Into the Abyss of Memory

Below is my paper. I apologize for the format but it will not let me do what I want to with it! I also have a works cited page, but did not feel that was necessary to include here.

“A novelist is, like all mortals, more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze of the past” (Nabokov). This quote from Vladimir Nabokov, printed in an unpublished interview on his work Transparent Things, seems to embody the authors’ sentiment of memories and how we as human beings try to understand and come to terms with our past. If this view of memories, and how we recognize and make sense of our past is really what Nabokov believed, why then do so many of his characters in his works obsess over things from their past, and many of them try to recapture what was lost? Nabokov writes about those that long for the past to exemplify his thoughts about the dangers of doing so. Many of the characters he creates long for their past, and this sense of loss is what drives their obsessions and leads to their ultimate demise.
“Perhaps if the future existed, concretely and individually, as something that could be discerned by a better brain, the past would not be so seductive…” (Nabokov 489). This quote from Nabokov’s Transparent Things, a work steeped in the realm of memories and their connection to all three tenses of past, present and future, exemplifies the idea that people continually have the habit of falling into the past. Not only their own past, but the history and past of each object they encounter, it is “the act of attention” that draws us in according to Nabokov’s character Hugh Person (Nabokov 492).
Transparent Things, is a work that focuses on a man, Hugh Person, and his four trips to the small town of Witt in Switzerland, these trips take place over several decades. Each trip is a new experience and through the work the reader is presented with Hugh’s memories of each of these trips. Nabokov creates a work in which the reader shares in Hugh’s discoveries as he recollects his past and tries to make sense of all that went on. Each trip Hugh makes is filled with encounters that he has with objects, places and people that bring back many of the events and things he had long since forgotten. Once again showing that it is through living and interacting with the world around us that we begin to remember and fall into our past.
Nabokov recognizes in his works though that several things can alter memories and change how we perceive or remember the world around us, one such thing is time. Nabokov writes of time in Transparent Things in the following quote, “Time, however, sets to work on those ephemeral affairs, and a new flavor is added to the recollection” (Nabokov 512). Time has the power to change and alter what we think we know, and Hugh experiences a change in his surroundings with each visit to the “familiar” town of Witt.
Memory and its power to connect us to past, present and future all within an instant is seen in Nabokov’s works. When we encounter something we remember the connection we had to it, and we fall into the past of that object, but then it is happening at a certain moment and perhaps it is telling us of something important to come. Memory and time are wrapped up in one another in Nabokov’s works. Brian Boyd, in his introduction to Nabokov’s Speak, Memory writes that, “…he (Nabokov) finds ways to resist the relentless linearity of time” (Nabokov xv). Nabokov recognized that memory and time are connected in a critical way. He does not write in the linear time of the everyday, but the cyclical time of mythology and classical writings. This is what he tried to capture in his writings, that memories are events that are returning to us because of their importance. There is something critical that we need to understand in déjà vu.
The connection of all three tenses, past, present and future as seen in Transparent Things is exemplified in the murder scene between Hugh and Armande and again in Hugh’s own death at the end. All these tenses are connected in the events that take place in each of these scenes, in so much as Hugh predicts his own death while dreaming and trying to “save” Armande from the “fire.” In the end Hugh dies from the fire he believed he was trying to save Armande from in an earlier memory. Through Hugh’s dream and the murder of his wife Hugh’s future is being presented to him, and yet he does not realize this until the time has arrived when past, present and future are all connected in his own death.
Another work in which Nabokov’s protagonist is doomed through his obsessive longing for the past and what was lost is Lolita. This tale is of a man, Humbert Humbert, and his longing for a lost childhood love, which leads to his obsession for a nymphet by the name Dolores Haze, Lolita. Humbert writes early on in his telling of the tale that if there had not been a lost love there may have never been a Lolita and all that he had to endure could have been avoided. He writes, “Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, a certain initial girl-child” (Nabokov 9). Humbert himself in his writings realizes that through his longing and memories of what was lost, his Annabel Leigh, he was lead to his obsession and demise in his love and lust for Lolita.
Nabokov writes about another element in this work that can alter the world around us. In Lolita he explores the power of love to blind us to the truths and blot out the memories we chose not to remember exactly as they were. Humbert is blinded by his desire for Lolita and while writing in his prison cell cannot recall he face. He writes, “I would like to describe her face, her ways-and I cannot, because my own desire for her blinds me…” (Nabokov 44). Love, lust and desire have the power to change recollections and alter them to what we want them to be, making them more like dreams then memories of the past.
Humbert writes about when the dream of having his nymphet all to himself began to become a nightmare, and the memories of the bad begin to emerge in his writing. It is no longer the fantasy he had hoped for, but the sad writings of a man that has lost his past love once again through his new found girl-child. He writes, “Whether or not the realization of a lifelong dream had surpassed all expectation, it had, in a sense, overshot its mark-and plunged into a nightmare” (Nabokov 140). Lolita is not the Annabel Leigh he remembered from his past, and yet he still longs for her, and for her to love him back.
Love and lust have distorted his childhood love, and he creates a monster of his nymphet and himself through his obsession for the past. Humbert realizes too late, after
he has lost his Lolita and killed the man, Quilty, who took her from him, that “the hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolita’s absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from that concord” (Nabokov 308). He sees now that he does not love the Lolita he so recently lost, but he loves the idea of her and the remembered love from his distant past in a “kingdom by the sea.”
Nabokov’s Pale Fire is another work in which memories take control and lead to the demise of the principle characters involved. In this work by Nabokov there are two such characters caught in the tangled web of memory, John Shade and Charles Kinbote. Shade through his own poem tries to make sense of his past, and especially tries to understand his daughter and the other worldly. The poem is one man’s long remembrance of his past. A way to write down all that happened and try to make sense of it, but this longing to know and understand the past is his downfall. As Nabokov says in the unpublished interview, “…all mortals, (are) more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze of the past” (Nabokov). Like Hugh Person in Transparent Things John Shade at the end of his poem predicts his own death, a moment in time that in an instant combines all realms, past, present and future. As he tries to make sense of the past he writes, without noticing, what is to come.
Kinbote is the other character in Nabokov’s Pale Fire that falls victim to his memories and obsession for lost places and times. What makes Kinbote’s fall so notable though is that he longs for a place, Zembla, and a life that never truly existed. His memories are of a place and life that never was, perhaps he is longing for something more or he is just insane. His obsession for an imaginary life leads to his own demise
and unlike his counterpart Shade, his demise is not death, but instead his insanity and isolation from the rest of the world through his fascinations and daydreams of “a distant northern land.”
Brian Boyd quotes Nabokov from a letter to Edmund Wilson in his introduction
to Nabokov’s autobiography Speak, Memory, as writing, it is “a scientific attempt to unravel and trace back all the tangled threads of one’s personality…” (Nabokov ix). In his own autobiography Nabokov is a man trying to make sense of his own life, trying to “unravel” all the “tangled threads” of his past. This looking into his own past does not lead to his demise though, because he has mastered the art of connecting the present and past in a way that as Boyd writes fuses “time with intentions of timelessness” (Nabokov ix).
Nabokov has found in his own autobiography a way to stay on top of that thin veneer that is reality. He writes in Transparent Things, “A thin veneer of immediate reality is spread over natural and artificial matter, and whoever wishes to remain in the now, with the now, on the now, should please not break its tension film” (Nabokov 489). Nabokov himself, unlike his characters, has mastered all three tenses and can be in the present moment and yet recall the past and make it timeless.
Even though Nabokov believes we, mere mortals, understand the present at any point in time the best. Most of his novels focus on those people that fall into the “ooze of the past”, and are lost within their longing for something long forgotten until then. In Transparent Things it is a man’s four trips to Witt and his longing to understand his past that leads to his death just as he had dreamt it. In Lolita a man obsessed with a lost childhood love places this obsession on a girl in the present and in the end loses her and his mind. Pale Fire includes two such characters immersed in this “ooze”, one and his longing to reconnect and remember his life and daughter, and another longing
for a place and life that never existed.
While most of these creations of Nabokov cannot master and stay atop that “thin veneer of immediate reality” that covers all they encounter, Nabokov can. Memory is a theme that Nabokov continually returns to in his works. Through his writing he shows that we mortals are better in the present then in “the ooze of the past.” While his characters are continually falling into the abyss of their past, and most often to their detriment, Nabokov himself is the one that manages to stay afloat. He has mastered the realms of time and can live and write in all tenses, past, present and future and this is what makes his works timeless.