In "Ada, or Ardor" Nabokov writes more explicitly about the triptych
painted by H. Bosch and offers several interpretations about the
spacial disposition of the pannels as "past- present-future" and the
butterflies represented in them.
(The quotations are in blue. I underlined the
most significant parts in relation to the "triptych" theme.)
1. ‘If I could write,’ mused Demon, ‘I would describe, in too many
words no doubt, how passionately, how incandescently, how incestuously —
c’est le mot — art and science meet in an insect, in a thrush, in a
thistle of that ducal bosquet. Ada is marrying an outdoor man, but her mind is a
closed museum, and she, and dear Lucette, once drew my attention, by a creepy
coincidence, to certain details of that other triptych, that tremendous
garden of tongue-in-cheek delights, circa 1500, and, namely, to the
butterflies in it — a Meadow Brown, female, in the center of the right panel,
and a Tortoiseshell in the middle panel, placed there as if settled on a flower
— mark the "as if," for here we have an example of exact knowledge on the part
of those two admirable little girls, because they say that actually the wrong
side of the bug is shown, it should have been the underside, if seen, as it
is, in profile, but Bosch evidently found a wing or two in the corner cobweb of
his casement and showed the prettier upper surface in depicting his incorrectly
folded insect. I mean I don’t give a hoot for the esoteric meaning, for the
myth behind the moth, for the masterpiece-baiter who makes Bosch express some
bosh of his time, I’m allergic to allegory and am quite sure he was just
enjoying himself by crossbreeding casual fancies just for the fun of the contour
and color, and what we have to study, as I was telling your cousins, is the joy
of the eye, the feel and taste of the woman-sized strawberry that you embrace
with him, or the exquisite surprise of an unusual orifice — but you
are not following me...'
2. "I dismiss it. Life, love, libraries, have no future....Time
is anything but the popular triptych: a no-longer existing Past, the
durationless point of the Present, and a ‘not-yet’ that may never come. No.
There are only two panels. The Past (ever-existing in my mind) and the
Present (to which my mind gives duration and, therefore, reality). If we make a
third compartment of fulfilled expectation, the foreseen, the foreordained, the
faculty of prevision, perfect forecast, we are still applying our mind to the
Present."
(this idea comes up again in the opening paragraphs of
Transparent Things*)
3. What is the worst part of dying?
...For you realize
there are three facets to it (roughly corresponding to the popular
tripartition of Time). There is, first, the wrench of relinquishing forever
all one’s memories — that’s a commonplace, but what courage man must have had to
go through that commonplace again and again and not give up the rigmarole of
accumulating again and again the riches of consciousness that will be snatched
away! Then we have the second facet — the hideous physical pain — for obvious
reasons let us not dwell upon that. And finally, there is the featureless
pseudo-future, blank and black, an everlasting nonlastingness, the crowning
paradox of our boxed brain’s eschatologies!
4. “In every individual life there goes on from cradle to deathbed the
gradual sharpening and strengthening of the backbone of consciousness, which is
the Time of the strong. ‘To be’ means to know ‘one has been’. ‘Not to be’
implies the only ‘new’ kind of (sham) time: the future” (A,559) because
unconsciousness “envelops both the Past and the Present from all
conceivable sides”.
(But then, in the novel such theories are voiced
only by Van Veen and not even Ada seems to agree with him) .
5. In full,
deliberate consciousness, at the moment of the hooded click, he bunched the
recent past with the imminent future and thought to himself that this would
remain an objective perception of the real present and that he must remember the
flavor, the flash, the flesh of the present (as he, indeed, remembered it
half a dozen years later — and now, in the second half of the next
century).
* -
Transparent Things:
Perhaps if the future existed, concretely and individually, as something that
could be discerned by a better brain, the past would not be so seductive: its
demands would be balanced by those of the future. Persons might then straddle
the middle stretch of the seesaw when considering this or that object. It might
be fun.
But the
future has no such reality (as the pictured past and the perceived present
possess); the future is but a figure of speech, a specter of
thought...When we
concentrate on a material object, whatever its situation, the very act of
attention may lead to our involuntarily sinking into the history of that object.
Novices must learn to skim over matter if they want matter to stay at the exact
level of the moment. Transparent things, through which the past shines!
The "hereafter" ( such a curious word) is not indicated here, nor
the fourth image that arises from the closed triptych. Nabokov's
intent look towards the past and the backbone of personal conscious
memories might be related to his despair of recovering Arcadia,
if we follow Walter Benjamin's ninth Thesis on the Philosophy of
History, inspired
by the painting "Angelus Novus", by Paul Klee. The "angel of
history" is blown backwards into the future by the storm of
progress that comes from Paradise: " Where we perceive a chain of events, he
sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon
wreckage ..."