Part Two, to follow:"I'm willing to take the risk that John Shade's 'quirk in space' may also be applied to time and
eternity"
...because, when I quoted other verses by Shade: "A thousand years
ago five minutes were/ Equal to forty ounces of fine sand./, I
didn't take into account that he was suggesting an hourglass right
there and then!
Here is what Marina Grishakova notes in the
first paragraph of her Nabokovian note: "Let us turn to Adam Krug's
hampered attempt to cross the bridge..." - when she quotes VN:
"...Not a bridge but an hourglass which somebody
keeps reversing, with me, the fluent fine sand, inside." before she adds: "An
hourglass is an image of measurable infinity (as well as a verse line, a unit of
poetry, another metaphor for the bridge). It visually resembles the mathematical
sign of infinity and belongs to the leitmotival "signs and symbols associated
with the point of contact between the novel's two worlds." (D.B.Johnson
Worlds in
Regression...)"
In the former posting, related to "a quirk in space" that
dislodged two conscious recollections from their shared source, I compared
this effect to some of Marina Grishakova's arguments. I had
simply wanted to make a reduction from "two infinite abysses" (help!)
to John Shade's description of how he is unable to see his home when
he is looking in that direction in the present, with the one
that had included his home in the past.
Matt Roth
has asked: "Is the idea of “two consciousnesses” at the root of this
passage?" [relating Wordsworth's lines to Shade's
"quirk in
space"*]. Sigmund Freud and
Wilhelm Wundt referred to "conscious awareness" by linking perception and
consciousness, as you seem to imply it to be the case in Wordsworth's
conclusions, and even
Nabokov's.
Freud's
innovations led him towards the acceptance of distorted
recollections that could be either conscious or unconscious, the
effects of which altered or influenced present perceptions. He also
observed that when a person is remembering something, the perception
of what surrounds him(her) is closed-off (and vice-versa).
For a writer to be
able to indicate "two consciousnesses" ("aligning memory with
immediate perception"), he must be relying on
yet some kind of third consciousness - and on their mnemonic
registers, however faulty.
Would Nabokov have
advocated the reality or the objective truth of everything he could
remember from his childhood years?
............................................................................
* - The complete quote, by M.Roth is:
“But
with ‘somewhat of a sad perplexity’ he [the poem’s speaker] registers a
difference between the memory he has carried of the place and what he now
sees. When he superimposes the picture held in memory over the actual
scene, he finds they are mismatched. Wordsworth referred to this device of
aligning memory with immediate perception as the ‘two consciousnesses.’ Imagine
looking through a View-Master, that childhood toy that layers two images over
each other to create a 3-D scene. You expect to see a single sharply defined
landscape but instead see two pictures, one hovering over the other, their
differences disconcertingly
apparent.”