Petit, Laurence. Speak, Photographs? Visual Transparency and Verbal Opacity in Vladimir Nabokov's Speak, Memory. 2009

Like many contemporary writers, Vladimir Nabokov in Speak, Memory explores the destabilizing interaction between visual and verbal codes in an autobiographical work combining text and photographic image. The originality of this book, however, is that, unlike so many other postmodern works, the supposedly truthful photographic image does not hold its promise and challenges perception and representation. In Speak, Memory, photographs are indeed presented as a faithful, transparent window into the past. What obfuscates this autobiographical project, however, is the opacity of the reminiscing, or anamnestic discourse on those photographs, in particular that which is contained in their accompanying captions. Borrowing from critics such as Barthes, Doubrovsky, Harvey Rugg, and others, this essay examines how Nabokov in Speak, Memory playfully subverts his own autobiography, or photobiography, through an idiosyncratic use of text and image that not only sheds light on his condition as an exile, but also challenges his readers' expectations in typically postmodern, as well as Nabokovian, fashion.