A Prompt for Thursday

This morning I was in the computer lab printing a paper, and I saw a single sheet of paper on the ground below the printer. I picked up the paper and found the following quote on it listed with many other Orwellian quotations:

"An autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats."

-George Orwell

Think about how this quote may apply to the texts we have already covered in this course. Did Douglass, McCarthy, or Nabokov share any disgraceful memories or thoughts? If not, can we trust these individuals? Are they lying to us? Can you describe some moments in the autobiographies that can be considered "good accounts," and do you think these particular occurrences are accurate and factual?

Nabokov's Nostalgia

"The story of my college years in England is really the story of my trying to become a Russian writer. I had the feeling that Cambridge and all its famed features, venerable elms, blazoned windows, loquacious tower clocks, were of no consequence in themselves but existed merely to frame and support my rich nostalgia. Emotionally, I was in the position of a man who, having just lost a fond kinswoman, realized, too late, that through some laziness of the routine-drugged human soul, he had neither troubled to know her as fully as she deserved, nor had shown her in full the marks of his not quite conscious then, but now unrelieved, affection...And I thought of all I had missed in my country, of the things I would not have omitted to note and treasure, had I suspected before that my life was to veer in such a violent way."

(Page 261)

I suppose this passage caught my attention, because it reminded me of the time in my life that really developed my desire of wanting to be a writer. My high school years made me take a nostalgic look back at my carefree childhood in an Idaho small town. High school made me want to escape back to that time in my life that was seemingly stressless (I don't know if that's a word!) and when everyone seemed to know and admire me. My high school years ignited a fire in me that seemed to burn in the direction of my past. It's smoke pointed to the times in my life that were simpler. I knew then that I wanted to write those memories down, cherish and keep them forever, either for myself in a diary of sorts, or share them with the world. Perhaps some day I will, but I know exactly what Nabokov was feeling. When I moved to New Hampshire, I felt like a girl without a real home. New Hampshire was as foreign to me as the Far East and that is what made me yearn for the 1990s, the years when I didn't have to worry about exams, career paths, and what to make for dinner.

I also love Nabokov's personification usage in this passage. He personifies his time spent in Russia by using the kinswoman metaphor. The kinswoman (his past) leaves him and he didn't realize how much he had adored and appreciated it until it was long gone. You never know how great something is until it's gone. Sometimes we forget to appreciate life's pleasant, simple surprises, because we become so caught up in the turmoil going on around us and the difficult decisions we are forced to make every day.

A Late Post on Photo Captions in "Speak, Memory"

I apologize for the lateness of this post! It was something I had planned to put up all weekend and just kept feeling disgustingly sick. It is the idea that I presented in class today (Tuesday, 10/14), regarding the family photograph on page 140 of Speak, Memory.

Here are the parts of the caption that I found most intriguing:

• "The round thing on the tree trunk is an archery target..."
• "...photophobic Trainy..."
• "My paternal grandmother is holding, in a decorative but precarious cluster, my two little sisters whom she never held in real life..."
• "I am perched on the bench arm, hating my collar and Stresa."

Nabokov's allusion to the target on the trunk is so "him." It's just part of his style, and I find it slightly ingenius. Nabokov clearly has a vivid "Memory" that seems to see everything. Each memory that Nabokov writes about is so visually stimulating. I feel like it's just in his nature to notice everything about his surroundings, even is photographic self.

Photophobic Trainy just amuses me, because he looks so photophobic in the picture. It was the perfect way to describe the poor dog's emotional status in the picture. He looks absolutely petrified to be there. My dog is also particularly photophobic, so I have seen Trainy's posture before in my own life (expect in a MUCH larger canine).

Nabokov's grandmother never holds his sisters in real life. This indicates that pictures can be incredibly deceiving. Writing can be honest, and Nabokov is being honest about his grandmother who was apparently not a nurturing grandmother in the least. His words are the truth, even though the photograph could say something completely different about the personality of his grandmother.

Nabokov's final thought in the caption is sort of funny, because his photographed self does look extremely annoyed to be in the picture. He looks like he is about to spring off the bench's arm the first chance he gets. I just think Nabokov has done something that humans tend to do, and that is consider their physical and mental states of being when photographs were taken. I have numerous photographs in my house that bring back sensory memories. He remembers the discomfort he felt when wearing the collar and Stresa. I remember a photograph of me at my 8th grade birthday party blowing out the candles on the cake, and that photograph always makes me remember the spell of the burning candles mixed with the delicious smells of the frosting and dough of the cake.

Photographs in "Speak, Memory"

This may be a completely random observation, and I may have overanalyzed the captions that appear beneath the photographs in Nabokov's autobiography. I just find the photographs in the book so fascinating. He has used some particularly poignant photographs throughout the course of his examination of memory. Under some of these photographs Nabokov writes his captions using the first-person pronoun "I." Under other photographs, the title "the author" is utilized. I began to wonder whether these photographs were added in by an editor. I honestly don't believe that is true. I think that Nabokov refers to himself as "the author," even though it is signifying usage of a third-person pronoun.

On page 228, there is a photograph of Nabokov in a rowboat, in which the caption reads, "The author in Cambridge, Spring 1920. It was not unnatural for a Russian, when gradually discovering the pleasures of the Cam, to prefer, at first, a rowboat to the more proper canoe or punt."

I don't think an editor would add a caption like this. This caption is still clearly coming from Nabokov's voice. I think that "the author" uses this specific title to signify that he IS an author and that is how people know him. I also think that there is a possibility that Nabokov has used this third-person title to signify that someone else (aka Nabokov's memory) is discussing his situation in each photograph. Nabokov is giving his memory authenticity and allowing it to speak about his bodily self from an outsider's perspective. He also does not use the term "the author" in his captions until Chapter 10, which is more than half way through the book's entire contents. He is just about heading to college during this time, which is when he realizes that he wants to be a Russian writer. His nostalgia forces him to think about his past and reflect in a way that has created this brilliant autobiography.

Any thoughts on Nabokov's other captions?

-Megan

Writing Prompt for Thursday:

We have talked about language in Frederick Douglas (did he write his own work? was it written for him? could he really have had that vocabulary? etc.), and we've talked about language in Nabokov (is he pompous? is he showing off? is that just the way that he thinks?)...

... so, my prompt is to write about something, anything basically, that happened this week that amused you or alarmed you or made you laugh, but you must write it the way that you would say it, write it in your own particular patterns of speech. Don't write it the way you would write a paper for a class.

I don't mean that you have to write dialogue; I just want you to use the same vocabulary and the same syntax that you would in normal conversation with a friend.

A Passage from Nabokov:

"In those years, that marvelous mess of constellations, nebulae, interstellar gaps and all the rest of the awesome show provoked in me an indescribable sense of nausea, of utter panic, as if I were hanging from earth upside down on the brink of infinite space, with terrestrial gravity still holding me by the heels but about to release me any moment." (Pg. 226 - 227)

I found this passage interesting because it reminds me of a passage at the very beginning of the book: "The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness" (pg. 19). It seems to me that in these two passages, Nabokov is acknowledging how meaningless, short, and unimportant one human life is. We are nothing in comparison to the world around us, the universe around us, just as we are nothing compared with all that has come before and all that will come after. He tells us in the very first line of the first chapter that his story doesn't matter, and he reminds us throughout the work. An odd approach to trying to convince someone to care... Nabokov knows that there's no real reason for us to want to read his life story, but he tells it anyway in case we're somehow drawn in. And maybe it's this honesty that makes us want to know more.

Casey McMorrow

"There it lay in wait, a family of serene clouds in miniature, an accumulation of brilliant convolutions, anachronistic in their creaminess and extremely remote; remote but perfect in ever detail; fantastially reduced but faultlessly shaped; my marvelous tomorrow ready to be delivered to me." pg. 213

Jenna Payton

chapter 6, page #119
"From the age of seven, everything I felt in connection with a rectangle of framed sunlight was dominated by a single passion. If my first glance of the morning was for the sun, my first thought was for the butterflies it would engender."

Nabokov speaking...

So I had a very difficult time finding a passage we had not already talked about that dealt with memory. Instead I found several interesting passages...
The first passage is on page 188. In this section Nabokov is describing how his school life is so different from his peers. In the final line of the section Nabokov writes "But how on earth could I discuss this with schoolteachers?" I think this sentence is interesting for two reasons. The first being that it draws the reader in, it asks the reader a rhetorical question. The second being that it is a writing technique I do not believe Nabokov has employed thus far in this work.
On page 148 Nabokov describes his memory as "a glass cell" which I think is a very interesting way to think about memories.