The Texture Of Time

Nabokov’s interest in the essence of time glimmers throughout his oeuvre,and attracts many a scholar to this aspect of his works.However,most of the scholars limited their attention to how Nabokov employs certain literary devices to deliver the feeling of time,and studies regarding what his philosophy of time actually amounts to are rather few.What’s worse,these few studies only offer superficial interpretations,and some even argue that being a mere writer,Nabokov is not capable of genuine philosophical insight.The present thesis is a refutation of this argument,and argues that Nabokov’s treatment of the subject of time straddles the seemingly unsurmountable wall between the academic and the artistic;namely,he has achieved a rigorous and tenable philosophy of time as well as literary enactments of this philosophy.To encompass the what and the how of Nabokov’s philosophy of time,this thesis,under the guidance of Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology,purports to make a case study of the “Ada series”.The “Ada series” comprises of Speak,Memory,Ada and Transparent Things,which came out successively in 1967-1972 and revolve around the individual’s time-consciousness as the subject matter.The Texture of Time is a novella about time Nabokov ascribes to Van Veen(the narrator-protagonist of Ada)and incorporates into Ada as its Part Four,which he has affirmed repeatedly as reflecting his own conception of time.This thesis puts The Texture of Time into the context of transcendental phenomenology and interprets it as a phenomenological analysis of the individual’s time-consciousness.With the what pinned down,we proceed to analyze the enactment of this philosophy in the passages of Speak,Memory,Ada and Transparent Things.Following the structure of The Texture of Time,this thesis is divided into three chapters,which correspond to the three tenses of the Present,the Future and the Past.Chapter One discusses the Present in Nabokov’s philosophy of time and its artistic enactment.Nabokov’s conception of the Present is similar to Husserl’s “absolute timeconsciousness”,but unlike Husserl,who likens this absolute consciousness to a “time constituting flow”,Nabokov asserts that the structure of the Present is fixed,analogous to a “hollow” presupposed by the flows of specific experiences.Taking advantage of this structure,Nabokov composes several enargia in Speak,Memory,which delivers “the pang of nowness” via meticulous choice and arrangement of words.Chapter Two discusses the Future in Nabokov’s philosophy of time and its artistic enactment.By comparing Nabokov’s argumentation with the concept of “protention” in phenomenology,it is revealed that despite his refusal to grant the Future the state of Time,Nabokov does not ignore the Future in his analysis,but treats it as an optional moment of the Present,namely the possibility of saturating the experience in the Present with such features as expected,surprising,disappointed etc.through expectation.In Part Four of Ada(which is The Texture of Time),Nabokov frames the reader’s expectation by weaving a series of enargia into a twisty plot,and thus delivers the essence of the Future.Chapter Three discusses the Past in Nabokov’s philosophy of time and its artistic enactment.To Nabokov,the Past is not a mere extension of the Present,but an equally important panel of Time with its own inherent structure that centers on the subject and the object as two identity poles: on the one hand,all my present experiences are granted the possibility of recollection exactly as my experiences;on the other hand,an intuitive experience intending a certain object always leads to other intuitive experiences intending the same object.In Transparent Things,Nabokov pulls off an elaborate structural design that invites the reader to voluntary recollection of encounters with earlier enargia,and therewith delivers the peculiar feeling of the Past.Our investigation proves that The Texture of Time is an excellent descriptive account of the individual’s time-consciousness.It is not,as some argue,“stylish but empty”,but a rich and coherent piece of phenomenological analysis.After a detailed elucidation of its main points and their corresponding artistic enactments,this thesis comes to the conclusion that in his treatment of the subject of time,Nabokov transcends the limit of a “mere writer” and succeeds both as a philosopher and an artist;it is indeed a rare case where—to mingle several Nabokov quotes—“the precision of poetry” dances harmoniously with “the passion of pure science”.