SES: In addition to
Roy, who was first to respond with the source, and Barbara, who gave the page
number, both Victor Fet and Didier Machu swiftly followed although I didn't
forward their replies. Good work!
JM: Following their lead I
checked the entire paragraph from The Art of Literature and Commonsense.
"The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous
feeling of the words all being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to
become visible. You might choose to develop any part of the picture, for
the idea of sequence does not really exist as far as the author is concerned.
Sequence arises only because words have to be written one after the other on
consecutive pages, just as the reader's mind must have time to go through the
book, at least the first time he reads it. Time and sequence cannot exist
in the author's mind because no time element and no space element has ruled the
initial vision. If the mind were constructed on option lines and if a book could
be read in the same way as a paiting is taken in by the eye, that is without the
bother of working from left to right and without the absurdity of beginnings and
ends, this would be the ideal way of appreciating a novel..."
(379/380)
It's the same conception about inspiration,
words and images, now lying behind his words in the 1964 Toffler interview:
"I feel a kind of gentle development, an uncurling inside,
and I know the details are there already, that in fact I would see them plainly
if I looked closer, if I stopped the machine and opened its inner
compartment...Since this entire structure, dimly illumined in one's mind, can be
compared to a painting, and since you do not have to work gradually from left to
right for its proper perceptionm I may direct my flashlight at any part or
particle of the picture when setting it down in
writing...."(p.31/32)
It's emphatically not a platonic vision but...(
1967)"Since I always have at the very start a curiously
clear preview of the entire novel before me or above me, I find cards especially
convenient...I am afraid to get mixed up with Plato, whom I do not care for, but
I do think tht in my case it is strue that the entire book, before it is
written, seems to be ready ideally in some other, now transparent, now dimming,
dimension, and my job is to take down as much of it as I can make
out..."(69)
"Inspiration" (1972) "One can distinguish several types of
inspiration, which intergrade, as all things do in this fluid and interesting
world of ours, while yielding gracefully to a semblance of classification. A
prefatory glow, not unlike some benign variety of the aura before an epileptic
attack, is something the artist learns to perceive very early in life... it has
neither source nor object. It expands, glows, and subsides without revealing its
secret. In the meantime, however, a window has opened... The next stage of inspiration is
something ardently anticipated- and no longer anonymous. The shape of the new
impact is indeed so definite that I am forced to relinquish metaphors and resort
to specific terms. The narrator forefeels what he is going to tell. The
forefeeling can be defined as an instant vision turning into rapid speech. If
some instrument were to render this rare and delightful phenomenon, the image
would come as a shimmer of exact details, and the verbal part as a tumble of
merging words. The experienced writer immediately takes it down and, in the
process of doing so, transforms what is little more than a running blur into
gradually dawning sense, with epithets and sentence construction growing as
clear and trim as they would be on the printed page..." (309)
Even when lying sick in hospital, Nabokov maintained his
theory about an artist's inspiration, now in relation to a "finished"
novel, TOoL, which he seems not to have had time to take down in its
entirety from where it ideally lay in a shimmer.
Nabokov's ideas seem to me to be as puzzling now as before
when discussing Joyce's excessive verbal body to his images and "shadows of
words".