Speaking of Nabokov

language, syntax and figures of speech, appropriateness, age of voice
At the beginning of this excerpt from Speak, Memory, Nabokov sets the reader into the bedroom and emotion of his boyhood days. He tells us we're in the bedroom, but even beyond that, he lets his images speak for themselves.

"...if it disclosed a watery pallor one better not open them at all and so be spared the sight of a sullen day sitting for its picture in a puddle" he writes of his windows' shutters (423).

From the idea of nasty day as a nasty child he moves into the mental landscape of exuberance and dappled sunlight; the exuberance he felt while outdoors chasing butterflies.

Throughout this excerpt Nabokov meanders back and forth between his childhood memories and the recent present or the present. Although reading about Nabokov-the-child is interesting because I get to see a lifestyle quite different from my own, it is his adult intrigues and activities that hold me. His voice as an adult is a trustworthy one because he has built up a whole lifetime of entomology, and his stories show that. I feel like I can read this for information, come away from the piece and share my new knowledge with others and know its legit. It is literary nonfiction at its best for this reason.

This ability to entertain and inform is crucial for anyone writing a non-fiction memoir. I think of writers like Augusten Burroughs, whom I've loved, or David Eggers, whose work I hate, and whatever factual, informative stuff I might have taken from their books has been lost on me, since I didn't really think they were ever really telling a whole truth in any of their stories. Through his mentally stimulating crafting of his lifetime, Nabokov gives us fact along with emotion.

"'Natural selection', in the Darwinian sense, could not explain the miraculous coincidence of imitative aspect and imitative behavior, nor could one appeal to the theory of 'the struggle for life' when a protective device was carried to the point of mimetic subtlety, exuberance and luxury far in excess of a predator's power of appreciation," he writes of the ways in which butterflies, moths and caterpillars disguised or changed themselves as needed. " I discovered in nature the non utilitarian delights that I sought in art," he writes (425).

His love for art, nature and the craft of his own work shine in this passage, and it is his refined voice that allows for this. Were he to have written of his butterflies and knowledge from the child's viewpoint, we'd never get these insights, nor the detailed knowledge he's shared.

What is lost, of course, is the wonder and first-time innocence of a child out catching bugs for the first time. We don't get much of that sense of not-knowing here, but my guess is that even as a child Nabokov was a rather stoic, although quick and clever, boy. "Losing" this works for me, though, because I have my own sense of wonder and innocent understanding of what it was to chase bugs. What he's given me connects art with the natural world, and that wasn't something I had as a child, nor an adult really, until starting grad school. And even though my memoir doesn't take place in outdoor landscapes or focus much on place and environment, I've learned how to play with emotion in my word choice, sentence structure and composition enough so that I feel like I can relate my own "innocence" at the time of my stroke to the things going on in my voice when I write from the persona I write from.


In Eggers' and Burroghs, we get lots of emotion, lots of clever wit, but who knows how much "truth" we get.