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Exile and Temporality in Nabokov's Short Stories

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Exile and Temporality in Nabokov's Short Stories “I Confess I Do Not Believe In Time” Exile and Temporality in Nabokov’s Short Stories Merel Aalders (11753560) Master Thesis UvA Comparative Literature First Reader: dr. B. Noordenbos Second reader: dr. E.R.G. Metz June 2019 1 Table of Contents Introduction .............................................................................................................................. 3 Part I: The Writer In Exile ...................................................................................................... 8 Autobiography and the Concept of Time ................................................................................ 8 Displacement for the Transatlantic Intellectual ................................................................... 11 Memory and Nostalgia ......................................................................................................... 13 Part II: Exile As Displacement and Narrative Temporality .............................................. 17 Narrative Temporality .......................................................................................................... 17 Displacement: Two Short Stories ......................................................................................... 21 Part III: Exile As Nostalgic Condition ................................................................................. 26 Nostalgia and Creativity ....................................................................................................... 26 Narratology .......................................................................................................................... 32 The Texture of Time .............................................................................................................. 37 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................... 40 Bibliography ........................................................................................................................... 44 2 Introduction In the middle of his one major autobiographical work Speak, Memory, Vladimir Nabokov owns up to what the reader, up until this point, has already been highly suspicious of: “I confess I do not believe in time” (106). For Nabokov, a writer living in more or less voluntary political exile for a large part of his life, history is never a given. Travelling across borders a number of times during his life, nostalgia and an enquiry of temporality run continuously through his work. Nabokov’s project is therefore unique within both modernist and postmodernist strands. In this thesis, I will bring the two discourses on exile and on narrative temporality together on the basis of Nabokov’s autobiography and his short stories. For that, I will have to connect two different notions of exile: exile as displacement and exile as nostalgic condition. The first conception can be tracked through ‘distant reading’: a superficial, quantitative approach to movement across nations in Europe and America in the twentieth century. The second notion of exile is more intimate and refers to a strategy of survival resulting in artistic creation, which can be approached through ‘close reading’. Considering both, I want to outline Nabokov’s experience of exile as it contributes to the development of how we have come to consider temporality, both in art and in life. Nabokov’s concern with the ungraspable nature of memory and the poetic power of nostalgia engender experimentation with narrative temporality and a reconfiguration of the experience of time. Another author with the experience of exile, Dubravka Ugrešić, articulates the place where exile and temporality meet as follows: The exile feels that the state of exile has the structure of a dream. All at once, as in a dream, faces appear which he had forgotten, or perhaps had never met, places which he is undoubtedly seeing for the first time, but that he feels he knows from somewhere. The dream is a magnetic field which attracts images from the past, present and future (The Museum of Unconditional Surrender 9). The Museum of Unconditional Surrender (1998) is a fictionalized autobiographical work which traces the writer’s (traumatized) memory, only to find that there is no linear logic to it. According to Ugrešić, this dreamlike state of the experience of exile uncouples the exile from an ordinary sense of temporality, concerning past, present and future. Ugrešić has often referred to Nabokov’s writing in and on exile, as her own experiences correspond to his and their writing displays similarities in this respect. For both, the ‘uncoupling’ of an ordinary sense of temporality contributes to a rather abstract, personal sense of determination: 3 The exile suddenly sees in reality faces, events and images, drawn by the magnetic field of the dream; suddenly it seems as though his biography was written long before it was to be fulfilled, that his exile is therefore not the result of external circumstances nor his choice, but a jumble of coordinates which fate had long ago sketched out for him. Caught up in this seductive and terrifying thought, the exile begins to decipher the signs, crosses and knots and all at once it seems as though he were beginning to read in it all a secret harmony, a round logic of symbols (9). The experience of exile transcends causal notions of external circumstances and choice: being in a kind of purgatory between leaving and returning, the exile reads their environment without the logic of belonging to it, without having it fulfil any direct explanations in relation to the individual, let alone it being able to express their state of being. Similarly, Edward Said states that there are some positive things to say about the state of exile: “Seeing the entire world as a foreign land makes possible originality of vision” (191). In Nabokov’s writing, this restructuring of the personal experience according to a timeless, independent logic of symbolic matters, finds its expression in ingenious aesthetic articulations and experimental narrative structures. Being part of a large movement of liberal intellectuals, both émigrés and exiles, that travelled through Europe and the US at the beginning of the twentieth century, Nabokov’s work is situated within the strands of this particular modernist tradition. However, his thought indicates the beginning of postmodernist considerations of temporality as well. In order to track the movement of Nabokov and contemporaries, I will look at Will Norman’s study Transatlantic Aliens: Modernism, Exile, and Culture in Midcentury America (2016), and Sara- Louise Cooper’s consideration of the relation between memory and mobility in Memory Across Borders (2016). Both works are concerned with the crossing of borders, Norman mostly with national ones; Cooper with linguistic borders and the borders of self and other as well. They both acknowledge the nation state, since, as Cooper puts it: “Postulating a borderless literary space ignores […] the unequal distribution of economic and political power in the present world” (6). I agree that, as attractive as a literary space without borders sounds, it would not be helpful when analysing exile in the twentieth century, for which the loss of a national home (albeit therefore also the gain of new, intercultural insights) is of the utmost importance. There are two separate discourses on exile to be discerned. Scholarship on exile is concerned with either the theme of nostalgia as an intimate, autobiographical thing and the 4 extent to which it is possible to transcend the nostalgic need to return home as creative salvation, or with its function within globalization and theory on the displacement of persons. This last approach is embraced by, among others, Said and Darko Suvin, according to whom globalization has to be viewed as an existing situation from which new ways of experiencing spring, the experience of exile being one of them. To Said and Suvin, displacement is a global phenomenon which cannot be accurately grasped by considering ‘representatives’ like Nabokov. The problem, for Said, is that travel is fundamentally unrepresentable. Yet it can also be argued, as Cooper points out, that such a view precisely contributes to the silencing it contests (8). In light of this, it is helpful not to think as much of representation, but rather of the expression of experience through structure and style. For analysing the way the experience of exile translates to aesthetics in literature, the very creative act of restructuring the experience based on memory, nostalgia and loss has to be taken into consideration as well. Nabokov’s work is situated both within the modernist and the postmodernist tradition. I argue that Nabokov’s work is eccentric to the modernist tradition because of the persistent presence of an individual loss, but through that tendency he is precisely one of the writers starting to question temporality in postmodernist terms. The presence of personal memory and nostalgia, which play significant roles in Nabokov’s work, are also highly individual matters, and the original, experimental narrative structures he employs often go beyond the modernist project of tracking the mysteries of time, delivering him, to an extent, to postmodern concerns as well. I am looking for metaphor on a structural level in Nabokov’s work, which is more than a representation of exile on thematic level. Marina Grishakova’s work is useful in this respect. In “The Models of Time” (2012),
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