624
PARTISAN REVIEW
effect into place. An American would not say "the montane zone" but
rather something like "mountain region." The locution, both perfectly
correct and oddly foreign, acts to assimilate the mountains of Colorado
with the Alps and with Russian topography, just as Nabokov's English
in
general flaunts its interlinguistic character, makes itself felt as a vehicle
that can cross both geographical and temporal boundaries.
Where does the light come from that informs these scenes of mem–
ory? The example we have just considered might tempt us into a facile
response, namely, that the distinctive quality of light was simply present
in
the original experience, to be recalled in its peculiar vividness by the
lexically fortunate memoirist. Such recollection might follow the Prous–
tian path of consciousness suddenly and happily invaded by the past. For
Nabokov, however, the real light that once shone leaves only shadowy
traces in the storehouse of memory. It can be recovered not through
some spontaneous resurgence but through a careful formal reconstitution
in another medium, that of art. It is instructive that light in
Speak,
Memory
should be not only a defining presence in remembered scenes but
also a recurrent image for art. In the first chapter, Nabokov, puzzling
over the enigma of his own identity, speaks of "a certain intricate
watermark whose unique design becomes visible when the lamp of art is
made to shine through life's foolscap." This image of art as the il–
luminator of otherwise hidden patterns dovetails with the repeated rep–
resentation of memory in the figure of the magic-lantern, as when
Nabokov notes that the sundry tutors of his boyhood "appear within
memory's luminous disc as so many magic-lantern projections." A magic–
lantern, by putting light behind a colored transparency, transforms it into
a larger illuminated image that, even in its necessary two-dimensionality,
may seem enchantingly lifelike. Let us look briefly at a few selected slides
from
Speak, Memory
to see how Nabokov performs this trick by a deli–
cate positioning of the lamp of his art.
One of the oddest images conjured up in the autobiography is the
view from the dining room at the Vyra manor of Nabokov's father be–
ing tossed in a blanket outside by his servants. It is not sufficient to pi–
geonhole this moment as an instance of the technique of defamiliariza–
tion of which Nabokov was pastmaster, because the arabesque move–
ment of the prose also leads to a perception of the intimate and
paradoxical liaison between presence and absence, life and death, re–
ality and art.
Thrice, to the mighty heave-ho of his invisible tossers, he would fly
up in this fashion, and the second time he would go higher than the
first and then there he would be, on his last and loftiest flight, re–
clining, as if for good, against the cobalt blue of the summer noon,
like one of those paradisiac personages who comfortably soar, with
such a wealth of folds in their garments, on the vaulted ceiling of a
