Former posting: This space belongs to a “Forum” but I seldom find myself engaged in a debate with Nablers on VN’s assertions about his experiences in life and as a writer, about his style, games, specious words. However, I can always go back to a particular theme and construe a dialogue between Nabokov and himself at different times. Here, “hurtling through time and memory”, after quoting him in TT in which time becomes “a specter of thought” [ ] I chose a paragraph from “The Art of Literature and Common Sense”: : “The inspiration of genius adds a third ingredient; it is the past, the present and the future (your book) that come together in a sudden flash; thus the entire cicle of time is perceived, which is another way of saying that time ceases to exist. It is a combined sensation of having the whole universe entering you and of yourself wholly dissolving in the universe surrounding you. It is the prison wall of the ego suddenly crumbling away with the nonego rushing in from the outside to save the prisoner – who is already dancing in the open.”
Present posting, Jansy Mello: A typographical blunder in the quote I inserted distorted its meaning. I forgot to underline “the past, the present and the future,” following the author’s original text and clarifying the reader about “the future” as the third ingredient present in the “inspiration of genius”. To proceed with my “debate” I chose to use this opportunity (my blunder) to further explore the selected quote, now returning to various sources obtainable in the internet and their observations related to the “future”, “inspiration” (mainly “Vorstog”) and “the prison wall of the ego”.
1.“it is the past and the present and the future…” “This combination is reminiscent of Ada’s tower or Vadim’s triple harlequin, both of which also serve the key function of negating time, whiles the image of the freed prisoner distinctly echoes Cincinnatus C.’s escape at the end of Invitation to a Beheading. Intriguingly, it also closely parallels Emerson’s experience of transcendence described in his seminal 1836 essay, Nature…” (B.Wyllie)
2. “Cincinnatus’s glimpse of the lining of another life reminds us of that moment in The Gift (1938) – written at the same time as Invitation – when Fyodor, bemused by the penumbral presence of his beloved Zina, realizes “the strangeness of life, the strangeness of its magic, as if a corner of it had been turned back for an instant and he had glimpsed its unusual lining” (183) (Lara Delage Toriel)
3." Such hearts, such brains, would be unable to comprehend that one’s attachment to a masterpiece may be utterly overwhelming, especially when it is the underside of the weave that entrances the beholder and only begetter, whose own past intercoils there with the fate of the innocent author.” (Charles Kinbote)
4. “In ‘The Art of Literature and Commonsense’ he states that “time and sequence cannot exist in the author’s mind because no time element and no space element had ruled the initial vision” that constitutes the germ of the future work (pp.379-80)…Thus, although the reader may have to confront a temporal dimension when reading a novel, the author does not when it is first born in his mind. The reason is presumably that the work derives from the same timeless realm the author is vouchsafed to touch during moments of hightest consciousness or inspiration. This suggests that Nabokov’s characteristic practice of filling his fictions with epiphanic structures – with networks of concealed details, the connections among which emerge suddenly – is an aesthetic embodiment of a metaphysical experience.” An interesting observation precedes this paragraph: “…in Speak Memory..he says that memory’s ‘supreme achievement’ is ‘the masterly use it makes of innate harmonies when gathering to its fold the suspended and wandering tonalities of the past’ (italics added, p.170). As one can infer from the context, by ‘harmonies’ Nabokov obviously means patterns in human life, which, together with mimicry in nature, constitue one of his major forms of evidence for the existence of a transcendent otherworld….[M]emory operates in some mysterious harmonious way with the patterns “imprinted” by an otherworld onto life and nature themselves.” (Vladimir Alexandrov)
5.“In his discussion, Nabokov goes on to suggest that, as with cosmic synchronization, inspiration and the mysterious stimulation of the artistic consciousness are likewise marked by an abandonment of physicality and a crossing-over of the poet into a realm where the usual confines or time and space are overcome…” (Paul D. Morris)
6. “Yes! It sufficed that I in life could find/ Some kind of link-and-bobolink, some kind/ Of correlated pattern in the game” … (John Shade)
7. ?..........................................
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1.Companion to Twentieth Century United States Fiction, ed. David Seed. 2010. Barbara Wyllie, 373.; 2. Transitional Nabokov, edited by Will Norman, Duncan White…Lara Delage-Toriel, 158; 3. Pale Fire, Vladimir Nabokov: Foreword by C. Kinbote; 4. Nabokov’s Otherworld, V. Alexandrov, 30; 5. Vladimir Nabokov: Poetry and the Lyric Voice, by Paul D. Morris,121: 6. Pale Fire, Vladimir Nabokov. Poem by John Shade (811-13)