626
PARTISAN REVIEW
mind the necessary fate it shares with every human past of being swal–
lowed up by oblivion. Only the intervention of art grants it the grace of
a radiant afterlife, but that is, ineluctably, different in kind from the first
life. Instructively, at the end of Chapter Three, Nabokov fleetingly
evokes an infinite regress of adults remembering childhood. Rereading
the sentimental juvenile fiction of a certain Mme de Segur, nee Rostop–
chine, he relives his own boyhood when he first read these books, and in
a painful doubling, he remembers his Uncle Rub reading Mme de
Segur
back in 1908 and reliving
his
boyhood.
I see again my schoolroom in Vyra, the blue roses of the wallpaper,
the open window. Its reflection fills the oval mirror above the leath–
ern couch where my uncle sits, gloating over a tattered book. A sense
of security, of well-being, of summer warmth pervades my memory.
That robust reality makes a ghost of the present. The mirror brims
with brightness; a bumblebee has entered the room and bumps against
the ceiling. Everything is as it should be, nothing will ever change,
nobody will ever die.
Again, a window, light from the outside, and a mirror - this last, a
Nabokov trademark - make the scene cohere. As in our previous
illustration, the power of the memory is brought out in a play between
presence and absence, life and death, but the rhetorical balance here is
quite different. The sheer happiness of the remembered experience is ex–
plicitly announced, and the memoirist goes as far as to reverse the usual
categories of presence and absence: "That robust reality makes a ghost of
the present." The robustness is mysteriously reinforced by the alliterated
r's, while the assimilation through near-rhyme of "robust" and "ghost"
draws us into a somewhat disorienting semantic shell game: it is the past,
after all, that is a ghost, but a robust one that makes what we usually call
reality seem spectral. The final focus on the paired images of the sun–
flooded mirror and the bumblebee is articulated with a Tennysonian
musicality, emphatically clustering m's and b's and r's in a pattern of
sound that turns into an onomatopoeic evocation of the buzzing,
bumping bumblebee. The more important effect, however, of the pho–
netic interfusion of words in this penultimate sentence is to convey in the
bronze rivets of prose a sense of
all
the elements of an experienced mo–
ment beautifully, timelessly locked together. But the last sentence -
"Everything is as it should be, nothing will ever change, nobody
will
ever die" - is disquietingly double-edged. It hovers precariously between
a rapturous proclamation and an anguished
ai
de coeur.
On one level, it is
a true declaration - on the level every reader can experience in the
stylistic success of an undying memory crystallized in language that makes
