Approaching Nabokov with Bergson on Time: Why Spatializing Time?

21 Pages·0.344 MB·English

by  Lyaskovets T.

Kaleidoscope 5.2, Tetyana Lyaskovets, “Approaching Nabokov with Bergson on
Time”

Approaching Nabokov with Bergson on Time: Why
Spatializing Time?

TETYANA LYASKOVETS

Vladimir Nabokov’s writings reveal an intense thinking about the irreversibility of time and
the ways, if any, to resist this temporal irreversibility through art. Nabokov’s obsession with time
and space is well-known among literary historians from Anglo-American, European, and Russian
critical traditions.1 Although these scholars explore Nabokov’s involvement with space and time in
a variety of significant ways, in their discussions they tend to separate time from space. In doing
so, they follow a tradition established by Henri Bergson, who influenced Nabokov’s conception of
time, and bypass an important stylistic element of Nabokov’s fiction represented by certain
narrative ways in which Nabokov visualizes time.2

1 See Alexandrov, Vladimir. 1991. Nabokov’s Otherworld. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press; Boyd, Brian. 1993. Vladimir Nabokov: the Russian Years. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press; Dolinin, Alexandr. 1995. “Nabokov’s Time Doubling: from Gift to Lolita.” Nabokov’s Studies
2: 3-40; De Vries, Gerard, Donald Barton Johnson and Liana Ashenden. 2006. Nabokov and the
Art of Painting. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press; Jacobs, Karen. 1996. “The Eye’s Mind in
James and Nabokov.” In Languages of Visuality: Crossings between Science, Art, Politics, and
Literature, ed. Beate Allert. Detroit: Wayne State University Press: 187-215; Jacobs. 2001. The Eye’s
Mind: Literary Modernism and Visual Culture. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press; Toker, Leona.
2005. “Nabokov’s Worldview.” In The Cambridge Companion to Nabokov, ed. Julian W. Connolly.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 232-47.
2 Leona Toker explores the multidimensional relationship between Bergson and Nabokov in
a number of her essays: 2013. “Minds Meeting: Bergson, Joyce, Nabokov, and the Aesthetics of the
98
Kaleidoscope 5.2, Tetyana Lyaskovets, “Approaching Nabokov with Bergson on
Time”

This paper argues that, although Nabokov confirms the fact of time’s irreversibility, he
demonstrates that writing is able, if not to defy the “prison of time,” at least to unsettle its
boundaries by re-inscribing time in spatial terms evocative of painting and photography.3 In doing
so, Nabokov rethinks Bergson, whose writings on time provide central images of temporality for
Speak, Memory and Nabokov’s other writings, and spatialize time.
One of the main problems with our understanding of time, according to Bergson, is the fact
of its spatializing: we represent and think of time in terms of space and thus destroy time’s
flowing essence: duration. However, by collapsing the past and the present, duration shares with
spatial representations, such as paintings and photography, a feature of simultaneity. Nabokov
translates this principle of simultaneity, inherent in Bergson’s duration, into the visual language of
his fiction about time.
In this essay, Bergson will allow us to read Nabokov’s formulations about time and “cosmic
synchronization” (Speak, Memory, 218). If arcane and abstract philosophical concepts did not
speak to Nabokov, certain images and moods in Bergson definitely stirred his imagination.
Nabokov transforms an intellectual impulse gained from Bergson into visually appealing images. In
performing this transfiguration of the abstract into the concrete and the visual, the artist in
Nabokov counters Bergson and spatializes time.
Nabokov maintained a life-long interest with the issue of time. Time, for example, is given
an unexpected prominence in his early story “A Guide to Berlin” (1925).4 The title indicates
Nabokov’s engagement with both space (a guide as a map) and time (a guide as travel and
movement through history). “A Guide to Berlin” is Nabokov’s early attempt at temporal collapse of
the present and the future, of the present and the past through the narrative techniques evocative

Subliminal.” In Understanding Bergson, Understanding Modernism, ed. Paul Ardoin, S. E. Gontarski
and Laci Mattison. New York: Bloomsbury: 194-12; 2005. “Nabokov’s Worldview.” In The
Cambridge Companion to Nabokov, ed. Julian W. Connolly. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press: 232-47; 1995. “Nabokov and Bergson.” In The Garland Companion to Vladimir Nabokov, ed.
Vladimir. A. Alexandrov. New York: Garland: 367-73; 2002. “Nabokov and Bergson on Duration and
Reflexivity.” In The Shape of Nabokov’s World. New York: Palgrave: 132-40. Laci Mattison takes a
different approach to Nabokov’s appropriation of Bergson’s ideas. In her exciting study of
Nabokov’s Bergsonism, she shows how Nabokov’s writings, and his Speak, Memory in particular,
help us re-read Bergson along the lines of intersubjectivity and ethical aesthetics. Mattison makes
an important argument about space in Nabokov being an intersection of durations, but she uses it
to discuss intuitional ethics and aesthetics. See Mattison. 2013. “Nabokov's Aesthetic Bergsonism:
An Intuitive, Reperceptualized Time.” Mosaic 46.1: 37-52.
3 Nabokov. 1966. Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited. New York: G. P. Putman’s
Sons: 20.
4 In Details of a Sunset and Other Stories. New York: McGraw-Hill: 91-8.
99
Kaleidoscope 5.2, Tetyana Lyaskovets, “Approaching Nabokov with Bergson on
Time”

of space: foregrounding of attentive looking, patterning, and recording of details. The here-and-
now details, preserved in the memory of a keen traveler through Berlin in a form of images, will
emerge through remembrance in the future. By then this future will be the present mirroring the
past. Nabokov graphically records this re-inscriptive temporal pattern through the name Otto. In
“Otto,” the arrangement of the letters reflects the relationship between the past, the present, and
the future, as seen by Nabokov. These letters mirror both each other and the o-and-t-shaped pipe
that is observed: “Today someone wrote ‘Otto’ with his finger on the strip of virgin snow and I
thought how beautifully that name, with its two soft o’s flanking the pair of gentle consonants,
suited the silent layer of snow upon that pipe with its two orifices and its tacit tunnel” (“Guide,”
92).
As if engaging in a critique of his own elaborations on space and time, which emerge in his
early fiction, such as “A Guide to Berlin,” and develop throughout the entire oeuvre, Nabokov
closes his last novel Look at Harlequins! (1974) with an open-ended meditation on space
(“direction”) and time (“duration”).5 The narrator’s last love, whom he tenderly addresses as “you”
(this “you” is very reminiscent of “you” in Speak, Memory (1952), where it is intended for Vera
Nabokov), explains in almost Bergsonian terms that one should not confuse “direction and
duration,” or space and time (Harlequins!, 252). The narrator, whose life miraculously parallels that
of Nabokov, calls her explanation “an exquisite quibble” for which he is “grateful” (253). He
concludes by saying that “the notion of trying to twirl time is a trouvaille; it resembles … the neat
formula a physicist finds to keep people happy until … until the next chap snatches the chalk”
(253). The final words of Nabokov’s last novel are ironically self-reflexive in the sense that
Nabokov did think about time as a spiral in his Speak, Memory, hence twirling time. The spiral is
suggestive of a temporal pattern that, according to Nabokov, underlies his Russian, European, and
American years. At the end of Look at Harlequins!, however, he calls an attempt at configuring
time spirally – “a trouvaille” – an illumination, which remains neat, beautiful, and comfortable as
long as the one who is configuring has a chalk, which reminds us of a power to write.
What is it in the closing lines of Look at Harlequins! that Nabokov is so tenderly skeptical
about but grateful for at the same time? Syntactically the concluding paragraph of the novel does
not have closure. The last sentence simply fades away: “(mumbling comfortably, dropping off,
mumble dying away) –” (253). By leaving it open, Nabokov prefers to leave open a discussion of
time and space brought about not only in these final lines but continuously in his previous
writings. Announcing the “dying away” of a “mumble,” Nabokov allows the slipping away of
Bergson, whose terminology of time is conspicuous here, physicists, contradicted by Bergson on
issues of time, and writers who think about time in their own way. However, despite its intended
evasiveness and incompleteness, the passage strongly resonates with something important having
been understood and gained – something for which the narrator is “grateful.” The novelist narrator

5 Look at the Harlequins! New York: McGraw-Hill: 252-3.
100
Kaleidoscope 5.2, Tetyana Lyaskovets, “Approaching Nabokov with Bergson on
Time”

of Look at Harlequins! prefers to keep to himself this important glimpse of knowledge. To
approach it, one probably needs to revisit his and, in our case, Nabokov’s writings. After all,
Nabokov always insisted on looking closer and crafted his novels to stimulate our attentive
looking into details and the intricacies of his narrative patterns.
The concluding words of Nabokov’s last novel deal with time and its expression through
spatial patterning and design. In the very end of Look at Harlequins! we witness a kind of a
reconciliation of the narrator with his tragic flaw – his physical inability “to execute mentally the
about-face that would turn direction HP into direction PH” (252). The narrator treats this failure to
turn in his mind’s eye seriously and tries to warn his prospective wives about his flaw. At the end
of his life, he is informed that his problem comes from the confusion of space (“direction”) and
time (“duration”): one can reverse direction, but time is irreversible. The entire discussion of space
and time, replayed in the narrator’s mind, invokes Bergson’s language and his insistence on
keeping time and space separate. Despite this and similar evocations of Bergson, for example,
through the essay on the texture of time in Ada, Nabokov is famous for his distaste of the
abstractness of philosophy and disdain towards philosophizing in literature.6 If in his late novels
Ada and Look at Harlequins! Nabokov thinks of time in philosophical terms, with a tint of
playfulness and irony, in his autobiography Speak, Memory – a work occupying the middle of
Nabokov’s oeuvre – he instead chooses a lyrical tone to speak of time. To a large extent, the
subject and the nostalgic mood of Speak, Memory do not allow doubt or irony into Nabokov’s
meditations on time and make both Nabokov’s metaphysics and poetics of time more
approachable. To understand Nabokov’s engagement with time and space better, we need to
contextualize it in the modernist perception of time and in the ways Bergson theorized time.
One of the well-known modernistic images of time that strikes its viewer as an emblem of
conventional clock-time decomposition is the celebrated 1931 masterpiece Persistence of Memory
by Salvador Dalí. Dalí’s watch, melting over the tree, insects crawling over the watch’s face, and a
desert, all suggest a disintegration of measured, chronological time caused by one’s
consciousness. This visually memorable image of a decomposing clock time proves to be a rather
direct illustration of a complex modernistic concern with the nature of time. Bergson’s concept of
duration, which defies the limits of clock time, responded to the needs of that intellectual and
artistic delving into time better than any other philosophical theory. Given Bergson’s popularity in
the 1920s and 1930s and his strong consonance with Nabokov later, it is not accidental that
Bergson’s writings on time supplied some of the central images and themes for Nabokov’s texts.7
Among these texts, Speak, Memory is the key to our understanding of both the metaphysical and

6 Nabokov. 1969. Ada; or, Ardor: a Family Chronicle. New York: McGraw-Hill.
7 Glynn, Michael. 2007. Vladimir Nabokov: Bergsonian and Russian Formalism Influences in
his Novels. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
101
Kaleidoscope 5.2, Tetyana Lyaskovets, “Approaching Nabokov with Bergson on
Time”

aesthetical visual ways in which Nabokov constructs time by appealing to our sense of the visual
and of the bearing that time in Nabokov has on the issues of life and art.
Nabokov is a visual author who argues that a good novel is an arrangement of images
rather than ideas. “I think in images,” Nabokov says in his Strong Opinions (1974).8 In the same
group of interviews, he argues for his complete indifference towards music as opposed to visual
impressions. He says that when he attends a concert, he is able to keep attention just for a few
minutes. Then “visual impressions, reflections of hands in lacquered wood, a diligent bald spot
over a fiddle, these take over, and soon I am bored beyond measure by the motions of the
musicians” (35). Nabokov’s mind operates along the lines of seeing and visuality when he develops
and artistically manipulates images of time and personal time. Often in his prose works the
narrator’s imaginative cooperation with lived time projects his past experience onto the present
experience of the text by presenting images appealing to our sense of the visual. Speak, Memory
offers vignettes of people, interior snapshots, and landscape stills from Nabokov’s past, and the
writer synchronizes past time and present time in this particular visual way. In doing so, he looks
for patterns of “cosmic synchronization” – a ubiquitous echoing of interconnected things and
events (218). The image of “cosmic synchronization” was allegedly suggested by the author’s
“philosophical friend” Vivian Bloodmark (218). Although “Vivian Bloodmark” is an anagram of
“Vladimir Nabokov,” this friend’s articulation of time reminds us of Bergson and his idea of
duration that the philosopher famously represents as flow.9
Like many intellectuals in the 1920s and 1930s, Nabokov read and was impressed by
Bergson’s writings. In his books Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience [Time and Free
Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness] (1889), Matière et mémoire [Matter and
Memory] (1896), and L'Evolution créatrice [Creative Evolution] (1907) Bergson, who won the Nobel
Prize for literature in 1927, developed his understanding of time as duration. In these books,
Bergson defines time in terms of perception and argues that new forms are produced as the past
and the present merge. There is convincing evidence for the view that Nabokov preserved his
interest in Bergson for his entire life, since Bergsonian overtones are rather distinct, for example, in
the essay on the texture of time that Van Veen composes in Nabokov’s late novel Ada or in
Nabokov’s essay “The Art of Literature and Commonsense” (1980), to mention just a few.10
Nabokov’s conversation with Alvin Toffler in 1963 betrays the writer’s work on Speak, Memory

8 New York: McGraw-Hill.
9 Bergson. 1911. Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell. New York: Henry Holt; 1950.
Matter and Memory, trans. Nancy Margaret Paul. London: George Allen and Unwin; 1950. Time
and Free Will, trans. F. L. Pogson. London: George Allen and Unwin; 1935. The Two Sources of
Morality and Religion, trans. R. Ashley Audra and Loudesley Brereton. London: Macmillan.
10 In Lectures on Literature, ed. Fredson Bowers. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich: 371-
80.
102
Kaleidoscope 5.2, Tetyana Lyaskovets, “Approaching Nabokov with Bergson on
Time”

during the 1940s as preceded by a period of interest in Bergson. Thus the writer confesses to have
read Bergson “between the ages of 20 and 40” (Strong Opinions, 43). Not only do Bergson’s
writings on time seem to provide central images of temporality for Speak, Memory, but they also
help us to comprehend an intellectual impulse that runs through Nabokov’s highly personal
writings on time. Nabokov’s most confessional book on time, Speak, Memory, holds a dialogue
with Bergson by connecting time to consciousness and recreating time as an entity, in which the
past and the present overlap in their production and invention of the new. The preservation of the
past in new forms through remembrance and the artistic image becomes Nabokov’s project of
overcoming the finality of clock time and even death. At the same time, Speak, Memory marks a
distance that Nabokov travels from Bergson because literature is not philosophy. It has a language
of its own that privileges the materiality, suggestiveness, and figurativeness of language over
abstract philosophy. Paul Ricoeur in his famous Temps et Récit [Time and Narrative] (1984)
undertakes to show that the direct discourse of phenomenology fails to represent time. He argues
that we need the mediation of fiction to explore the nonlinearity of time. In volume three of his
book he says that “the ultimate unrepresentability of time … makes even phenomenology
continually turn to metaphors and to the language of myth … in order to talk about the upsurge
of the present or the flowing of the unitary flux of time….”11 It is the purpose of this essay to look
into Nabokov’s poetical elaboration on exciting time paradoxes posed by Bergson. To do so, we
need to locate those moments within Bergson’s conception of time that Nabokov transformed
into visually appealing images of time.
For example, Bergson’s notion that science and art access time in essentially different ways
appealed to Nabokov, despite his well-known demand for scientific precision in art. Although
L'Evolution créatrice [Creative Evolution] is not about art, Bergson cursorily identifies art as a
medium that allows one to experience – to live from within – the texture of time. Bergson sees
this texture as a constant becoming of the past into the present, which merge to produce new
forms. The language of scientific measurement has nothing to do with the lived time that artists
are able to experience at their peaks of inspiration.
To grasp why Bergson points at art as an environment and means that gives a creative
subject an access to time, we need to understand how Bergson explains the texture of time. He
does so by formulating a major difference between chronological and personal time.
Chronological time he calls “temps spatialisé” [spatialized time]. Spatialized time is the
conventional, symbolic representation of duration in words, figures, and chronology.12 The
description “spatialized” indicates our habit of substituting a graphical image of a line or clock for
real, experienced time when we measure it. By contrast, “durée” [duration] is the term that he uses

11 Chicago: University of Chicago Press: 243.
12 See chapter three of Bergson’s 1965 Duration and Simultaneity, with Reference to
Einstein’s Theory, trans. Leon Jacobson. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill.
103
Kaleidoscope 5.2, Tetyana Lyaskovets, “Approaching Nabokov with Bergson on
Time”

for personal time. According to Bergson, duration is “le temps réel” [real time] that continuously
unfolds as an uninterrupted change due to an overlapping of the past and the present in a
person’s consciousness. One can justly call it personal time because, for Bergson, “durée”
[duration] is a form of perception rather than measurement.
To give his readers a sense of duration, Bergson resorts to water imagery. One can feel a
continuous change that is “le temps réel” [real time], or “durée” [duration], as flux or flow. Unlike
spatialized time, which is “an auxiliary magnitude introduced to calculate real magnitudes,” fluid
duration is a product of our bodies and minds. To represent this duration we resort to language.
Thus Bergson draws a sharp borderline between duration, which is a real moving form of lived
time, and its graphical image, with which we conveniently operate to describe time in our
everyday life. This other form of time is represented as an arrangement of parts, such as, for
example, numbers on a clock face (Duration, 60).
Bergson says that science, intellect, and their instrument language have access only to
chronological, spatialized time. It is the chronological sequence of states that conventional clock
time gives us. But intuition and art informed by intuition allow one to experience time as duration
– a homogeneous and ever-progressing fusion of the past and the present that creates new
forms. In his L'Evolution créatrice [Creative Evolution] as well as in his later work Durée et
simultanéité [Duration and Simultaneity] (1921), especially chapter three “De la nature du temps”
[Concerning the Nature of Time], Bergson poses a problem of incongruity between the fluidity of
lived time and the symbolic language of science, philosophy, and ordinary communication. This
incongruity occurs because language reduces our understanding of time’s uninterrupted flow to a
spatialized arrangement of parts represented most often by a clock or a line. Rather than
capturing flow, language describes states and thus is inherently incapable of rendering change as
uninterrupted.
Just as the language of science and communication segments time into states and
moments, philosophy, as it exists, fails to capture transitions within time. According to Bergson,
philosophy bypasses “hyphens,” or transitions, between the measured parts of time, thus taking
away from time’s fluidity. In order to resolve this inability of scientific language to think and
render uninterrupted temporal change, Bergson calls for a philosophy that will correct it (Creative
Evolution, XV).
Bergson also points to another avenue of exploration that allows for going beyond the
conventional, numerical time of chronology. He says that poetical language and art create a
condition for time’s exploration from within. They are an environment that reveals to one, who
partakes in them, time’s uninterruptedness – the experience that Bergson calls duration. Bergson’s
references to artistic experience, which allows a man of arts to feel time’s flow, and the
philosopher’s emphasis on an overarching principle of creativity – vital impetus that runs through
evolution and causes change – must have struck a chord with Nabokov.
104
Kaleidoscope 5.2, Tetyana Lyaskovets, “Approaching Nabokov with Bergson on
Time”

Although in L'Evolution créatrice [Creative Evolution] Bergson was not concerned with art
but rather with evolutionary creativity, he mentions that aesthetic experience permits a rear
glimpse into real, homogeneous time that in our ordinary existence, controlled by intellect, falls
apart into a succession of moments. What Bergson says is that although an ordinary man lives in
time – or endures – he neither notices time’s true homogeneous structure nor possesses
appropriate means to depict this unity of the past and the present that makes up time. Through
“sympathie” [sympathy] – an act of identification with the object of art – an artist glimpses time’s
flow: he becomes able to bind together what is conventionally perceived as bits and pieces of
experience – moments and snapshots within clock time – into one coherent flow of sensations.
This homogeneous flow of fused sensations is time that otherwise flickers in the dark dulled by
intellect and that reveals itself only to the intuition of a creating subject. In L'Evolution créatrice
[Creative Evolution] Bergson says that intellect

Goes all round life, taking from outside the greatest possible number of views of it, drawing it
into itself instead of entering into it. But it is to the very inwardness of life that intuition leads
us.
That an effort of this kind is not impossible, is proved by the existence in man of an aesthetic
faculty along with normal perception. Our eye perceives the features of the living being, merely
as assembled, not as mutually organized. The intention of life, the simple movement that runs
through the lines, that binds them together and gives them significance, escapes it. This
intention is what the artist tries to regain, in placing himself back within the object by a kind of
a sympathy, in breaking down, by an effort of intuition, the barrier that space puts up between
him and his model. (176-7)

This rather figuratively framed passage by Bergson begins with an evocation of intellect that,
according to the philosopher, translates real time and experience into categories of spatialized,
dissected time. Intellect, with help of language, shapes time into a discrete succession of
individually distinct parts that we see as moments, minutes, or years. This intellectualized image of
time allows one to measure time but fails to capture the transitions and overlapping of life’s
multiple views that merge and constitute time’s uninterrupted flow. In this passage, the image of a
line evokes poetic language, which Bergson charges with a potential to represent time. The phrase
“the intention of life, the simple movement that runs through the lines, that binds them together”
figuratively formulates the unity and coherence of life and time. The same image of a line,
however, also suggests the linearity of conventional, spatialized time that fails to capture time’s
flow. By playing with these two opposite meanings of the word “line,” Bergson reminds us of a
difficulty that an artist faces because he has to employ an inadequate means – language – to
access time. In his 1932 work, Les Deux Sources de la Morale et de la Religion [The Two Sources
of Morality and Religion], the philosopher returns to the topic of language by saying that the
writer “will attempt to realize unrealizable” since language, unlike speech, is “the product of
105
Kaleidoscope 5.2, Tetyana Lyaskovets, “Approaching Nabokov with Bergson on
Time”

custom” (Two Sources, 217-8). Under these circumstances, “how can these elements [the writer’s
words], each unique of its kind, be made to coincide with words already expressing things?” asks
Bergson (218). It seems to be intuition that helps him to resolve the predicament created by
intellect and language. Intuition, unlike intellect, and an artist equipped with intuition due to an
effort that she undertakes – “a kind of sympathy” – provide an access to “the very inwardness of
life” (Creative Evolution, 49). Intuition gives us a glimpse – an eluding sensation of flowing time –
that expands the boundaries set by intellect (49). By an act of conscious identification with the
object of art, argues Bergson, an artist places himself within it and regains an ability to perceive
life in its uninterruptedness. In The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, Bergson will go further
and articulate this identification as “love” (220). Given this love, which is “creative energy” (220), an
artist becomes capable of perceiving time as a progression of multiple intertwining experiences.
Nabokov translates this fusion of experiences into his “cosmic synchronization” (Speak, Memory,
218).
Bergson sees in artistic experience a way to trick the intellect and to penetrate time’s texture
constituted by an unfolding fusion of sensations. This penetration happens when the artist
emotionally embraces the object of his art. Speak, Memory, a story of young Vladimir Nabokov
growing into a writer, discusses a similar effort of sympathy paralleled by immersing into time,
“entering into it,” as Bergson would have put it (Creative Evolution, 176). For the author of Speak,
Memory, chronological clock time collapses and gives way to another kind of temporality, that
Nabokov calls “timelessness,” when the poet identifies with objects around him through love and
gratitude that envelop everything perceived by the artist to become their shared essence:

I confess I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to
superimpose one part of the pattern upon another. Let visitors trip. And the highest enjoyment
of timelessness – in a landscape selected at random – is when I stand among rare butterflies
and their food plants. This is ecstasy, and behind the ecstasy is something else, which is hard to
explain. It is like a momentary vacuum into which rushes all that I love. A sense of oneness with
sun and stone. A thrill of gratitude to whom it may concern – to the contrapuntal genius of
human fate or to tender ghosts humoring a lucky mortal. (139)

This synchronization of patterns of the past and the present, which Nabokov calls
“timelessness,” reminds us of Bergson’s duration and its quality to fuse the past with the present.
Almost in the middle of the autobiography, Nabokov makes a personal statement and then
immediately wraps this important truth into the metaphor of a carpet. The image of a magic
carpet becomes more understandable if we remember that Speak, Memory begins with an
invocation of a time prison, whose constraints the narrator searches to escape with the help of his
creative mind. He looks for ways to regain time as a personal entity in order to travel back and
forth in it. In chapter six of Speak, Memory, time’s desired reversibility is humorously suggested by
a magic carpet that the writer folds in order to make his past contemporaneous with his present
106
Kaleidoscope 5.2, Tetyana Lyaskovets, “Approaching Nabokov with Bergson on
Time”

(“to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another”). What Nabokov says here is that
although we are not able to escape time’s irreversible flow, we can regain time spiritually when
falling into a state of ecstasy – “a momentary vacuum into which rushes all that” the creative
subject loves. Nabokov collapses temporal and emotional characteristics within the ecstatic
experience into “a sense of oneness with sun and stone” and says that this kind of immersion into
time through sympathy, for him, becomes possible when he hunts butterflies or writes. In chapter
eleven, which tells the story of young Nabokov composing his first poem, we again come across a
portrayal of suspended time that Nabokov describes in terms of a “trance” (222). He coins a poetic
image – “my private mist” (223) – to describe this fluid private time that he experiences
simultaneously with what he calls later, in chapter fifteen, “my emotion, my mortal love” (297).
Nabokov says that immersion into this experience, which is temporal and emotional at the same
time, defies clock time and allows the poet to travel through space and time and easily change
sceneries from France to Germany and then to the United States and back to Russia of his
childhood:

So little did ordinary measures of existence mean in that state that I would not have been
surprised to come out of its tunnel right into the park of Versailles, or the Tiergarten, or
Sequoia National Forest; and, inversely, when the old trance occurs nowadays, I am quite
prepared to find myself, when I awaken from it, high up in a certain tree, above the dappled
bench of my childhood, my belly pressed against a thick, comfortable branch and one arm
hanging down among the leaves upon which the shadows of other leaves move. (223)

What the writer calls here “ordinary measures of existence” is conventional chronological
time. The problem with conventional time is that it fails to represent the temporality gained
through intense sympathy, love, and artistic experience of composing. For Nabokov, this felt time
allows for virtual trips beyond limited, ordinary time, which he describes as a prison. Although one
cannot escape time, as much as one would wish, in real life, which is too limited for that escape,
one can transcend its limits and make the past contemporaneous with the present through
imagination and art endowed with intense emotion. Nabokov formulates this emotion in terms of
love and gratitude. Nabokov’s portrayal of time as sympathy collapsing the past and the present
allows us to contextualize his search for time’s nature in Bergson’s idea of duration.
Although neither Bergson nor Nabokov limits his figuration of time to personal experience,
Nabokov identifies with Bergson when he discusses time in terms of consciousness. Due to
consciousness that preserves the past in a form of memories, our past always remains contained
within our present. In his L'Evolution créatrice [Creative Evolution], Bergson says that time shares
with consciousness “a continuity of change, preservation of the past in the present” (23), which he
calls duration. Bergson begins chapter three “De la nature du temps” [“Concerning the Nature of
Time”] of his later work Durée et simultanéité [Duration and Simultaneity] by reminding his
readers that “there is no doubt that for us time is at first identical with the continuity of our inner
107