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

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and Present are blended by memory which thus gives
meaning and reality to them. This is most clearly ex-
pressed in Van's description of Ada's phone call before
her
arrival:
That telephone voice, by resurrecting the
past and linking it up with the present,
with the darkening slate-blue mountains
beyond the lake, with the spangles of the
sun wake dancing through the poplar,
formed the centerpiece in his deepest perception
of tangible time, the glittering
'now' that was the only reality in Time's
texture (556). 88
Nancy Anne Zeller has detected a slight flaw in the
correspondence between Van's theories and the story he
has fitted into them. Talking of time as rhythm, he
also says that this rhythm should be regular. The
rhythm formed by his and Ada's reunions starts off by
being very regular, the periods of separation between
them being four years (1884-1888), four years again
(1888-1892), then twelve years (1893-1905), and twelve,
of course, is a multiple of four. It is the last period
which is the odd one out, because it does not fit into
89
the pattern: it lasts seventeen years (1905-1922).
However, Zeller shows how this is straightened out
by Van having recourse to a very Nabokovian image,
the
,
spiral:
Events are free to recur, but on a different
level, a higher level, their meaning
enhanced by union with a similar past
event. These recurrent events line up vertically
on the spiral so that just below
the present is the past and low that an
even more distant past, etc.
Now, in a diagram of a spiral the reunion after seven-
teen years would be slightly out of line, it would not
appear on the vertical line, not immediately above all