I have often been intrigued by the swivel experiment performed
in Look at the Harlequins: "On the contrary: now is the moment to
shut your eyes tight and concentrate. I want you
to imagine yourself turning on your heel so that `right'
instantly becomes `left,' and you instantly see the
`here' as a `there,' [ ]
"Done,"
said Iris. "About-face executed.[ ] Shall we start
walking back?"
"You may, I can't! This is the
point of the experiment. In actual, physical life I can turn as simply and
swiftly as anyone. But mentally, with my eyes closed and
my body immobile, I am unable to switch from
one direction to the other. Some swivel cell in my brain does
not work [ ] some kind of atrocious obstacle, which would drive me
mad if I persevered, prevents me from imagining the twist which
transforms one direction into another, directly opposite. I am
crushed, I am carrying the whole world on my back in the process of trying
to visualize my turning around and making myself see in terms
of `right' what I saw in terms of
`left' and vice
versa."
It might have been a reference to some spacial quirk or a metaphorical
elaboration on "right" and "left," but somehow the quandary seems to reflect a
difficulty with "time," not "space," associated to what in SM and in ADA
appears under the term "chronophobia.," particularly by looking
backwards in time to a period when the individual wasn't yet born, that is, a
historically true or a non (totally) subjective
past.
I came across a particular line in Barnes's "The Sense of an Ending" that
brought Nabokov once again to my mind*. Not because of. Nabokov's
exceptional memory, his record keepings, his way of applying tags. The
impossibility of predicting one's future and then, from that
standpoint, look backwards, experienced by JB's character, isn't a
problem that a novelist,. who invents the entire plot, has to face. It is
the author's, not the character's blockage. and irrespective of the writer's
talent, there's no redemption for him, even when he sets things right in fiction
(as did Ian McEwan's Brittany, in "Atonement") or extracts the gems from the
stones in his memoirs. Humbert Humbert certainly knew this kind of
despair. I cannot remember any other character who expresses this
closed-door as clearly and as poingnantly as he
does.
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* JB- “...when you are young, you think you can predict the likely pains
and bleaknesses that age might bring. ...You imagine the loss of status, the
loss of desire....You may go further and consider your own approaching
death...But all this is looking ahead. What you fail to do is look
ahead, and then imagine yourself looking back from the future point.
Learning the new emotions that time brings. Discovering, for example, that as
the witnesses to your life diminish, there is less corroboration, and therefore
less certainty, as to what you are or have been. Even if you have assiduously
kept records – in words, sound, pictures – you may find that you have attended
to the wrong kind of record-keeping."