Frances Assa [ to
JM's "He
adds:that "this
entire structure...can be compared to a painting and you don't have to work
gradually from left to right..."
(SO 32): He is not consciously a yarn-spinner because he seems to
isolate a cerebral plot from
the emerging visual structure of the novel, but this aspect is
not very clear to me. What about his "combinational
talents" to
compose
"riddles
with elegant solutions" ? (p.16)
Or "the
instant vision turning into rapid speech"?
(SO 109)" ]: "Interesting question about interesting observations, Jansy. I
might add to these observations his ability to do chess problems, and see the
world (through Luzhin) as organizeable into 8 by 8 squares. A chess
board works nomatter how you turn it, and may thus have been particularly
pleasing to VN. This brings up something that has always puzzled
me. I think it is in Look at the Harlequins that the protagonist,
who shares a lot of VN's life, is chagrined because he is unable to visualize a
certain path backwards, until his true love somehow helps him. This seems
to fit in with your exploration of Nabokov's patterning.
Jansy Mello: Interesting anwers
and conjectures, Fran. They set me thinking about Vadim's inability to
"visualize a certain path backwards" in connection to the organizational
urge that could inspire some of the chess players.
I read that Nabokov was able to mentally
plan ahead a great number of chess moves. Would it be
equally important, in a tournament or during the composition of problems,
to visualize in retrospect in order to find out where an ackward move
had spoilt the player's future choices that lead to victory? I mean,
metaphorically, to find out one's past errors to correct them or, if
impossible, to be able to grieve over them? Nabokov's
recollections of his past are artistically doctored and he had a great aversion
to the Freudian method of unearthing past truths. Besides, as we find
in Speak,Memory (and, later, in ADA) not only references to what
Nabokov named "chronophobia" but a few other examples related to the panic of
discovering that the world existed before and after his existence, or that
people didn't conform to his "organized" view of them ( he registers his
surprise at one of his tutor's getting married, or at a hot-dog vendor being
recognized as a good
poet...)