Masthead Logo The Iowa Review Volume 17 Article 17 Issue 1 Winter 1987 Autobiographic Rapture and Fictive Irony in Speak, Memory and "The Real Life of Sebastian Knight" David Shields Follow this and additional works at: https://ir.uiowa.edu/iowareview Part of the Creative Writing Commons Recommended Citation Shields, David. "Autobiographic Rapture and Fictive Irony in Speak, Memory and "The Real Life of Sebastian Knight"." The Iowa Review 17.1 (1987): 44-54. Web. Available at: https://doi.org/10.17077/0021-065X.3460 This Contents is brought to you for free and open access by Iowa Research Online. It has been accepted for inclusion in The oI wa Review by an authorized administrator of Iowa Research Online. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Autobiographic Rapture and Fictive Irony in Speak, Memory and The Real Life of Sebastian Knight David Shields An Initial Titular Antithesis THE CONTRAST BETWEEN THE TITLE of Vladimir Nabokov's autobiography and the title of his first English novel suggests a An distinction between autobiography and fiction. Speak, Memory: is an self-conscious and self-directed Autobiography Revisited excruciatingly a is a mock-classical address appellation for book, for "^peak, Memory" from the author to his own memory, as if his recollections had unto not "An themselves only personality but also language; Autobiography Revisited" is Nabokov's extremely arch way of saying that the present as text is the revised edition of Conclusive Evidence. But the comedy, always a with Nabokov, cuts considerably deeper. If autobiography is physical to one can if has words to place which return, and memory with which communicate, then consciousness is tangible and the imagination is real. one Into titular phrase Nabokov has compressed the central motif of his is an "loaded" for memoir. The Real Life of Sebastian Knight equally title, or "real life" implies that lived life, rather than remembered imagined life, is real: that here?the naive novel-reader thinks?we're going to get the on a as an artist were to be found goods writer's "real life," if the life of In a "Sebastian" anywhere except in his work. book about half-brothers, as a to in must be taken reference Viola's twin brother Twelfth Night, and a on "chess and "dubbed "Knight" is triple pun "night," knight," we but the novel-title knight." Note the differences: interpret both titles, makes references to the world as well as to literature, whereas the the novel-title autobiography-title is militantly hermetic. Furthermore, assumes a an an sophistication beyond the reader and hence implicit tagonism toward us, for certainly the reader is deceived who approaches the that we're to The Real Life of Sebastian Knight with expectation going on the "get" the "real life" of Sebastian Knight. The autobiography-title, ensu other hand, takes the reader into its confidence; explains the entire, and via its ing book in its five-words-and-a-colon; acknowledges reveals, 44 University of Iowa is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve, and extend access to The Iowa Review ® www.jstor.org use own terror of the imperative, the yearning of its voice, the and ecstasy own of its creation, the rapid heart ("some forty-five hundred heartbeats an creator. hour," p. 19) of its The Dichotomy of Introduction The critical introduction to The Real Life of SebastianKnight is so inferior can a that the reader only hope it's forgery, that "Conrad Brenner" is an a Nabokov's impersonation of idiot. It's doubtful such saving delight is case. sentence the Virtually any will succeed in condemning Mr. Brenner, none so as but perhaps would be quite completely effective the following: not a The maelstrom-descenders of his books reflect freely meta phoric condition, but Nabokov's dialogue of convoluted mistrust, the diabolic conscience in a death-lock with romance monocracy, (p. xii) as a This is best received parody of critical jargon; unfortunately, it isn't. in to in When, however, the Foreword Speak, Memory, Nabokov engages at self-important pedantry, he is least partially kidding. He writes: By theOld Style Iwas born on April 10, at daybreak, in the last year of the last century, and thatwas (if I could have been whisked across at the border once) April 22 in, say, Germany; but since all my birthdays were celebrated, with diminishing pomp, in the twentieth century, everybody, including myself, upon being shifted by revolu to tion and expatriation from the Julian calendar the Gregorian, used to add thirteen, instead of twelve, days to the 10th of April. The error is serious. What is to be done? (p. 13) sentence to The extremely long, intentionally tedious, first is there only set sentences up the two, short, pseudo-solemn that follow it. The effect, unlike that of Brenner's is comic. introductions, purposefully Furthermore, in meant to Nabokov's scholarly language the above paragraph is jar with the truly poetic language present elsewhere in the Foreword?e.g., "That at cornerstone order had been established in 1936, the placing of the which a already held in its hidden hollow various maps, timetables, collection of 45 even ?as matchboxes, and I now realize ?the view from my balcony of at tea Geneva lake, of its ripples and glades of light, black-dotted today, coots Brenner's time, with and tufted ducks" (pp. 10-11)?while absurd to it grandiloquence has nothing bounce off except itself, and there does. we encounter In front of fiction turgid interpretation, whereas before we own autobiography read the autobiographer's self-conscious explana at to create tion, his last attempt apologia. The fictionist seeks enough mys tery that he needs to be studied; the memoirist attempts an act of self so at study profound that the puzzle of his life is least partially solved. First Lines an common sense us our ex "The cradle rocks above abyss, and tells that a istence is but brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness" sentence of is (p. 19). The opening Speak, Memory communal ("us," "our"), contemplative, serious, indulgently alliterative. The identification a between the author and all of humanity, and the attempt to arrive at are comprehensive understanding of one's life, signatures of autobiog tone to raphy. The essentially serious and the unblushing surrender florid contrast language with the comedy and controlled language of The Real Life of SebastianKnight; it is as if only when finally writing about himself as so subject that Nabokov could make completely manifest what obviously informs, a level or six below the surface, his fiction: his love of sheer verbal sound and his tragic perceptions. The first line of The Real Life of Sebastian a or Knight is probably parody of the novelistic biographic entrance; was on "Sebastian Knight born the thirty-first of December, 1899, in the to former capital of my country" (p. 5). In direct contrast the sentence autobiographic beginning, this is linguistically unremarkable, and concerned with the names, dates, and places of the world, rather than movements of the human After we have read in the mind. Speak, Memory own of Nabokov's nearly obsessive identification of his age with the age of we the twentieth century, read Sebastian Knight's birthdate, "the thirty first of December, 1899," with a bemused smile. So, too, when we know that Nabokov was born in St. Petersburg and how bitterly he views his see expatriation, do we the particular poignance of the phrase, "the former capital of my country," for the former capital is Nabokov's former capital and the lost country is Nabokov's lost country. This is the way the 46 fabulator tends to work: satirizing in fiction what he swoons over in fact, onto own displacing other people the details of his identity. Photographs of a Gentleman one It is only appropriate that of the very few Nabokovian novels referred to in Speak,Memory is The Real Life of SebastianKnight: reasons to For various I find it inordinately hard speak about my other brother. That twisted quest for SebastianKnight (1940), with com its gloriettes and self-mate combinations, is really nothing in parison to the task I balked in the first version of this memoir and am facedwith now. (p. 257) to One of the principal strategies of autobiography is insist upon its more supremacy because it is visceral, cutting closer to the human heart, so we most here have Nabokov?the radical defender of the inviolability of the imagination ?stating that writing about his brother in fact ismuch more difficult thanwriting about a half-brother in fiction. Nabokov balks as the task in this version well. He writes two uninspired, painful pages on to more about Sergey, then surrenders in despair, moving the pleasant own at to topic of his education Cambridge. Without imagination blur seems the distance between himself and his subject, Nabokov unable to reconcile himself to the isolation which existed between himself and his on brother. Sebastian Knight, the other hand, places the following adver tisement in the newspaper: Author writing fictitious biography requires photos of gentleman, efficient appearance, plain, steady, teetotaller, bachelors preferred. to Will pay for photos childhood, youth, manhood appear in said work. (p. 40) an is not Sebastian does write Lost Property, autobiography which in its to Lost is an im dissimilar rapturousness Speak, Memory, but Property not same aginary work?it is listed in the card catalogue?in the way that Sebastian's advertised biography is fictitious: it is a forged document to asserts pretending be real. Thus, in Nabokov's autobiography he the 47 primacy of autobiography, and in his first English-language novel he asserts the primacy of fiction.