Carolyn Kunin: "... it got me to thinking about
Nabokov as a chess player.Google led me to an interview done with the author
before fame struck, but in 1951, the latest book was .a volume called
"Conclusive Evidence." It was an autobiography and yet it wasn't altogether so.
Would Mr. Nabokov talk a bit about it? He would.[ ] The memoir
became the meeting point of an impersonal art form and a very personal life
story."[ ] "With me, Mr. Nabokov said, 'it is a kind of
composition. I am a composer of chess problems. Nobody,' he said, 'has yet
solved the chess problem in 'Conclusive Evidence' ." What about a professional,
a Reuben Fine, a Reshevsky, or someone like that? 'I'm waiting for one to come
along,' Mr. Nabokov said in a voice that could have been as ambivalent as
Joyce's when people were starting to guess at the title of what turned out to be
'Finnegans Wake'."
Jansy Mello: You reminded me of two things. In the first
place, that Nabokov wasn't as keen on playing chess as he was in devising chess
problems.So, his invitation in "Conclusive Evidence" turns the reader
into a chess player and this promotes a distancing distinction bt. him
and those readers whose joy depends on solving the problem
and winning the game, instead of following the malicious turns and
clever devices of his mind (another kind of "discovery game").
Still stuck with Kinbote's mention of Proust's "flora of
metaphors," I started to read again Beckett's essay, which was not a
true academic work, filled with footnotes, references and quotes,
although his work already carried the mark of his future
writings (a variation of VN's Memoir that isn't just a Memoir, i.e, an
Essay that's not an academic feat). Beckett became close to James
Joyce during his stay in Paris. Joyce, noticing the young man's
talent, invited him to join a collective travail
evolving around what he'd been writing in 1922, namely,
his "Work in Progress, published much later, in 1939, as
Finnegans Wake (Beckett was in charge of researching Bruno,
Vico and Dante and his results were published as a part of "Our
Exagmination Round his Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress")
..
Factifications, indeed! And these carry me to the second association to
your comment. It's a quote, from Mark Twain's Autobiography
(which I haven't read) After all, if Clement's observation is
true, he must have inadvertently transformed his "very personal life
story" into literary fiction then and there. ( "When I was
younger, I could remember anything, whether it had happened or not; but my
faculties are decaying now and soon I shall be so I cannot remember any but the
things that never happened.")