Nabokov's Memorable Tales

It's hard to think of, when asked, what my first memory was. When do we really begin to retain such information, and what makes something memorable? Making it stay in the corners of our minds or not for all our time in this realm. Nabokov seems to have a fascination with the idea of memories and their importance to what we consider out future. In Lolita he writes of a man that lost a childhood love, and the memories of that love are what drive him to his obsession. Transparent Things is the writing of a man that tries to connect to his past and memories by returning to the places that are familiar to him. And of course there is Nabokov's own autobiography, Speak, Memory, where he is remembering his own past to some how understand his present.

As Brian Boyd writes in the introduction, Speak, Memory is unlike any other autobiography we readers have encountered from great writers, "...more than these and any other biographies it fuses truth to detail with perfection of form, the exact with the evocative, and acute awareness of time with intimations of timelessness (ix)." But in the end that is what makes his autobiography so timeless, his ability to connect that present with the past through his writing. Connecting those memories to the world in which he lives at that moment!

As Nabokov writes in the first chapter of Transparent Things, each encounter we have with some object connects to a memory we have of that object and that objects own history. "When we concentrate on a material object, whatever its situation, the very act of attention may lead to our involuntarily sinking into the history of that object (1)." He goes onto write in Chapter 3 about a pencil Hugh encounters and the "memories" attached to that object.

These are the details that make Nabokov's work timeless and memorable. His writing is about connecting our present place to a memory long forgotten. In Dr. Sexson's Classical Lit. class we discussed the idea and importance of cyclical time especially in classical works of literature. Boyd again writes that Nabokov tries to break free of the linear time. Time is more than just cause and effect to Nabokov. As discussed in Classical Lit. anything that was believed to be important if missed would return again. That is what he tries to capture in his writing, that memories are events that are returning to us because of their importance. There is something critical that we need to understand in deja vu. We are being reminded of what is critical in this moment that we experienced in the past and must remember.

So that is what I am waiting for before I can write about by first memory. I must first encounter an object that connects my present to the memories in the corners of my mind. Then I will write about what I remember! And then my past will be with me at that moment and then I will be able to write about the memory that has returned.