Remember that "In my memoirs, quotable ideas are merely passing visions, suggestions, mirages of the mind. They lose their colors or explode like football fish when lifted out of the context of their tropical sea." The context is his autobiography where he relates his experience, and it is perfectly feasible that Nabokov did not have any prenatal memories, whereas James is unlikely to have really seen a lighted tip.

And perhaps Nabokov is on your side. It is, after all, common sense who tells us "that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness", that "the two are identical twins", and that "man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour)".

Seeing that Nabokov wrote in The Art of Literature and Commonsene that "commonsense is square whereas all the most essential visions and values of life are beautifully round", he is unlikely to back his antagonist in this instance. And indeed, in the next sentence he undermines immediately the least controversial of these commonsensical notions: the purported calmness with which we contemplate the herefore [enter chronophobiac*]. Later on he makes his opposition explicit: "I rebel against this state of affairs. I feel the urge to take my rebellion outside and picket nature. Over and over again, my mind has made colossal efforts to distinguish the faintest of personal glimmers in the impersonal darkness on both sides of my life." Again from TAoLaC: "That human life is but a first installment of the serial soul and that one's individual secret is not lost in the process of earthly dissolution, becomes something more than an optimistic conjecture, and even more than a matter of religious faith, when we remember that only commonsense rules immortality out."

That the subjective non-experience of many people is a precognitive abyss rather than a prenatal one, then evinces not Nabokov's incompetence, but commonsense's myopia.


- Philip Klop

*Has anyone noticed the curious case of this fellow getting born into the world of the book, living a rather frightened life while his description lasts, only to dissolve, along with his bones, into the very abyss he had so absurdly feared--for he is never heard from again?


2011/8/5 Anthony Stadlen <STADLEN@aol.com>
I was reading to my wife Nabokov's opening of "Speak Memory", when she spoke the obvious: "But he's a bloke." I had thought what she thought, but not bothered to articulate it before. But surely it is crucial.
 
Nabokov's account of the "identical twin" "abysses" (posthumous and "pre-natal" [sic]) may be phenomenologically true to the particular defective and distorted experience of the young "chronophobiac" who is frightened by seeing film of a few weeks before his birth when, supposedly, he did not "exist". But it is certainly not true to my experience, for example. And my wife was speaking as a mother. To her it was absurd that a baby (foetus) in the womb should be thought not to exist, either by the mother or the baby. And indeed it is to me, too. Even without the explicit memories of the womb which some people have, there is surely for many people a more general feeling of having been there: it is certainly not an "abyss". Once this has been pointed out, Nabokov's description seems as incompetent because as inaccurate as Henry James's description of the lighted "tip" of a cigar or innumerable poets' descriptions of single nightingales seemed to Nabokov.
 
Heidegger, in a lecture course a year or so after he published Sein und Zeit (1927), mentioned that many people had asked him why, since he had made so much of death in that work, he did not deal with birth also. He replied that birth and death were not a symmetric pair in the way implied. Surely he was right.
 
Anthony Stadlen
 
 
Anthony Stadlen
"Oakleigh"
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Email: stadlen@aol.com
Founder (in 1996) and convenor of the Inner Circle Seminars: an ethical, existential, phenomenological search for truth in psychotherapy
See "Existential Psychotherapy & Inner Circle Seminars" at http://anthonystadlen.blogspot.com/ for programme of future Inner Circle Seminars and complete archive of past seminars
 
 
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Google Search the archive Contact the Editors Visit "Nabokov Online Journal" Visit Zembla View Nabokv-L Policies Manage subscription options Visit AdaOnline View NSJ Ada Annotations Temporary L-Soft Search the archive

All private editorial communications are read by both co-editors.