Chronophilia: Nabokov and the Time of Desire

Hagglund, Martin.

New Literary History, Volume 37, Number 2, Spring 2006, pp. 447-467 (Article) Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: 10.1353/nlh.2006.0036

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Chronophilia: Nabokov and the Time of Desire

Martin Hgglund

o inscribe something is first of all an act of memory. Regardless of what, to whom, or why I write, my words become traces of the past at the very moment when they are imprinted. Accordingly, writing has a capacity to store historical data, to document and record what has taken place. By inscribing what happens on a particular occasion, I provide myself with a supplement that can retain details even if I forget them. I thus increase my chances of recalling past eventsof holding on to my own lifebut by the same token I mark a precarious temporality. Without the thought of a reader to come (whether myself or someone else), there would be no reason for me to write. The addressed future, however, is essentially perilous. When someone reads my text I may already be dead, or the significance of my words may no longer be the same. Moreover, the inscriptions themselves always risk being erased. Thus, if writing can counter oblivion, it simultaneously reveals a latent threat. Writing would be superfluous for an immortal being, who could never experience the fear of forgetting. Conversely, the need to write (if only a memo or a mental note) stems from the temporal finitude of everything that happens. My act of inscribing something already indicates that I may forget it. Writing thus testifies to my dependence on that which is exterior to me.1 Even my own thoughts disappear from me at the moment they occur and must be imprinted as traces in their very event. The texts of Vladimir Nabokov strongly reinforce the desire to keep what can be taken away, to remember what can be forgotten. Many of Nabokovs novels are fictive memoirs where the protagonists narrate their own lives. I will track how such writing is haunted by temporal finitude. A good place to begin is Nabokovs own autobiography Speak, Memory. Here, Nabokov ascribes a tremendous power to his proper consciousness and emphasizes his wakeful ability to recreate the past. This posture may appear to confirm Nabokovs notorious hubris, but such a reproach disregards the innate risks of Nabokovs self-assurance. The celebrated consciousness in Speak, Memory is not an idealized entity, but one hyNew Literary History, 2006, 37: 447467

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persensitive to the temporality of its own existence. The section on the authors insomnia is an instructive example. Unlike most people who suffer from insomnia, sleep is for Nabokov not to be coveted. On the contrary, the prospect of dozing off is a humiliating mental torture and no matter how great my weariness, the wrench of parting with consciousness is unspeakably repulsive to me.2 There is of course no reason to doubt that Nabokov really had difficulty sleeping. But a more interesting task is to consider how this theme figures in his text. Sleep is a classic synecdoche for death, which Nabokov reinforces through a simile of Somnus as a black-masked headsman binding me to the block (SM 85). Thus, Nabokovs refusal to abandon himself to the night answers to his firm determination not to let events fall into oblivion. Nabokovs battle is impossible to win. No consciousness would be able to sustain itself without interruptions for sleep, and Nabokov admits that the strain and drain of composition (SM 85) sometimes forces him to take sleeping pills in order to gather strength. Analogously, even the most vigilant mind is susceptible to forgetting. Nabokov mobilizes his power of remembrance against the threat of oblivion, but everything he wants to remember was transient from the beginning.3 We can thus discern how the same precarious temporality conditions the relation to the present. In a discreet but important episode, Nabokov recounts how his mother sought to apprehend the various time marks distributed throughout our country place (SM 33). This heedfulness, Nabokov explains, was the legacy his mother left to him. When they went walking together, she would pinpoint some cherished detail and in conspiratorial tones say Vot zapomni: a phrase Nabokov translates to the imperative now remember. As we shall see, this scene is reenacted throughout Nabokovs writings and indicates a fundamental trait of his chronophobia, to adopt a suggestive term from Speak, Memory. The main symptom of chronophobia is a sentience of the imminent risk of loss and a concomitant desire to imprint the memory of what happens. In spite of what Nabokov sometimes claims, chronophobia does not stem from a metaphysical desire to escape the prison of time (SM 18). On the contrary, I will argue that chronophobia and chronophilia are two aspects of the same condition. It is precisely because one desires temporal phenomena (chronophilia) that one fears losing them (chronophobia). The mortal beloved is necessarily marked by its possible disappearance, which for Nabokov is unacceptable and yet essential. Such a contradiction is irresolvable, but that is the point. Chronophobia cannot be cured, since what one wants to hold on towhat one wants to guard and keepis constituted by the fact that it will be lost. Chronophobia is thus intrinsic to chronophilia. Without the chronophobic apprehension that the moment is passing away, there would be no chronophilic desire to hold onto it.

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However, Nabokov scholarship is dominated by the thesis that his writing is driven by a desire to transcend the condition of time. The most influential proponent for this view is Brian Boyd, who in a number of books has argued that Nabokov aspires towards the full freedom of timelessness, consciousness without the degradation of loss.4 According to Boyd, the possibility of such a life beyond death is the pivotal concern in Nabokovs oeuvre. Boyd is aware that Nabokov and his protagonists are resolute chronophiles who treasure their memories and temporal lives. But this does not prevent Boyd from arguing that Nabokov regards finite and time-bound consciousness as a prison that he hopes to transcend in death.5 Boyds reconstruction of Nabokovs metaphysics hinges on the assumption that these two positions are compatible. For Boyds system to work, the desire to retain temporal experience must be compatible with the desire for immortality. Thus, what Boyd describes as Nabokovs devotion to the precision of perception, the glory of consciousness in its apprehension of the things in the world must be compatible with the desire for a supreme negation of time and the restrictions it places on consciousness (NA 62, 65). Boyd tries to solve the equation by understanding immortal consciousness as an unlimited access to the personal past of mortal consciousness. While Boyd reinforces that time would not exist for such an ideal consciousness, he nevertheless describes it as a consciousness to which the past is directly accessible and which can endlessly reinvestigate it to discover new harmonies and designs (NA 6465). Boyd does not explain how a timeless consciousness could have a concept of the past or how it would be able to distinguish memories in the first place, since this requires discrimination between different times. Furthermore, a timeless consciousness could never reinvestigate or discover anything, since these activities require temporality. Thus, the full freedom of timelessness could never allow us to enjoy endlessly the riches of time (NA 65). These contradictory claims dissimulate that the riches of time could not be treasured or even comprehended by a timeless consciousness. It is in principle impossible to enjoy the riches of time forever, since temporal experience, by definition, cannot last. Moreover, Boyds argument presupposes that time is ultimately inessential for the constitution of an event. According to Boyd, the past is inaccessible because of our cognitive limitations, not because the events themselves were temporal and irrevocably passed away.6 Only by thus denying the ontological reality of time can Boyd project an ideal realm in which events remain intact and ready to be inspected by a timeless consciousness that would bring to light endless patterns in an always available past (NA 65). For this argument to work, it must be possible to extract the essence of an experience from the singular body that gave rise to it and from the condition of temporality that necessarily marks

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it. But even if such an operation were possible, it would eliminate the particularity of experience that Nabokov wants to keep. The chronophilic desire to remember the finite is not compatible with the metaphysical desire to transcend finitude as such. Thus, I will argue that the logic of chronophilia in Nabokovs writing undercuts the metaphysics that Boyd ascribes to him. Finitude is not a degraded state of being that can be opposed to a full life beyond death. Rather, chronophilia makes it clear that what is desired is temporal in its very essence. This gives rise to the incurable chronophobia at the heart of chronophilia. Whatever is desirable cannot be dissociated from the undesirable fact that it will be lost. There is no way out of this double bind because the threat of loss is not extrinsic to what is desired, but intrinsic to its being as such. Consider Nabokovs novel Pale Fire, where a long autobiographical poem by the character John Shade broaches the question of death and immortality. The same poem reverberates in Nabokovs later novel Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle, where the lovers Van and Ada Veen translate Shade into Russian. Shades narrative poem in Pale Fire stages the internal contradiction of mortal love. In an attempt to cure his fear of death, Shade consults an Institute of Preparation for the Hereafter. As is clear from Shades reasoning, however, immortal life cannot answer to what he desires, namely, to keep the traits of his finite life. Shade frankly declares that he will turn down eternity unless / The melancholy and the tenderness / Of Mortal life; the passion and the pain . . . Are found in Heaven by the newlydead / Stored in its stronghold through the years.7 Shades demand is incompatible with itself, since immortality would not be immortality if it preserved the mortal as mortal. Consequently, if one loves the mortal as mortal there cannot be any transcendental consolation for its loss, since even if there were an immortal life it would annul the essence of what one loves. In a conversation about Shades poem towards the end of Ada, Van makes precisely this point:
Van pointed out that here was the rubone is free to imagine any type of hereafter, of course: the generalized paradise promised by Oriental prophets and poets, or an individual combination; but the work of fancy is handicappedto a quite hopeless extentby a logical ban: you cannot bring your friends alongor your enemies for that matterto the party. The transposition of all our remembered relationships into an Elysian life inevitably turns it into a second-rate continuation of our marvellous mortality.8

Vans logic elucidates why chronophilia makes chronophobia both inevitable and incurable. Like Nabokov in Speak, Memory and John Shade in Pale Fire, Van and Ada are thoroughly devoted to their finite lives and fragile memories. But for the same reason, they are haunted by the

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horror of dying. Van figures this horror as the wrench of relinquishing forever ones memories, which is intrinsically linked to the desire for accumulating again and again the riches of consciousness that will be snatched away (A 457). Hence, the chronophobic fear of death is caused by the chronophilic love of what will perish. This means that there is not even theoretically any possibility of ever escaping the problem of finitude. The desire to hold onto ephemeral details and temporal events is incompatible with the desire for an eternity beyond the pain and passion of our marvellous mortality. Such valuation of mortal life undermines the very idea that immortality is desirable, and thus answers to Shades declaration that he will turn down eternity unless it retains the characteristics of his mortal life.9 Affirming the mortal does not entail accepting death. On the contrary, to affirm the mortal is to oppose death, to resist and defer it for as long as possible. But since the mortal is essentially linked to death, it is internally bound to what it opposes. This is why there can be no chronophilia without chronophobia. In the stanza where Shade makes the chronophilic declaration that he will turn down eternity, he also underlines the chronophobic sentience of finitude: we die every day; oblivion thrives / Not on dry thighbones but on blood-ripe lives (A 44). These lines epitomize how death and forgetting are innate to life. This insight drives Nabokovs autobiographic protagonists. They seek to record time because they are hypersensitive to the threat of oblivion. Nabokovs first great work, The Gift, provides an instructive example. This novel was originally written in Russian in the 1930s, during Nabokovs exile in Germany and France. Berlins Russian migr culture provides the backdrop for a chronicle of the young author Fyodors life between 1926 and 1929. The chronicle turns out to have been a search for lost time, when in the last chapter Fyodor decides to write the book we are about to finish. It is intended as a declaration of love for his girlfriend, Zina, who finally has come to illuminate Fyodors life after a number of complications have prevented them from meeting. The inception of The Gift testifies to Fyodors chronophilia and chronophobia. Fyodor conceives the idea of writing the book when he spends a couple of early summer days sunbathing in the Grnewald. Pursuing memories of recent years, he is seized by a panicky desire to prevent these past events from fading indefinitely.10 This desire to keep what can be lost is the impetus for Fyodors decision to write an autobiography and is inscribed in the title of the book. The gift designates Fyodors life (and especially his relationship with Zina) but also Fyodors literary talent. This other gift will result in the book we are reading and includes some of Fyodors preliminary effortsamong them a biography of his father and commemorative love poems to Zina after their nightly meet-

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ings. The common feature concerns the act of writing as an endeavor to remember, which is reinforced when at the end of the novel Fyodor tells Zina about his idea to write an autobiography. The Gift shall commemorate the history of their love, Fyodor promises. In making this pledge, he must figure the presence of the promise as a memory for the future. One day we shall recall all this, Fyodor reflects on the last page of the book, as he and Zina leave a restaurant and wander out into the summer night. This final scene is a version of what Fyodor calls future retrospection (G 354), the anticipation of a memory to come. Such future retrospection marks the precarious temporality of affirming the gift of life. Both the gift and its affirmation are threatened from within by their finitude. The novels happy ending stages this panicky desire when Fyodor promises to narrate his life. This narration must inscribe the past and the present with regard to the future, which constitutes both the possibility of remembering and the risk of forgetting.11 A parallel example is Nabokovs short story The Admiralty Spire.12 Here the narrator recalls his first love, one distant summer when the gramophones played Russian tsyganskie romansy: a kind of pseudo-gypsy, sentimental music. The mood of the music, with its invocations of bygone landscapes and bittersweet memories, would seem suitable for the one who is writing in retrospect. But the young couple already apprehend their current happiness in the same spirit. The sense of approaching lossof how their tangible circumstances at any time can be taken awayleads them to practice nostalgia and approach the present as if in retrospect, keeping its happening as a beloved memory. Examples of this motif (now remember) are numerous in Nabokovs oeuvre and would each merit a lengthy treatment. However, in the following I want to focus on Ada, which Nabokov regarded as his crowning achievement. Here we find the most profound treatment of the necessary entanglement between chronophobia and chronophilia. The frame of the novel is that Van and Ada are writing the story of their life-long love, a work begun in 1957 and ended sometime during 1967, when Ada is ninety-five and Van ninety-seven. The book has been interrupted, rather than finished, and the text we read is a posthumously published manuscript. Although the manuscript does not relate exactly when Van and Ada died or who died before the other, an editorial note asserts that neither one of them is still alive at the time of publication. The text itself vibrates with life as Van and Ada indulge in a striking gotisme deux. Constituting what Ada calls a super-imperial couple (A 60), they do not hesitate to emphasize their incomparable love. This arrogance has been a source of disapproval even among inveterate Nabokophiles, and it is true that vain Van Veen (one of his many alliterations) at times becomes quite an intolerable narrator. Nonetheless,

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it would be a mistake to dismiss Vans and Adas vainglorious attitude as a mere eccentricity. Rather, the egotistic desire of their relationship is an emphatic version of the perilous self-assurance in Speak, Memory. By writing an autobiography, Van and Ada commit themselves to remembering their love. But as we shall see, the affirmation of memory underscores the threat of forgetting. The first lines of the novel reconfigure the first lines in Tolstoys Anna Karenina. In Nabokov, it is unhappy families that are all alike, while happy families are happy each in their own special way. This inversion of Tolstoys premise permeates the book. As in so many nineteenth-century novels, the romance of Van and Ada is set against a dark family secret. Officially, they are cousins, but in fact they are brother and sister, due to a confidential love affair they unravel during their first summer together. At that time, Ada is twelve years old and Van fourteen, but neither their age nor the incest taboo can soften their passion. On the contrary, the young siblings soon become lovers in every sense of the word. That their forbidden love does not lead to a predestined tragedy, but lives on for more than eighty years, is a cunning demonstration of the happy family. Nevertheless, there are dissonances in Vans and Adas wellorchestrated pretensions. Almost half the memoir is devoted to their first two summers together (1884 and 1888). In between only a few fleeting meetings take place, and after the second summer another four years pass before they meet again. They spend a winter together in 1892, and barely a week in 1905. Not until 1922 are they reunited to live together for the rest of their lives. As Michael Wood has argued, these partings point to a persistent source of worry in Ada. Love is depicted as a prodigious possibility, but at the same time there is trepidation in the very realization of happiness. In a trenchant reading, Wood suggests that this is due to an interdependence of love and loss. Such interdependence unsettles any definite assurance because happiness is intelligible only under threat; intelligible only as its own threat.13 This observation is similar to a figure elaborated by Jacques Derrida in his reading of Romeo and Juliet, which explores the force of tragedy as the force of what he calls contretemps. With this term, Derrida designates the ever-recurrent possibility of accidents, typically figured as an unfortunate timing or aleatory event that shatters the prospect of lasting love. If these tragic contretemps traditionally have been understood as something exterior and secondary that supervenes upon an ideal love, Derrida argues that the force of contretemps is intrinsic to every relation. A given promise may be broken and the anticipated future an occasion of mourning. Love is threatened from within by a constitutive finitude.14 Finitude leaves its mark on both levels of Ada, as the novel divides into two narratives. The first of these spans from 1884 to 1922, recounting

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the intricate love story of Ada and Van. Despite a number of contretemps, the story may seem to refute a tragic sense of love by letting Van and Ada emerge from their partings to reunite and live happily ever after. Nabokovs story does not end there, however, since Van and Ada also appear as the aged writers of the book we are reading. Thus, any happy ending is shown to be essentially compromised by finitude. In the last part of Ada, our super-imperial lovers are trying to complete their autobiography without knowing how to end or when to stop revising the manuscript. After having deferred death for more than ninety years, they are still attempting to prolong their life and fortify their power of remembrance. Hence, the perils of their experience are intensified. We find them worrying about who will die first and leave the other in solitary mourning. Van and Ada have managed to survive almost all the classical contretemps of a great romance, but death cannot be avoided, only delayed. The closing pages of the novel display defiant strategies that tryand failto cope with the inevitable contretemps of finitude. One of Nabokovs most ingenious moves is to stage the ten-year period of writing (19571967) parallel with the story running from 1884 to 1922. By way of interpolated parentheses, we get to witness Van and Ada recollecting their past. Van is the main signatory of the text, but Ada takes over from time to time. Both of them interrupt the progressing narrative by inserting additional notes or comments. The desire to keep as much as possible thus turns out to be a drama in itself. The narrators moods vary considerably, ranging from exorbitant self-confidence to elegiac intonations and nervous arrogance. These emotional shifts are partly due to their love story being perforated with partings, partly to the depicted young lovers being so distant in time, but also to Van and Ada as writers being marked by impending death. Telling takes time, and we are not allowed to forget the irrefutable process of aging. On the contrary, it breaches the act of narration. For example, an enchanted episode in the first half of the novel is disrupted by an inserted marginal comment that might be Vans last words and that stages a transition from 1888 to 1967. We are here displaced from a sex-drenched summer scenario where Van and Ada are teenagers to a comment from Van when he is reading the proofs and pointing out that he is sick, that he writes badly and can die at any moment, in a note that ends with an instruction to the editor of the book: Insert (A 174). Such temporal displacement is always latent in the text, not only because the protagonists are shadowed by their writing selves, but also because of an irreducible risk at the heart of love. Even in the most brazenly blissful moments, there is an apprehension of possible mourning. In Nabokovs syntax, every affirmation of love is haunted by its opposite. Within the space of single sentences contrary categories clash:

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passion/pain, beau/beast, tenderness/torture, happiness/helplessness. And in a beautiful, entangled phrase Van describes how the sight of Adas twelve-year-old hands gave rise to agonies of unresolvable adoration (A 85). Vans adoration here signifies an irrevocable emotion; it is unresolvable in the sense that it cannot be dissolved. At the same time, even the seemingly perpetual bond of love can always be broken and is thus characterized by an unresolvable contradiction that permeates Vans adoration with symptomatic agonies. Almost four hundred pages later, the same word reappears concerning Vans aging: physical despair pervaded his unresolvable being (A 448). We can discern the common denotation. Vans being is unresolvable because his resistance to its approaching death yields a conflict that cannot be resolved. That what is loved will disappear is unacceptable but nonetheless inevitable, intrinsic to its very essence. Ada enacts this unresolvable problem. We should here consider an important scene in the summer of 1884, which recalls the scene in Speak, Memory where Nabokovs mother taught him to remember time marks at their country place. Having recently fallen in love, Van and Ada undertake an excursion in the resplendent landscape that surrounds the family estate, Ardis Hall. With amorous attention, they try to figure out where and when they might have seen each other for the first time. They compare their travel itineraries from childhood in a playful exchange of memories. The critical implication is marked by a remark of Adas:
But this, exclaimed Ada, is certain, this is reality, this is pure factthis forest, this moss, your hand, the ladybird on my leg, this cannot be taken away, can it? (it will, it was). This has all come together here, no matter how the paths twisted, and fooled each other, and got fouled up, they inevitably met here! (A 12324)

Vans and Adas interpolated parentheses are usually identified through an appended description, such as Adas note or late interpolation. It is significant that the above inserted comment is exempted from this practice. It would be easy to read the stealthy it will be taken away, it was taken away, as a belated insight signed by the aged couple. But such a reading disregards the pivotal part that these four wordsit will, it wasplay on both levels of the memoir. Already at the moment of its enunciation, Adas question is shadowed by the possibility of loss. Even her emphatic This reinforces the flight of time. Repeated seven times, it marks temporal displacement in the very act of trying to mitigate it. Adas deictic gesture answers to the chronophilic and chronophobic injunction now remember. Every cherished event is threatened by an imminent risk of forgetting. This is why Van and Ada promise each other to hold on to what happens. As Van describes it, their love gives rise to a complex system of those subtle bridges that the senses traverse . . .

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between membrane and brain, and which always was and is a form of memory, even at the moment of its perception (A 174, my emphasis). The passage quoted above is a clear example of why perception is always already a form of memory. Adas emphatic This, while seemingly pinpointing a pure presence, is an act of memorization through which she tries to imprint details before they disappear. By retaining the event as this particular event, Ada emphasizes a double temporality. She turns towards both what is no longer and what is not yet, since the retention of the event preserves it as a memory for the future. Such double temporality is doubled once again when the scene is inscribed in the autobiography. On the one hand, Van and Ada turn backwards in time by recounting past events. On the other hand, they turn forwards in time by addressing readers to come, including their future selves. Both their experience and their writing are thus haunted by the refrain it will be taken away, it was taken away. The perilous implications of this refrain are reinforced by Vans and Adas decision to publish the book posthumously. Van and Ada hold on to their memories, but their desire to keep them is concomitant with the awareness that every detail will be lost for them. Vans and Adas chronophilic passion for relating calendar dates is significant here. Throughout the novel, they keep track of the interrelation between certain days, weeks, months, and years, delimiting special periods of life and helping each other to remember their mutual history. Dates are congenial markers because they measure the passage of time and offer points of comparison, but also because they provide the possibility to label the current day for future retrospection. As each date implies its own recurrence the following year, there is a chain of memories where each link both guards itself and remains open towards what is to come. The autobiographical project is thus prefigured in Vans and Adas passionate archiving of dates. At one place, these dates are described as chronographies (A 88). Such spatialization of time is highly significant throughout the book. Right before Adas remark cited above (this cannot be taken away, can it?), Van recounts how he on the same summer day, while carefully matching his memories with Adas, was confronted with questions that would haunt him for the rest of his life:
[A]s Van casually directed the searchlight of backthought into that maze of the past where the mirror-lined narrow paths not only took different turns, but used different levels (as a mule-drawn cart passes under the arch of a viaduct along which a motor skims by), he found himself tackling, in still vague and idle fashion, the science that was to obsess his mature yearsproblems of space and time, space versus time, time-twisted space, space as time, time as spaceand space breaking away from time in the final tragic triumph of human cogitation: I am because I die.(A 123)

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Vans obsession with space and timealong with his striking revision of Descartess dictumis crucial for the entire novel. But given Vans allusion to the science that was to obsess his mature years, the passage above should primarily be read against his philosophical treatise The Texture of Time. This treatise occupies the fourth part of Ada and is intertwined with a narrative of Vans journey (by car) from the Dolomites to Switzerland. We are situated in the middle of July 1922, when Van is on his way to a hotel where he will meet Ada for the first time in seventeen years. During his journey, Van composes the treatise we are reading. It is a measure of its pivotal status that Nabokov had first planned to use its titleThe Texture of Timefor the novel itself. Nonetheless, in approaching The Texture of Time we need to be armed with critical vigilance. On one level, the treatise denies that time and space are interdependent. Van repeatedly maintains his search for a Pure Time that would be completely separate from space. On closer inspection, however, these assertions do not answer to the logic of Vans writing. As in the rest of the memoir, there is a necessary coimplication of time and space, which is accentuated by Vans stylistic ingenuity and subverts his philosophical claims. We thus come to a crossroads in our reading. All of Vans metaphorsincluding the title of his treatisedescribe time in spatial terms and thus contradict his notion of Pure Time. A sympathetic reader may try to explain away this circumstance by arguing that what Van calls pure time is something immediately given, an unmediated experience that is incompatible with the spatialization intrinsic to language. From such a perspective, pure time is an interior quality that is dispersed when translated to external, quantitative categories. To measure time would be to distort its proper essence, to discriminate separate phases in what is originally an indivisible unity. A number of Vans formulations seem to invite such a reading, but in fact the idea of immediacy is undermined by his writing. The following passage is an instructive example:
What nudged, what comforted me, a few minutes ago at the stop of a thought? Yes. Maybe the only thing that hints at a sense of Time is rhythm; not the recurrent beats of the rhythm but the gap between two such beats, the gray gap between black beats: the Tender Interval. The regular throb itself merely brings back the miserable idea of measurement, but in between, something like true Time lurks. How can I extract it from its soft hollow? The rhythm should be neither too slow nor too fast. One beat per minute is already far beyond my sense of succession and five oscillations per second make a hopeless blur. The ample rhythm causes Time to dissolve, the rapid one crowds it out. Give me, say, three seconds, then I can do both: perceive the rhythm and probe the interval. A hollow, did I say? A dim pit? But that is only Space, the comedy villain, returning by the back door with the pendulum he peddles, while I grope for the meaning of Time. What I endeavor to grasp is precisely the Time that Space helps me

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to measure, and no wonder I fail to grasp Time, since knowledge-gaining itself takes time. (A 421)

Here, Vans inquiry is guided by one of his metaphysical ideas: that the essence of time is an indivisible presence. But when examined, the idea turns against itself. Van aims at a pure interval that would harbour true time, but he soon realizes that the interval only comes into being through a distended temporality. The interval cannot be a pure presence. On the contrary, it divides every moment in its very becoming. Vans argument is thus haunted by minutes, seconds and oscillations within seconds, despite his attempt to debase measurement as a miserable idea. Vans philosophical ambition is to elucidate experience at its most immediate, but what he discovers is that there can be no presence in itself. The incessant division of time becomes particularly evident when Van applies a method he calls Deliberate Presence. Deliberate presence consists in directing the energy of thought towards what is happening right now. Van describes it as follows: To give myself time to time Time I must move my mind in the direction opposite to that in which I am moving, as one does when one is driving past a long row of poplars and wishes to isolate and stop one of them, thus making the green blur reveal and offer, yes, offer, its every leaf(A 31). Vans focus on the present demonstrates that there cannot be an immediate presence. Even if Van brought the car to a halt, he would still be driven towards the future. Consequently, every momentlike every detail in the fleeting landscapecan only appear as past. Temporality divides not only what appears for the subject, but also the self-awareness of the subject itself. Temporal division is here marked by an inherent delay in the reflexive act of giving oneself time to time Time. The interval separates the present from itself in its very event, and without such discrimination nothing could ever be distinguished. A page further on Van continues in the same vein:
Since the Present is but an imaginary point without an awareness of the immediate past, it is necessary to define that awareness. Not for the first time will Space intrude if I say that what we are aware of as Present is the constant building up of the Past, its smoothly and relentlessly rising level. How meager! How magic! (A 432)

Here, Van concedes that spatiality is intrinsic to the experience of time. The purported presence is always already becoming past and could never be experienced without spatial inscriptions, which can remain from one moment to another and thus detain the relentless disappearance of time. Vans desire to retain evanescent moments is thus not compatible with the desire for an immutable presence. Rather, it is concerned with spatializing time in order to counter its inexorable disappearance. The

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narrative of the treatise archives temporal events in spatial signs. The logic of the expositiondriven by Vans desire to keep as much as possibleundermines the purported thesis of the text. A similar complication can be tracked in Vans discussion of the future in The Texture of Time. Van describes the treatise as a Work-in-Progress (A 439) and openly addresses the dawning desk of the still-absent reader (A 420). Nonetheless, he makes several attempts to deny that the future is a valid temporal category. Perhaps this can be ascribed to a psychological cause. As Van is writing the treatise, he is on his way to meet Ada and he is palpably nervous about meeting her after seventeen years. He himself says that the purpose of his philosophical speculations is to keep him from brooding over their anticipated reunion. In any case, Vans line of reasoning encounters severe problems. His proclaimed stance is that expectations or fears of the future are inessential phenomena for a proper understanding of time. However, when Van qualifies his argument he pursues a completely different thesis: that the future is not predetermined. His simple point is that coming events do not yet exist. This argument does not refute the future as a temporal category, but rather inheres in its definition. Accordingly, we get to witness yet another U-turn in the treatise. What was supposed to be negated is instead emphatically affirmed:
The unknown, the not yet experienced and the unexpected, all the glorious x intersections, are the inherent parts of human life. The determinate scheme by stripping the sunrise of its surprise would erase all sunrays. (A 441)

The relation to the future is here asserted as a necessary condition. Despite Vans overt claims, this insight is at work in his argument from the beginning. Van has no qualms about appropriating a concept of the past, while he attempts to denounce what he calls the false third panel in the triptych of time. However, it is impossible to accept a concept of the past and deny a concept of the future, since the two concepts are interdependent. That something is past means that it has been overtaken by a future. Inversely, anticipations of the future are anticipations of a past to come. Whatever happens will have been in a future anterior that marks the becoming of every event. Although the temporality of the future anterior operates throughout the novel, one scene in particular captures it with striking precision. The scene in question is triggered by a photograph that portrays Van and Ada as young relatives in the summer of 1884. In a stylized setting, they pose for the family photographer. The occasion turns out to be memorable indeed:

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Van stood inclining his head above her and looked, unseeing, at the opened book. In full, deliberate consciousness, at the moment of the hooded click, he bunched the recent past with the imminent future and thought to himself that this would remain an objective perception of the real present and that he must remember the flavor, the flash, the flesh of the present (as he, indeed, remembered it half a dozen years laterand now, in the second half of the next century). (A 316)

Van seeks to capture himself in the photographic moment precisely because even his most immediate experience is constituted by temporal difference. His very act of perceiving is divided between the recent past and the imminent future. There is no self-presence that can ground the passage between past and future, which is why the moment must be recorded as a memory in its very event. Without the support of such a trace, there could be no connection between past and future and consequently no experience of time. The same condition is reinforced by the photograph, which pinpoints a certain moment by duplicating it as a trace on the film. Similarly, Van is both witness and witnessed when he thinks to himself that he must memorize the present. The event is inscribed as a trace in his consciousness, while the interpolated parenthesis demonstrates how the tracing enables repetitions of the memory. Within the space of a single sentence we move from the summer of 1884 to the winter of 1892when Van encounters the photograph in an apartment in Manhattanall the way up to the 1960s, when the sequence of memories is archived in the autobiography. In Vans series of recollections one should not neglect the connection to technological memory, which is deeply significant in the novel. Van and Ada have a tremendous ability to recall the past, but they are dependent on supplementary devices to retain the flight of timeeverything from clocks and calendars to photographs and telegrams. Furthermore, the setting of Ada gives a hint as to the importance of technology. To a large extent, the world of the novel corresponds to our own, but Nabokov rearranges the historical course of events. For example, in the beginning of the nineteenth century, cars, telephones, and cinemas are part of everyday life. Nabokovs revision of the history of technology is not just playful, but is intertwined with the time-theme of the novel. In the foreword to Speak, Memory, Nabokov writes that all our memories ought to be microfilmed. His remark is suggestive, since a chronophile has good reasons to be fascinated by mnemotechnical devices. The possibility of saving sense data, of transmitting visual and sonorous phenomena to the future, increases dramatically with inventions such as the tape recorder and the film-camera. Time is but memory in the making (A 440), Van claims with a striking phrase in his treatise. A decisive question, then, is what material supports are available for archiving. Time must

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be registered in spatial terms, and an advanced technology provides a greater capacity for storing and transferring what happens. Nevertheless, humanistic ideologies have traditionally demoted technology, arguing that its artificial modes of production distort the immediacy of living life. When phenomena are reproduced mechanically, there is an inevitable spacing between origin and transmission. To surrender ones face to a camera or to deposit ones voice in a tape-recorder is to be duplicated by an exterior medium that is subject to reiteration and dislocation. What becomes clear in Ada, however, is that such temporal spacing is not an unnatural process but is always already at work in the interior of the subject. Even the most intimate self-awareness can never repose in itself; it is incessantly divided between the already past and an imminent future. Hence, the perceptual apparatus must be a memorymachine: retaining what is no longer by opening itself towards what is not yet. As I have already indicated, such a tracing of temporality depends on spatial inscriptions that can remain from one time to another, in a necessary mediation of experience that contradicts the very idea of immediate presence.15 We notice the necessity of mediation in Vans thoughts before the camera in 1884. Parallel to the explicit act of photography there is an implicit act of chronography that marks the mnemotechnics of the psyche. In both cases, it is a matter of inscribing traces under the risk of erasure. Just as photographs can easily fade or be destroyed, Van will suffer from forgetfulness and death. However, there is a difference of degree to be noted here. The photograph is an objective perception capable of preserving details even if Vans memory would lose its acuity. At the same time, the photographs potential mnemonic power is dependent on Vans ability to reawaken the past atmosphere. Such interdependence reveals the treacherous structure of memory. By transferring sense data to an exterior receptacle, Van strengthens his ability to resist the force of oblivion. But by the same token he calls attention to the possible dispersion of meaning. When one is photographed or recorded on tape, there is always the prospect of the face or voice being reproduced in a different context, beyond the control of its presumed origin. The same condition applies to written words, which are still readable and susceptible to manipulation in the absence of the author. We can thus approach another significant theme in Nabokovs novel: that writing is a technology. A first clue is a number of connections between the project of the memoir and technical devices. On several occasions, Ada and Van imagine that episodes from their past are displayed as a motion picture and they are repeatedly attracted to the idea of a particular event being accessible through magnetic tape or cinematographic recordings. One example of

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chronophilic imagination is a dialogue between Van and Ada in 1884. Their dialogue is supplemented by a commentary from the aged couple, who regret not having taped the conversation in order to listen to their voices eighty years later. It is easy to understand the attraction of this prospect: the ability to reactivate visual and sonorous details heightens the sense of the past. Words printed on paper do not exhibit such a link to sensual memory, but they nevertheless enable one to approach vanished circumstances. The exquisite style of Ada is perhaps the most elegant example of such literary mnemotechnics, since it reinforces the quality of memories by dwelling on subtle nuances of experience. However, Ada and Van also pursue a more advanced technology of writing. Already to inscribe an event is a form of programming, since it relies on the ability of future users to translate the marks on the page into living impressions. The strategies of writing in Ada distend the scope of such programming. As previously mentioned, the novel bifurcates into two parallel narratives, as Van and Ada interrupt their autobiography while writing it. They comment on details, admit lapses in memory, and demand that certain passages be eliminated or rephrased. Ada, especially, inserts a large number of notes that supplement, correct, and quarrel with Vans version of their life. These notes concern not only revisions of the text, but also a documentation of the ten-year period of writing as a drama in itself that gradually evolves in the margins of the book. For example, the episode when Van and Ada make love for the first time is repeatedly interrupted by repartee between the two at the time of writing, when they recall the event more than seventy years later. At times, Van attempts to protect himself from the emotionally charged subject by having recourse to summarious or lecherous phrases, but Ada protests and gives us a more delicate description of what happened, as they take turns writing the episode. That the alternating process of writing is staged in the text is no coincidence; it is consistent with the chronophilic and chronophobic sense of autobiography that pervades the memoir. Throughout the novel, we can observe the desire to narrate the one who is narrating, to integrate the process of writing the autobiography into the autobiography itself. The ambition to narrate the one who is narrating is brought to a head in a number of supplementary markers that are mainly appended to Adas notes. An inserted comment may be followed by characterizations such as Marginal note in red ink (A 104) or Marginal jotting in Adas 1965 hand; crossed out lightly in her latest wavering one (A 19). Such specifications are recurrent and typographically distinguished from the editors notes, which are given in square brackets according to the model: [Ed.]. It is thus Ada herself who provides the additional

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descriptions of her marginal notes, in accordance with a chronophilic and chronophobic logic. When the manuscript is printed as a book, the marginal notes will cease to be marginal and will be transferred to the center of the page (as indeed they are in the edition we read). For the same reason, the color of Adas ink will have been erased when her handwriting is replaced by printed letters. It is therefore necessary to describe these characteristics in order to prevent them from vanishing without a trace. When Ada writes a note in 1965 she thus adds that it is a note written by herself in 1965. This doubling is operative even when impending death has deprived Ada of physical strength: her wavering hand lightly crossing out text describes itself as a wavering hand lightly crossing out text. Adas inscriptions may seem to be an extreme form of chronophilia and chronophobia, but the very project of the memoir resonates in her desire to keep as much as possible. The text is programmed to retain its character when transmitted from one material support to another and enables us to track different dates of inscription on one and the same page. The following passage exemplifies how the temporally extended process of writing is staged in the text. The point of departure is a summer night in 1884 when Van and Ada make love:
For the first time in their love story, the blessing, the genius of lyrical speech descended upon the rough lad, he murmured and moaned, kissing her face with voluble tenderness, crying out in three languagesthe three greatest in all the worldpet words upon which a dictionary of secret diminutives was to be based and go through many revisions till the definitive edition of 1967. When he grew too loud, she shushed, shushingly breathing into his mouth, and now her four limbs were frankly around him, as if she had been love-making for years in all our dreamsbut impatient young passion (brimming like Vans overflowing bath while he is reworking this, a crotchety gray old wordman on the edge of a hotel bed) did not survive the first few blind thrusts; it burst at the lip of the orchid, and a bluebird offered a warning warble, and the lights were now stealing back under a rugged dawn, the firefly signals were circumscribing the reservoir, the dots of the carriage lamps became stars, wheels rasped on the gravel, all the dogs returned well pleased with the night treat, the cooks niece Blanche jumped out of a pumpkin-hued police van in her stockinged feet (long, long after midnight, alas)and our two naked children, grabbing lap robe and nightdress, and giving the couch a parting pat, pattered back with their candlesticks to their innocent bedrooms. And do you remember, said gray-moustached Van as he took a Cannabina cigarette from the bedside table and rattled a yellow-blue matchbox, how reckless we were, and how Larivire stopped snoring but a moment later went on shaking the house, and how cold the iron steps were, and how disconcerted I wasby yourhow shall I put it?lack of restraint. Idiot, said Ada from the wall side, without turning her head.

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Summer 1960? Crowded hotel somewhere between Ex and Ardez? Ought to begin dating every page of the manuscript: Should be kinder to my unknown dreamers. (A 98f99)

At least four different time-levels can be discerned here. Initially, we are treated to an episode from 1884, which necessarily was written at a later datein its first version probably sometime in the late 1950s. When the first parenthesis interrupts the narrative we become aware of yet another time-level, since Van here is reworking the section we read. The narration of the summer night is resumed, but the depiction of the crotchety gray old wordman is continued in the following paragraph, which displaces us to a hotel room where Van and Ada are working on the manuscript. If we wonder exactly when this scene takes place we soon realize that the same question occupies Van (Summer 1960? Crowded hotel somewhere between Ex and Ardez?) when he at yet another occasion reads the text and notes that he ought to begin dating every page of the manuscript. It seems reasonable to attribute the last comment to 1967, since a reference to this year has been inserted into the description of the episode from 1884if the reference to 1967 does not testify to yet another date of inscription, yet another time-level. In any case, Van and Ada enable us to track how they return to the same passage several times, as they record themselves in the act of making further additions or commenting on their comments. However, their obsessive investment in the autobiography only serves to accentuate their eventual disappearance. Van and Ada apply themselves to an ingeniously programmed textual archive, but even the most advanced technology runs the risk of being distorted. The possibility of malfunction is built into the system from the beginning, due to the finitude of both the machine and its designers. It is thus significant that the book we are reading is an unfinished manuscript. This is easy to forget since the prose of the novel is so elegant and arrogant, but there are several furtive mementos to be noted. In a number of places, incomplete sentences remain in the text, and are subsequently repeated and completed. These momentary disruptions of the progressing narrative create the same effect as when the needle of a gramophone is caught in a track: we become aware of how the act of reading or listening is dependent on a fragile mechanism. The editors remarks, which appear about twenty times throughout the novel, underscore the threat of technological corruptibility. As mentioned earlier, what might be Vans last word is a technical instruction (Insert). There are reasons to return to this section anew (pages 17374). The note that interrupts an amorous scenario in 1888 is in turn interrupted in the middle of a sentence and followed by the editors square brackets,

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where we learn that the rest of the sentence is illegible. Apparently, the margins of Vans proofs have not allowed sufficient space for his notes, but he has continued writing on a separate sheet. These notes have been inserted in the printed book following Vans concluding instruction. In this case, then, the editor appears to be faithful to the manuscript. At the same time, his interventions mark a series of interruptions that become more and more critical. As the book proceeds, one can observe that the editor is insolent in some of his comments. In the middle of a dialogue, he begins to speculate on whether Van has obtained the lines from other sources. Even in Vans and Adas intimate love letters he takes note of solecisms with a pedantic sic! The man behind these remarks is a certain Ronald Oranger, who, as it turns out, has at least one special interest in the book. When in the final chapter Van is about to describe his beautiful secretary (who was to become Mrs. Ronald Oranger) the sentences we anticipate are quite simply replaced by an omission mark. The autobiography of our super-imperial couple has thus been bowdlerized by a jealous husband. Nabokovs stealthy irony reminds us that the written can never protect itself against being grafted onto a different context. Van and Ada inscribe layer upon layer of memories in their texture of time, but their hypermemoir also holds the threat of a lifeless repetition upon its posthumous publication, when readers and editors can do as they please with the dead letters. Nevertheless, Nabokov scholars have sought to locate a transcendent meaning that would redeem the displacements of time that Ada records. A telling example is Robert Alter, who in an otherwise valuable essay misreads the part played by Ronald Oranger. Relying on no textual support except the possibility that Ronald Oranger is an anagram (angel nor ardor), Alter claims that Oranger is an angelic figure whose final responsibility for the text of Ada confirms the idea that art can create a perfected state of paradise. Indeed, in Alters view the ultimate sense that Ada seeks to convey is that all threats of evil, including the evil of the corrosive passage of time can be finally transcended by the twinned power of art and love.16 My reading of Ada has argued for an opposite view. The very idea of a perfect paradise is shown to be untenable in Ada, since threats of destruction are intrinsic even to the most amazing happiness and the most meticulous work of art. It is thus an appropriate irony that the figure Alter assumes to be the angelic guardian of the books metaphysical ambition, in fact is a petty editor who disfigures the text and reminds us that corruption is always possible. Far from redeeming corruptibility, the writing of Van and Ada reinforces that the chance of inscription is inseparable from the risk of erasure. Whether their mnemotechnics are interior or exterior it is a matter of chronographing: of saving time in

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spatial marks. These chronographies anticipate future readers by making it possible to remember the inscribed events. But in the same process of preservation Van and Ada are forced to underline their finitude and their dependence on marks that exceed their control. The double bind cannot be eliminated, since the promise of memory only pledges to what will be forgotten. To examine the seams in the texture of time is thus to see the fragility of every cherished connection. The awareness of this condition is the chronophobia that haunts chronophilia from beginning to end. Cornell University
Notes 1 Compare Jacques Derridas essay Platos Pharmacy, in Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 63171, in particular 109. 2 Nabokov, Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited (New York: Penguin, 1969), 85 (hereafter cited in text as SM.) 3 See Robert Alters essay Nabokov and Memory, Partisan Review 58, no. 4 (1991): 62029, and Michael Woods chapter on Speak, Memory in The Magicians Doubts: Nabokov and the Risks of Fiction, 83102 (London: Chatto & Windus, 1994). Both Alter and Wood pursue important discussions of how Nabokov attempts to preserve the particular through the powers of his prose, which nonetheless is marked by the irrevocable passage of time. 4 Brian Boyd, Nabokovs Ada: The Place of Consciousness (Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis Publishing, 1985), 65 (hereafter cited in text as NA). The idea that Nabokov seeks to transcend time and finitude is the guiding thread in all of Boyds studies, which in addition to the book on Ada include Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), and Nabokovs Pale Fire: The Magic of Artistic Discovery (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999). Another major study that maintains Nabokovs visions of a life beyond death is Vladimir Alexandrovs Nabokovs Otherworld (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991). See also Alex de Jonges early essay Nabokovs Uses of Pattern, in Vladimir Nabokov: A Tribute, ed. Peter Quenell (New York: Morrow & Co., 1980), 6075, which prefigures Boyds and Alexandrovs understanding of Nabokovs metaphysics. De Jonge holds that for Nabokov time must be denied or overcome in order to establish the truth, namely, that nothing is ever lost, and that apparent loss is an illusion, the creation of a partial and blinkered consciousness (72). 5 See, for example, Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: the Russian Years, 283, and Nabokovs Ada, 73. 6 See Boyd, Nabokovs Ada, 64, and passim. 7 Nabokov, Pale Fire (1962; New York: Penguin, 1973). 8 Nabokov, Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle (1969; New York: Penguin, 1971), 458 (hereafter cited in text as A). 9 Boyd dissimulates the logic of chronophilia when he comments on Vans reading of Shades poem. According to Boyd, Vans argument shows the absurdity of merely eternalizing human life (Nabokovs Ada, 72) without therefore discrediting the notion of an afterlife as such. Rather, Vans argument would teach us to leave behind our anthropomorphic confines when we imagine the afterlife (Nabokovs Ada, 72). Boyds reading is untenable for a number of reasons. Van argues that any type of hereafter is contradicted

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by a logical ban. This logical ban reinforces that memories of mortal life cannot be transposed to an immortal life. When Boyd himself denounces the idea of such transposition as absurd, he denounces the very idea that organizes his own reading of Nabokov. Boyds self-contradiction is evident even within single paragraphs of his text. For example, Boyd writes: Scrupulously avoiding the logical absurdity of eternalizing the necessarily finite condition of human consciousness, Nabokov satisfies his desire for freedom by imagining the various limitations of the mind transcended in death. Death could offer us a completely new relation to time: freedom of our being pegged to the present, freedom of access to the whole of the past (73). Boyds idea of an always accessible and thus immortal past is a clear example of eternalizing the finite, since what is past had to be finite in order to become past in the first place. The classic strategy to avoid this logical absurdity is to say that immortal life is completely different from mortal life. But we have already seen that such an alternative is excluded for Nabokov and his characters, since a chronophile turns down eternity if it does not retain the traits of mortal life. 10 Nabokov, The Gift, trans. Michael Scammell (New York: Putnam, 1963), 349 (hereafter cited in text as G). 11 Thus, in the last paragraph of The Gift Fyodor marks the mortality of every writer and reader (Good-bye, my book! Like mortal eyes, imagined ones must close some day.) while he at the same time expresses his desire to retain and prolong the experience of his mortal life (And yet the ear cannot right now part with the music and allow the tale to fade.) 12 See The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov, ed. Dmitri Nabokov (New York: A. Knopf, 1995), 34453. 13 Wood, The Magicians Doubts, 220. 14 See Derridas essay Laphorisme contretemps, in Psych: Inventions de lautre (Paris: Galile, 1987), 51933, in particular 52224. The double bind of finitude (as the condition of both the desirable and the undesirable) is a constant theme in Derridas work. See, for example, Derridas account of how the mortals desire awakens in you the movement (which is contradictory, you follow me, a double restraint, an aporetic constraint) to guard from oblivion this thing which in the same stroke exposes itself to death and protects itself. Derrida, Che cos la poesia? in Points . . . Interviews: 19741994, ed. Elisabeth Weber, trans. Peggy Kamuf and others (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 293. I have elsewhere developed how Derridas logic of desire answers to the logic of what I call chronophilia/chronophobia. See the last chapter of my book Kronofobi. Esser om tid och ndlighet (Stockholm/ Stehag: Brutus stlings Bokfrlag Symposion, 2002), 20718. 15 These remarks are indebted to Derridas insights concerning an originary spacing of time, which I develop in my essay The Necessity of Discrimination: Disjoining Derrida and Levinas, Diacritics 34, no. 1 (2004): 4071. Furthermore, Derrida explicitly relates the spacing of time to an originary technicity. See, for example, Freud and the Scene of Writing, in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge, 1978), 196231, in particular 199, 22628, and Ulysse Gramophone: Deux mots pour Joyce (Paris: Galile, 1987). 16 See Robert Alter, Ada, or the Perils of Paradise, in Vladimir Nabokov: A Tribute, ed. Peter Quenell (New York: Morrow & Co., 1980), 118. Note that Ronald Oranger can be pronounced as Ronald Or Anger, which reinforces the character trait that can be discerned from his notes.