Aeternus

The first chapter of Speak Memory ends with the abrupt transition from how young Nabokov watched his father´s mien during a session of “levitation” to the moment when he looks at that same face in an open coffin. He had started his essay by a statement: “The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for” (SM,19).

In a special note for John Shade´s opening lines in Pale Fire, Brian Boyd [Nabokov´s Pale Fire, the Magic of Artistic Discovery (178;281), 1999] brings up the double blackness of Nabokov´s sentence. He adds that when Shade wrote: “I was the shadow of the waxwing slain,” he was thinking about his origin and that of his ornithologist father because he had “in mind the void before him as well as the void after.” As Brian Boyd observes, this “image, ultimately derived from Lucretius, had already featured in The Gift (11); and in Bend Sinister (192-99)”.

The picture of a cradle bracketed by time is linked to VN´s remembrance of his father who, like his character, was shot by mistake. Nevertheless these thoughts, Nabokov´s own and his character´s, do not directly suggest an identification between Nabokov and Shade, although Brian Boyd´s association between the first line of Pale Fire and the “two voids” makes such a connection inevitable (whatever meaning we ascribe to these “two eternities of darkness” or to their transformation into “voids”). Priscilla Meyer [ Find What the Sailor Has Hidden,Vladimir Nabokov´s ‘Pale Fire’(46)] considers that “the connection between V.D. Nabokov and Shade is forged indirectly through Judge Goldsworth, the killer´s true target”. Later she will illustrate how V.D.Nabokov´s murder is also represented by the English historical case of regicide and restoration in VN´s poem ‘Restoration’, whose themes “point to the transcendence of murder through poetry”(101), and by “Hamlet”( 113-122).

Shade´s poem remained unfinished but Kinbote, his commentator, believes that the missing line is the repetition of the poem´s initial one. In that case the first and last lines could be interpreted either as a frame that embraces the poem, or as the reassertion of the eternal recurrence of events, as we find in VN´s letter to his mother after Vladimir Dmitrievich´s assassination: “We shall see him again…Everything will return” [quoted by P.Meyer (106,240)].

In the present note I would like to follow the various shapes and turns of Nabokov´s own contrasting views about “time before and after,” as they reappear in some of his novels before I discuss the first lines of Shade´s poem, “Pale Fire.” It is my contention that although Nabokov describes at length his characters´ fears, mourning and deaths while hinting at the interference of ghosts from the afterlife (Pale Fire, Ada, or Ardor, Transparent Things), he also expresses another point of view by rhetorical devices and stylistic twists which might come closer to his beliefs.

I found more names in connection to the origins of the poetic vision of “twin eternities,” besides Brian Boyd´s vague reference to Lucretius, probably the Roman Titus Lucretius Carus in “De Rerum Natura” (1^st Century BC) who states that “Time exists not of itself; but sense reads out of things what happened long ago, what presses now, and what shall follow after. No man, we must admit, feels time itself, disjoined from motion and repose of things,” while he construes a rational argumentation against superstition and established religion. Even a very modern furious speech, by Samuel Beckett´s Pozzo (“Have you not done tormenting me with your accursed time! It´s abominable! When! When! (...) They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it´s night once more”) denies the assumption that any concept of time may fight off the meaninglessness of life (Waiting for Godot, 1954).

A different analogy construed a century after Lucretius´s also comes close to the spirit of Shade´s verses, while it still refuses the idea that we can learn about the darkness that encircles our life if we are not inspired by Christian faith. The Venerable Bede (AD673/AD735), in The Ecclesiastical History of the English People, compares man´s life on earth to the arrow flight of a small sparrow crossing a lighted hall “passing from winter into winter”. When she studies the Anglo-Saxon references in Pale Fire[in op.cit (73)], Priscilla Meyer also registers that “as has been demonstrated by Jean-Christophe Castelli, Nabokov uses the metaphor of the house, of enclosure, for the concept of mortal time, with windows as the point of transition into and out of it”.

When Nabokov writes in SM about what “common sense tells us,” he is suggesting that there is another way to understand time and immortality. In his lecture “The Art of Literature and Commonsense” (1951), he says that “human life is but a first installment of a serial soul and that one's individual secret is not lost in the process of earthly dissolution, becomes something more than an optimistic conjecture, and even more than a matter of religious faith, when we remember that only commonsense rules immortality out.”

Like him, Van Veen (Ada or Ardor) cannot accept the rational demarcation of human finitude. His memoirs reach towards the limits of sensuous memory by probing “the texture of time” while his book bends over itself to disrupt conventional chronology, using the same tactics we see in VN´s biography of Nikolai Gógol. The “ardis of time” flowing between the covers of his “chronicle” are smashed, reiterating themes and expressions which Nabokov had been using since 1937 (in Dar, “The Gift”), or even earlier.

Van distinguished text and texture, contents and essence of time (SO,120). Although Nabokov confessed that he loathes Van Veen, he later admitted that he considers him a “charming villain,” with whom he cannot fully agree as to “all his views on the texture of time" (SO,143). This disagreement on the texture of time does not hinder Nabokov from lending to “his creature” old instruments that twirl temporal perspectives.

Doubling the image of “turning life upside-down so that birth becomes death” (The Gift, 18) behind the masks of Mascodagama, Van enacts the idea of discovering “the real point, the contrapuntal theme” which will become “not text, but texture; not the dream but topsy-turvical coincidence” (PF,62/3) and adds a new thrust to it. His Mascodagama stunt uses maniambulation to “perform organically what his figures of speech were to perform later in life—acrobatic wonders that had never been expected from them and which frightened children” (A,185). Mascodagama´s bodily inversions will become a visual rendering for “standing a metaphor on its head.” And yet Van is not able to control coincidences nor does he acknowledge the three insistent feminine figures who, like the fates of Greek mythology, keep intruding into his reconstructed “Memoirs.” Despite his efforts to coax Mnemosyne into expanding his sentient recollections beyond his own past, memory and perception are always at war in the strange temporal triptych which carries the present in its central panel.

We can follow in Ada how Van´s figures of speech turn over the “cradle of life” when he describes the seduction of his mother by Demon in the interval between the two acts of a play, after his father has been struck “by the wonder of that brief abyss of absolute reality between two bogus fulgurations of fabricated life” (A, 12). A theatrical absolute reality is also ironically described by Humbert Humbert as the “play´s profound message” in reference to the Poet in “The Enchanted Hunters,” for whom “mirage and reality merge in love” (The Annotated Lolita, 201).

Van´s verbal wonders are again put to the test for a next rotation of the analogy: “The mind of man, by nature a monist, cannot accept two nothings; he knows there has been one nothing, his biological inexistence in the infinite past, for his memory is utterly blank, and that nothingness, being, as it were, past, is not too hard to endure. But a second nothingness—which perhaps might not be so hard to bear either—is logically unacceptable…” (A, 314). Later Van returns to it and observes that “In every individual life there goes on from cradle to deathbed the gradual sharpening and strengthening of the backbone of consciousness, which is the Time of the strong. ‘To be’ means to know ‘one has been.’ ‘Not to be’ implies the only ‘new’ kind of (sham) time: the future” (A, 559) because unconsciousness “envelops both the Past and the Present from all conceivable sides.”

Although VN seems haunted by the darkness generated by unconsciousness, he indicates his confidence in immortality when he mentions “the actual existence of a permanently moving bright fissure (the point of perception), between our retrospective eternity which we cannot recall and the prospective one which we cannot know” [(BS,306) The Library of America,1996]. At the same time he playfully induces us to make false links between the unknowable “time before and after” and the ideas of “past, present and future.” Mascodagama´s tricks are also an attempt to excise the excess of “verbal body” from his work ("We think not in words but in shadows of words. James Joyce […] gives too much verbal body to his thoughts” [SO, 30]) by placing Van´s bodily inversions side by side with his project of inverting metaphors--as if tropes were similarly bound to physical space or could be flicked over like the heads or tails of a coin. The incantatory reversion of words he so often uses in his novels (like “repaid” and “diaper” in Ode to a Model, quoted by Alfred Appel in his introduction to the Annotated Lolita) can almost conjure up the image of poor Hazel as “Mother Time” changing the diaper of an immaterial baby in a “toilest.”

We may find a certain mockery on VN´s part, concerning his characters´ preoccupation with perfect knowledge, by which he questions his omniscient role in the realm of fiction. It is by his authorial interference that Krug “in a sudden moonburst of madness, understands that…nothing on earth really matters, there is nothing to fear, and death is but a question of style, a mere literary device, a musical resolution. And as Olga's rosy soul, emblemized already in an earlier chapter (Nine), bombinates in the damp dark at the bright window of my room, comfortably Krug returns unto the bosom of his maker” (BS,169). Now it is no longer a cradle that hangs over an abyss but words, encased in the sentence like prisoners of commonsense standing in line over an abyss of silence.

Marina Grishakova recognizes that “[t]he Pascalean subtext and the fiction of the ‘invisible observer’ as the Author of the World vs. the author of the text appears already in Nabokov's Russian novels.” She quotes the French Mathematician: “What will we do then, but perceive the appearance of the middle of things, in an eternal despair of knowing either their beginning or their end. All things proceed from the Nothing, and are borne towards the Infinite” (“V. Nabokov’s “Bend Sinister”: A Social Message or an Experiment with Time?” Sign Systems Studies 28, Tartu University Press, 2000, pp. 242-263).

Probably the preoccupation with individual time and omniscient observers shared by Nabokov and Jorge Luís Borges encourages people to link their names and to investigate common perspectives. In his short-story “El Aleph,” Borges says: “Lo que vieron mis ojos fue simultáneo: lo que transcribiré sucesivo, porque el lenguaje lo es” (“What my eyes perceived was simultaneous, what I shall now transcribe will come in succession, because such is language”). In Transparent Things likewise, Nabokov recognizes the limitations of ordinary writing: “Fortunately for my self-esteem that book will not be written–not merely because a dying man cannot write books but because that particular one would never express in one flash what can only be understood immediately” (1972, 84). Nevertheless Nabokov tries to advance a step ahead of Borges when he avoids the temporality of narrated events by employing gaps (blancs), which not only convey two forms of negation of time, but are signifiers for what is ineffable (Yona Dureau, Nabokov ou le sourire du chat, 2001). Writing about Plausible Time in Bend Sinister, Pnin and Ada or ardor (Nabokovian, 53, 33-42), Alain Andreu recalls VN´s “philosopher friend” Vivian Bloodmark´s assertion that “while the scientist sees everything that happens in one point of space, the poet feels everything that happens in one point of time” (Speak,Memory, Chapter XI)” to inquire if the “negation of time could be part of an acute perception of eternity… a total and immediate perception of all instants in time.”

In Ada or Ardor Nabokov argues that Van Veen examines “the essence of Time, not its lapse.” He considers that “Van´s greatest discovery is his perception of Time as the dim hollow between two rhythmic beats, not the beats themselves, which only embar Time. In this sense human life is not a pulsating heart but the missed heartbeat" (SO, ch.19). Van´s discovery of time as a “dim hollow” that holds the fulgent flash of human life between the two bars of non-being endorsed Nabokov´s own. His description of Van Veen´s discovery does not require the presentation of philosophical arguments (such as Berkeley´s and Bergson´s) about duration and time. It becomes a very definite rendering of an experience, which, as a scientist, he tries to reproduce again and again in writing.

Although Van´s conceptual evolution seems far from Shade´s perplexities, there are proofs that Shade already knew how to develop, like Van, stylistic acrobatics. Despite hints of “serial souls” which interfere in his text with messages from the hereafter, like the inspiring red butterfly which guides his pudgy hand, and even Kinbote´s (Brian Boyd, Nabokov´s Pale Fire), I prefer to investigate the “missed heartbeat”, the syncope, in the opening stanzas of PF. In this way I hope to come closer to the interval between the “eternities of darkness,” when these are considered brackets or beats that “embar time.”

We meet a multitude of referred pronouns “I” in Pale Fire. Its first line brings an “I” as the shadow of a dead bird, an illusory, perhaps accidental product of the second “I”, the one who notices how a diffuse bluishness in sky and mirror led a waxwing to search for one in the other: I was the shadow of the waxwing slain

By the false azure in the windowpane;

The invented third “I” survived the shock against glass because John Shade´s own “I” divides it into a “smudge of ashen fluff” and a living reflection:

I was the smudge of ashen fluff - and I

Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky.

We can follow how Shade suspends time creating an interval between these two events by presenting them almost simultaneously. To confuse the sky with its reflection, as if both were interchangeable, is a deathly experience but there is a space in between that might reveal a new level of awareness.

Shade´s exercise of pure imagination undoes the reality of sky, glass, mirror and bird while he objectifies the double “I” into mirages, shadows or mirror reflections. Jotting down an apparently addictive “and” (“and I lived on…”) he makes the surviving “I” more real than the landscape from which it emerges.

As readers, we are invited to watch with him how the furniture inside his cozy study is hung “out in the crystal land”:

And from the inside, too, I´d duplicate

Myself, my lamp, an apple on a plate:

Uncurtaining the night, I´d let dark glass

Hang all the furniture above the grass,

And how delightful when a fall of snow…

But no! Shade has not simply blended that which lay inside and what was kept outside the nest of his room because, another missed heartbeat later (signaled, like the others, by “and”), he has already dropped us from a shimmering blue day into a dark wintry night. Like the sparrow in Bede´s tale entering a heated hall while crossing over from a freezing nothingness into another, we can escape the illusion created by the “and” to follow Shade from the transient warmth of his verse to what lies outside the realm of words and meaning.

The multiple “I” in PF are not only presentations of a divided subject who, by describing himself in a given moment, is turned into a series of “objects” in the eyes of an observer. When Shade verbally recreates the image of a sunny lawn he once saw through the glass, he smashes it against the actual barrier of reflections thrown onto the snow by the contrasting lights of his studio and external darkness. Stunned into awareness by the brusque temporal transition the reader, like the waxwing, may escape the fictional dimension and isolate his “I” from the voice speaking in the poem. Or he may allow himself to be carried away by the magic carpet of Shade´s “and”, under the illusion of wandering from present into past like an entrapped bird flying back and forth inside a speeding rocket. In a different context, Marina Grishakova (in op.cit) writes that “Nabokov's intention was apparently embedding of several individual time-orders, their “objective” exposition as different perceptual fields within the single subjective field of perception. The device of the “serial observer” discloses an affinity between the metafictional and metaphysical problems: the status of the fictional world, its development in time, the fiction of the creator”.

Nabokov observes that he tends “more and more to regard the objective existence of all events as a form of impure imagination" (SO 154) and, through Shade, he gives us a glimpse of who remains suspended between the sentences he conjoined by “and”. He even allows us to accompany him in the diastema of a “missed beat”. Such an experience requires the deliverance from the “saddle of personality” that weighs metaphors down, when a “purer” metaphorical “I” makes its appearance after the unity of time and place has been broken. The heraclitean fluidity of words in succession becomes the medium from which the poet creates his intended caesura. Perhaps this is why Nabokov believes that “Time is a fluid medium for the culture of metaphors” and describes Shade as “by far the greatest of invented poets” (SO,59).

Thanks to Carolyn Kunin for calling my attention to Samuel Beckett´s lines in “Waiting for Godot”.

Jansy Mello,2005.