ROBERT ALTER
Nabokov and Memory
In Nabokov's notoriously restricted private canon of great twentieth–
century novelists - he admitted only Proust, Joyce, Kafka, and Biely - it
is Proust who often seems most intimately allied with his own aims and
sensibility. A pursuit of time past is undertaken directly or obliquely
in
many of his novels, and most centrally in what are probably his two
finest books -
Lolita
and
Speak, Memory.
The autobiography is as Prous–
tian as anything Nabokov wrote, and it even includes a little
homage
to
Proust: Nabokov's last vision of Colette, his Riviera childhood sweet–
heart, rolling a hoop glinting in the autumnal sun through dead leaves in
a Parisian park, is a citation, a transposition of pattern from fiction to
autobiography, of the scene at the end of
Swann's Way
in which the
child Marcel beholds the adored figure of Gilberte Swann playing among
the leaves in the Champs Elysees.
The special sense of euphoria associated with the recovery of the
sensuous fullness of past experience is equally Nabokov's goal and
Proust's, but the routes they follow toward this end notably diverge.
The key concept for Proust is of course involuntary memory. The return
of the past is vouchsafed by adventitious circumstances as a moment of
grace, an unanticipated epiphany. Some otherwise trivial datum of expe–
rience, like the wobbling of uneven pavingstones in a Venetian piazza,
jogs slumbering memory, flooding consciousness with a complex of
seemingly forgotten, perhaps repressed, perceptions from the past. (The
articulation of this experience, to be sure, becomes possible only through
the finely attuned artistic discipline of the experiencer.) Nabokov, on the
other hand, conceives his relation to the past much more exclusively
in
volitional terms. He is grateful for the occasional mnemonic clues that
circumstances may cast his way, but for him the ability to revisit the past
is chiefly a consequence of the imaginative concentration afforded by
artful prose.
It
is only a little overstated to say that for Nabokov the apt
manipulation of language makes the past come back.
A seemingly self-indulgent fantasy in the penultimate paragraph of
Speak, Memory
actually provides a nice definition of the book's project.
Nabokov recalls how his four-year-old son, playing on a French Riviera
beach not long before their departure for America, would gather tide–
tossed treasures from the sea: "candy-like blobs of sea-licked glass -
lemon, cherry, peppermint" and "sometimes small bits of pottery, still
beautiful in glaze and color." He then reflects on this collection of
frag-
