Post for 11/5

I'm finding Speak, Memory to be massively enjoyable. I think there's something wonderful that Nabokov is tapping into with this text, and that's the perception of reality. People find reality to be sacred. I do not, and (more relevantly) Nabokov does not either. The book is filled with wonderful, often absurd details about Nabokov, his family, and his history. At moments, they are actually quite funny. I think about The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, a play that took many people by storm. The story (which is, at no point claimed to be entirely fiction or non-fiction) contains a section in which the protagonist goes to China, and finds that factory workers have been blacklisted for speaking up, and essentially, that the workers in factories like FoxConn are treated horribly. So the play is essentially this person telling this story. The story turned out to not be "true" (whatever the heck that means). There was a whole scandal. People were furious, and the author was dsiclaimed of his work because he hadn't "actually" gone to the factories and seen these things. This meant that many of the details were (likely) made up. I didn't really understand the controversy, and I wasn't surprised by the supposed lack of "truth" in the piece. I had gone to the theater to see a work of art. Peoples' mere subjectivities will bring us away from the facts. Furthermore, the goal of the piece seemed to me, not really to be about whether or not these things actually happened or not.

Nabokov really plays with this in Speak, Memory. Nabokov's uses of lists becomes much more interesting in this setting than it was in Lolita. Take, for instance, Chapter Three of Speak, Memory. The whole chapter is a sort of half-realistic (the boringness of the coat of arms) half absurd (the uncle who nearly died in a bomb and nearly got on the Titanic) catalog of ships. Lists seem tangible. Lists make things seem real. People are very easily convinced by math and science, no matter how phony it is. These lists play into the very idea that science and math only exist in "reality." It's the boring, unnecessary details that give a thing realism. Nabokov is not so simplistic as to simply just add a bunch of details for realism. Nabokov really stands in between fiction and non-fiction, and writes a book that very much deals with elements of reality, but fudges the details to make them more dramatically interesting. The truth is, for Nabokov, reality is fascinating in its intricate detail, but dramatically uninteresting in its nature.