''Vladimir Nabokov's Comic Quest for Reality' - Nottingham eTheses

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voice on the phone that has this effect: "... the
phone had preserved the very essence, the bright vi-
bration, of her vocal cords... It was the timbre of
their past, as if the past had put through that call,
a miraculous connection... " (155).
Talking about time as rhythm, Van explains that it
is "the dim interval between the dark beats [that]
have the feel of the texture of Time" and that "The
same... applies to the impression received from per-
ceiving the gaps of unremembered or 'neutral' time
between vivid events" (548). And, following his idea
about the freedom memory enjoys with regard to the
Past, he feels that he is indeed "... able to suppress
in my mind completely... " the dim and grey intervals
between colourful events (548). He does not suppress
them altogether, he allows "some casual memory to
form in between the diagnostic limits" (549), but most
of his memoir is of course taken up by descriptions
of the times he and Ada could spend together. The less
colourful information in between is "meant by Nabokov
to be filler between the major events of the book -
the gray gap between black beats. "87
These, then, are the elements that give Van an in-
sight into the texture of time: the gaps, the intervals,
harbouring "something like true Time" (538),
brimming
...
with a kind of smooth, grayish
mist and a faint suggestion of shed confetti
(which, maybe, might leap into color if I
allowed some casual memory to form in between
the diagnostic limits) (549),
and the "diagnostic limits" themselves, the colourful
events which share a common feature and in which Past