--Vladimir Nabokov (from Ada, which I have not read; I'm just cribbing William's erudition here)
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| October 1972 |
Tuesday, February 22, 2011
And one from the archives
"The Past, then, is a constant accumulation of images. It can be easily contemplated and listened to, tested and tasted at random, so that it ceases to mean the orderly alternation of linked events that it does in the large theoretical sense. It is now a generous chaos out of which the genius of total recall ... can pick anything he pleases."
--Vladimir Nabokov (from Ada, which I have not read; I'm just cribbing William's erudition here)
--Vladimir Nabokov (from Ada, which I have not read; I'm just cribbing William's erudition here)
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Philosophically, on the other hand, Time is but memory in the making. In every individual life there goes on from cradle to deathbed the gradual shaping and strengthening of that 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. I dismiss it. Life, love, libraries, have no future.
ReplyDeleteHere a heckler asked, with the arrogant air of one wanting to see a gentleman’s driving license, how did the “Prof” reconcile his refusal to grant the future the status of Time with the fact that it, the future, could hardly be considered nonexistent, since “it possessed at least one future, I mean, feature, involving such an important idea as that of absolute necessity.”
ReplyDeleteThrow him out. Who said I shall die?
So what I want to know (and yes, I know, I could read the book!) is what we're supposed to think of Van Veen. Is this philosophy, or satire?
ReplyDeleteThis is one of the more debated questions in the Ada lit-crit world (which, admittedly, is a pretty small world). My view is that the answer is "both." Nabokov did have his own kooky views about time and memory and how he felt about his life, but he made them absurd and put them in Van's mouth so that he could write them without having to fully take a stand.
ReplyDeleteOn Van generally, my view is that we're supposed to recognize that he's an evil, selfish, son-of-a-bitch, but only after we've also gotten sucked in to his world and his problems and his love story.