NPPF - Nabokov & Time

[Michael Joseph]

Very interesting, David. Thanks for keying in all of this. In Nabokov's
statement that our ideas of Time are "tainted by the idea of space, he is
quite clearly drawing upon Bergson's ideas in TIME AND FREE WILL, which
were also seminal in Eliade's dialectic of sacred time and history.
Perhaps you or others who know Nabokov studies better than I will be kind
enough to say whether this debt is generally noted. It does position
Nabokov at any rate to conceptualize time that could admit of
transcendence, a noted theme of Shade's.

VN's note about delighting "sensually" in the texture of time is
remniscent of Shade's revelation:

all at once it dawned on me that this
Was the real point, the contrapuntal theme;
Just this: not text, but texture. . . .

A comparison: Nabokov's valorization of the "folds" of time corresponds
closely to Shade's valorization of the music of time, sharing a perception
of inhering design. Both formulations assert a value to time vis-a-vis the
human characteristic of apprehending artistic coherence - one might even
say time is valorized because it serves as the medium through which
structure appears -- a very pagan idea.


Michael






On Wed, 23 Jul 2003, David Morris wrote:

>
> http://lib.ru/NABOKOW/Inter19.txt
>
> We can imagine all kinds of  time,  such  as  for  example
> "applied  time"--  time  applied to events, which we measure by
> means of clocks and calendars; but  those  types  of  time  are
> inevitably  tainted by our notion of space, spatial succession,
> stretches and sections of space. When we speak of the  "passage
> of  time,"  we  visualize  an  abstract river flowing through a
> generalized landscape. Applied time,  measurable  illusions  of
> time,  are useful for the purposes of historians or physicists,
> they do not interest me, and they did not interest my  creature
> Van Veen in Part Four of my Ada.
>      He and I in that book attempt to examine the essence of
> Time,  not its lapse. Van mentions the possibility of being
> "an amateur of Time, an epicure of duration," of being able  to
> delight  sensually  in  the  texture of time, "in its stuff and
> spread, in the fall of its folds, in the very impalpability  of
> its  grayish  gauze, in the coolness of its continuum." He also
> is aware that "Time is  a  fluid  medium  for  the  culture  of
> metaphors."
>      Time,  though  akin to rhythm, is not simply rhythm, which
> would imply motion-- and Time does  not  move.  Van's  greatest
> discovery  is  his perception of Time as the dim hollow between
> two  rhythmic  beats,  the  narrow   and   bottomless   silence
> between  the beats, not the beats themselves, which only
> embar Time. In this sense human life is not a  pulsating  heart
> but the missed heartbeat.
>
>
> __________________________________
> Do you Yahoo!?
> Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software
> http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com
>