Spatial form and simultaneity in Nabokov's fiction
Description
An obsessive concern with the relations between time and space characterizes Nabokov's art. In Speak, Memory, Nabokov declares his rebellion against the notion of time as linear, a notion that inevitably leads to a vision of human existence as 'a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.' Throughout his fiction, Nabokov seeks to demonstrate that linear time is an illusion and to redefine the relationship between time, space, and human consciousness. This redefinition of time-space relations in Nabokov's fictional worlds involves the displacement of a materialist, Newtonian cosmology by a relativist one and can best be understood in the light of the new physics. In Nabokov's fiction, time, space, and matter are neither objective nor absolute, but relative to the consciousness perceiving the phenomenal world In his fiction, Nabokov explores the opposition of the materialist and relativist philosophies by pitting a rational approach to experience against an intuitive one. Common sense tells us that time flows through three-dimensional space because the rational approach of Western culture is shaped by a materialist philosophy. The intuition of temporal and spatial relativity offends common reason because it demands a complete reorientation of our habitual way of seeing the world. According to Nabokov, it is the artist who possesses this intuitive understanding of relativity and it is the artist's task to violate familiar habits of perception, to deny the 'reality' perceived by the communal eye Nabokov seeks to re-educate the reader whose customary experience of fiction is informed by expectations of temporal succession and material causality, to create a reader who can respond to a fictional world in which time is discontinuous and fused with space. To achieve this end, Nabokov manipulates fictional structures in such a way that the linear thrust of the narrative is displaced by the reader's experience of the novel as a spatial entity. Through the spatial patterning of pictorial details, the negation of events, and the evocation of simultaneously existing realities, Nabokov transforms the diachronic structure of linear narrative into a synchronic structure which the reader apprehends as an instantaneous whole, illumined in the mind like a painting. . . . (Author's abstract exceeds stipulated maximum length. Discontinued here with permission of author.) UMI