Former posting (note): “This book is about Lolita; and now that I have reached the part which (had I not been forestalled by another internal combustion martyr) might be called "Dolorès Disparue," there would be little sense in analyzing the three empty years that followed. While a few pertinent points have to be marked, the general impression I desire to convey is of a side door crashing open in life's full flight, and a rush of roaring black time drowning with its whipping wind the cry of lone disaster.” (“Lolita,” part 2,25)…”
Present posting (associated to HH’s Dolores Disparue in “Lolita” and Proust’s Albertine Disparue in second half of “In Search of Lost Time”):
"In his Lectures on Literature, which were originally delivered to his students at Cornell in the 1950s, Vladimir Nabokov calls Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time "the greatest novel of the first half of our century." Although he makes this statement as an aside in his lecture on Madame Bovary, this is no mere throwaway remark...The Proustian themes running through Nabokov's varied works--the themes of time, memory, identity, sensation, jealousy, loss, etc.--have long been explicated by other critics. But, it's only in the last hundred pages of Proust's final volume, Time Regained (the book that culminates the 4,300-page novel and that even few critics have actually read), that so many of those Proustian themes come together and create a new theme that Nabokov was to extrapolate to such an extreme in 'Lolita'." http://classiclit.about.com/od/insearchoflosttime/fr/aa_proust_nabok.htm
However, in a 1965 interview, by Robert Hughes, Nabokov makes a different observation in relation to Proust’s novel:
"My greatest masterpieces of twentieth century prose are, in this order: Joyce's Ulysses, Kafka's Transformation, Biely's Petersburg, and the first half of Proust's fairy tale In Search of Lost Time." John Burt Forester,Jr. notes that: "Rivers, 1984, p.137, plausibly argues that Nabokov limited his praise to the first half of the Recherche because Proust was unable to make final corrections on the second half before his death." [Cf. The Garland Companion to Vladimir Nabokov ed. V.E.Alexandrov. ]. Now it strikes me that in the two appraisals of Proust’s novel, V. Nabokov employs the word “half” (first half of our century, the first half of Proust’s fairy tale…) and, in addition to that, we find that although V.Nabokov chose the first volume of Proust’s novel for his lecture, he ends it with references (and incomplete notes and quotations)* to its last volume, namely “The Past Recovered” ( translated also as “Finding Time again”or “Time regained”), all of them related to “The Roman d’Albertine” and forming an essential part of the “second half” of the novel, the one that Nabokov had rejected (and which was published posthumously.)**
Later on we shall come to another evaluation of Proust’s novel, now considered in its entirety and through the prism of Charles Kinbote boldly probing Sybil’s memory (“you remember…you…”). In Pale Fire, after Charles Kinbote hands Sybil a volume of In Search of Lost Time as a gift to her husband, he adds:" …you remember we decided once, you, your husband and I, that Proust’s rough masterpiece was a huge ghoulish fairy tale, an asparagus dream, totally unconnected with any possible people in any historical France, a sexual travestissement and a colossal farce, the vocabulary of genius and its poetry, but no more…" We cannot trust Kinbote, though, not even his report of Sybil’s testimony.
In “Lolita”, Proust, or rather, the narrator Marcel, was presented as the other “internal combustion martyr,” here in connection to the driving force behind his search for the Albertine “avatar.” When, as seen in this posting’s initial quote, the narrator Humbert Humbert writes those lines, he is also acknowledging his feeling that there’s no sense in reporting the following three years in his life since it was then, at that point, that his active search had come to an end together with his fantasy world (in want of a better way of phrasing this complicated instant).
However, while he wrote the paragraph in question, he had not yet achieved Marcel’s wisdom related to the conquest of time through art. Quoting V.Nabokov’s words about Marcel, in the penultimate paragraph of his Lecture on Proust: “ The illumination is then completed when the narrator realizes that a work of art is our only means of thus recapturing the past, and to this end he dedicates himself…” (p.249).
Did HH reach a realization that approaches Marcel’s “illumination”? His last words in his “Confessions” are:
“…and one wanted H.H. to exist at least a couple of months longer, so as to have him make you live in the minds of later generations. I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita.”
And… it’s in the beginning of the line “one wanted HH to exist” that, for me, reveals VN/HH’s insight ( I’m still pondering about it, though) and I must go back to VN’s lecture on Proust to show the way, on p.210-11 (check also 222 and 226) “Within the novel the narrator Marcel contemplates, in the last volume, the ideal novel he will write. Proust’s work is only a copy of that ideal novel – but what a copy!”
Did he?
And John Shade, did his poem stand by itself ( a matter of some controversy) or was C. Kinbote needed to make him “live in the minds of later generations” by a similar procedure as the one adopted by HH ? Too many hasty questions…
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*- This matter is presented by Fred Bowers, in the introduction to the edition of V.Nabokov’s Lectures on Literature: “Quotation bulked large in Nabokov’s teaching methods…In the construction of the present reading edition from the lectures, Nabokov’s method has been followed with very little cutting…for the quotations are most helpful in recalling a book to the reader’s memory or else in introducing it to a fresh reader under Nabokov’s expert guidance[ ]…Some few quotations have been selected by the editor although not called for either in the lectures or in the teaching copies when the occasion seemed to require illustration of a point that Nabokov was making[ ] A unique instance, however, occurs at the end of the lectures on Proust. Nabokov had chosen for his text Swann’s Way, the first volume of Remembrance of Things Past. The last lecture on Proust ends with an extended quotation from Marcel’s meditations in the Bois de Boulogne on his memory of the past that concludes the novel. It is an effective ending to the novel but it leaves Marcel (and the reader) only a short way along the road to the full understanding of the functions and operations of memory as the key to reality, the meaning of the whole work. The musings in the Bois, indeed, are only one of the different aspects of viewing the past that in the gradual building up of Marcel’s understanding prepare him for the final experience that reveals the reality for which he had been searching through the preceding volumes. This event takes place in the great third chapter, “The Princesse de Guermantes Receives,” of the final volume, The Past Recovered. Since the revelation found in this chapter is the key to the cumulative meaning of the whole series of novels, any consideration of Proust that did not analyze it in explicit terms and make clear the difference between its full flowering and the early seed dropped in Swann’s Way would fail in its essential purpose. Although Nabokov’s lectures on Proust ended with the quotation of the episode in the Bois, a random sentence or two unconnected directly with his lectures suggests that he may have taken up the matter with his students, the more especially since the extensive typed quotations from Derrick Leon’s book on Proust tend to concentrate on this final episode and its explanation. Nabokov’s disjunct remark that “a nosegay of the senses in the present and the vision of an event or sensation in the past, this is when sense and memory come together and lost time is found again” is essentially true and an excellent encapsulation of Proust’s theme; but it would not be very illuminating to anyone who had not read this final volume without the full explanation Proust himself provides in The Past Recaptured. The editor in this extraordinary case has felt justified, therefore, in extending the Nabokov ending by fortifying with quotation from the final volume of Remembrance of Things Past the incomplete Nabokov notes in an attempt to focus more sharply the essence of the revelation that came to Marcel by providing excerpts from Proust’s own account of the transformation of memory into reality and into material for literature.[ ]” (Introduction xi/xii). Obs: I underlined the instances related to “disjunction,” “random sentence or two” and “incompleteness,” related to “the second ( ‘disjointed’) second half of Remembrance of Things Past.
** - A reminder, following the Wikipedia listing of the seven volumes of "In Search of Lost Time": Swann's Way; In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower; The Guermantes Way; Sodom and Gomorrah; The Prisoner; The Fugitive; Finding Time Again, when it is informed that “the last three of the seven volumes contain oversights and fragmentary or unpolished passages as they existed in draft form at the death of the author; the publication of these parts was overseen by his brother Robert. The Prisoner (La Prisonnière, also translated as The Captive) (1923) is the first volume of the section within In Search of Lost Time known as "le Roman d'Albertine" ("the Albertine novel"). The name "Albertine" first appears in Proust's notebooks in 1913. The material in volume 5 and 6 were developed during the hiatus between the publication of volumes 1 and 2 and they are a departure of the original three-volume series originally planned by Proust.”