From former postings
"our awareness of being is
not a dot in eternity, but a slit, a fissure, a chasm running along the entire
breadth of metaphysical time, bisecting it and shining — no matter how narrowly
— between the back panel and fore panel"
(Ada)
"Our mistaken feeling of time as a
kind of growth is a consequence of our finiteness which, being always on the
level of the present, implies its constant rise between the watery abyss of the
past and the aerial abyss of the future... The theory I find most tempting -
that there is no time, that everything is the present situated like a radiance
outside our blindness - is just as hopeless a finite hypothesis as all the
others." (the Gift)
The subject of the first quote is a mental state
(our awareness of being) related to metaphysical time. It's
simultaneously a fissure and a source of light - like the rays of the sun
in the horizon at the crack of dawn, separating the oceanic
waters.and heaven, as it came out in another, very distinct, novel.
However, maybe these images shouldn't have been set side by side nor
is their significance one that VN has meant to
describe. Perhaps they aren't intended as images that occupy a place in
space, In fact, as stated in the sentence from The Gift,most theories are
"just as hopeless a finite hypothesis as all the others" and the prevalent
"awareness" in a sense of impotent wonder that strikes
different VN characters, an emotion that they share with their
readers.
Trying to explore a little more VN`s relation
to time, duration and to Henri Bergson's philosophy I turned to "
Vladimir Nabokov - Bergsonian and Russian Formalist Influences in his
Novels" (Ed.Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), where author Michael Glynn
discusses Nabokov's "anti-symbolism". For M. Glynn, "Nabokov's tropes tend to
reveal rather than adumbrate...Nabokov was always deeply suspicious of symbols
and for him the world was real and endlessly interesting, not a mere
analogue.."(14/5). "In the verse, as in the prose, Nabokov`s otherworld turns
out to be not a vague Symbolist eidolon, but a world of the here and
now."(17)
Michael Glynn believes that "Nabokov`s views were also
buttressed by the deep-seated anti-symbolism that he encountered in
Bergson's notion of scientific knowledge. Bergson's negative view of science as
a form of symbolism was derived from his notion of duration...(60)
But Michael Glynn isn't writing a novel or a poem
and his conceptualization of symbols and Symbolists seems to be rather
distant from the verbal and imagetic flow I was following in the wake
of Nabokov's characters and their words? signifiers?
symbols?metaphors? patterns?
My mistake here results from having tried to lift
the veil that separates an author and the characters he creates, as
if a living human face was speaking from behind a set of masks
and a collection of strong opinions...