ROBERT ALTER
627
the wallpaper, the uncle, the book, and the mirror brimming with
brightness live on. But both narrator and reader are also acutely aware
that the final sentence is flagrantly contrary to existential fact: each of
these affirmations is necessarily shadowed by a negation, for nothing re–
mains as it should be, everything always changes, everyone dies.
The more one ponders this enchanting book, the more evident it
becomes that Nabokov's conception of memory is profoundly - and ap–
propriately - ambiguous. In the same breath, he intimates that he has re–
covered or somehow reconstituted the past in his prose, and that he has
rather reinvented a past forever lost in the vanishing perspective of time.
To affirm merely the former would be to succumb to self-indulgent
delusion; to affirm merely the latter would be to concede that autobi–
ography is impossible because it must always turn into fiction. He defines
"the supreme achievement of memory" as "the masterly use it makes of
innate harmonies when gathering to its fold the suspended and wander–
ing tonalities of the past." The adjective "innate" here hovers indetermi–
nately. The structure of experience may involve innate harmonies, as
Nabokov seems to propose in his sundry remarks on pattern. Alternately,
there may be an aesthetic order, distinct from experience as such, which
has its intrinsic harmonies - the consonance of images, the pleasing re–
currences of sound - and these may be exploited by artful consciousness
to pull together the disparate fragments of experience. He tends toward
the first alternative, which makes the act of autobiographical recovery a
triumphant reality, but he repeatedly allows for the second alternative as
well, in which autobiography is perforce an artifice offering a kind of
luminous compensation for the unrecoverable past.
Nabokov's evocation of the initial trip of his Swiss governess,
"Mademoiselle," from the rural train station to the family estate vividly
illustrates this delicate ambiguity. It contains features shared by most of
the examples we have considered - an emphatically defined source of
natural illumination, mirror imagery, painterly elements of composition -
and provides a nice nocturnal complement to the sunlit scenes we have
looked at:
Every now and then,
she
looks back to make sure that a second sleigh,
bearing
her
trunk and hatbox, is following - always at the same dis–
tance, like those companionable phantoms of ships in polar waters
which explorers have described. And let me not leave out the moon -
for surely there must be a moon, the full, incredibly clear disc that
goes so well with Russian lusty frosts. So there it comes, steering out
of a £lock of small dappled clouds, which it tinges with a vague iri–
descence; and, as it sails higher, it glazes the runner tracks left on the
road, where every sparkling lump of snow is emphasized by a swollen
shadow.
