ROBERT ALTER
629
emotionally and aesthetically assimilable precisely by playing up those
"innate harmonies." The moon is a literary stage-prop and still the real
moon seen by a wide-eyed child in the winter sky over Vyra in 1906, just
as the chill touch of snow is real, then and now.
Few imaginative writers have been so committed as Nabokov to
the ideal of conscious control. In his autobiography he often evinces a
sense that he can actually stage a return to the past by a sufficiently deft
and resourceful ordering of his prose medium. But there is also an aspect
of Proustian involuntarism stalking this project of artful volition. The
scene of memory invoked, whether actual recollection or invention or a
subtle compound of the two, picks up an experiential charge from the
present, sets up a circulation between past and present that is not strictly
determined by artistic calculation. This, indeed, is why
Speak, Memory
is
not simply a series of virtuoso tricks in constructing the past but rather a
haunting expression of what it means to live in time, circling back on
the past, intimately bound to it, yet also forever exiled in another, later
world.
Robert Motherwell
1915-1991
We are saddened by the death
of a valued friend and early contributor
