ROBERT ALTER
ments:
I
do not doubt that among those slightly convex chips of majolica
ware found by our child there was one whose border of scrollwork
fitted exactly, and continued, the pattern of a fragment I had found in
1903 on the same shore, and that the two tallied with a third my
mother had found on that Mentone beach in 1882, and with a fourth
piece of the same pottery that had been found by
her
mother a hun–
dred years ago - and so on, until this assortment of parts, if all had
been preserved, might have been put together to make the complete,
the absolutely complete, bowl, broken by some Italian child, God
knows where and when, and now mended by
these
rivets of bronze.
621
The meticulous fitting together of fragments into patterns, as
Nabokov announces in the opening pages of the book, is what his au–
tobiography is all about. It is at once a task excitingly imaginable and
hopelessly impossible, as the language he chooses to evoke the broken
bowl suggests. The crucial verbs are in the conditional tense ("if
all
had
been preserved, might have been put together"), implying a condition
obviously contrary to fact. The well-wrought urn of the past is, after
all,
irrevocably shattered; only a few of its shards can be gathered by the pa–
tient memoirist; and that is what is ultimately so wrenching about this
remarkably happy autobiography. The "rivets of bronze" that might
mend the assembled fragments are of course the fine linkages of
Nabokov's polished prose. (The association of bronze with poetic art is
confirmed earlier in the book in an explicit reference to Horace's
exegi
monumentum,
"I have built a monument more lasting than bronze.") The
image of bronze rivets represents precisely the paradoxical character of
Nabokov's undertaking. A majolica bowl put back together with rivets
is no longer what it once was, yet it has a new, if patently composite,
wholeness, and the bronze that makes this possible, though superimposed
on the original substance of the pottery, is itself a burnished material that
contributes to an aesthetic effect. The Horatian background of the
bronze metaphor also suggests perdurable strength, a quality that, as we
shall see, is repeatedly manifested in the stylistic assurance of Nabokov's
willed recuperation of the past.
Humbert Humbert at the beginning of his sad narrative cries out to
a forever absent Lolita that he has only words to play with. That is also
the desperate situation vis-a-vis his Russian past of the narrator of
Speak)
Memory,
but he is able to overcome absence, to surprise himself with fe–
licity, by fashioning the words into intricate configurations that bring
back to him a substantial measure of what he has irrevocably lost. A full
explanation of how he achieves this end would involve a comprehensive
