Writing Objects, Writing Memories: Making Nabokov’s Memory Speak

Abstract

In Vladimir Nabokov’s autobiographical writings, which crossed linguistic borders just as the author himself repeatedly crossed geographical frontiers, objects hold a special role, seemingly endowed with the power not only to trigger the mnemonic process, but to anchor it and allow for its further amplification. In The Poetics of Space, Bachelard insisted upon the importance of past homes, and on the spatialization of memory to retain remembrances, a process largely illustrated in Nabokov’s memoirs, in which the textual mnemonic space often seems to expand thanks to objects. After an analysis of how Nabokov’s revisions of his autobiographical texts show an amplification of memory thanks to the objects of his past homes, this paper focuses on objects that conflate the “power to recall” that things have (Laurence Bertrand-Dorléac) with the power to trigger writing, by investigating metatextual objects such as pencils or pen-holders in Nabokov’s memoirs. By investigating these writing tools, this study wishes to delve into the interplay of the mnemonic and writing processes in Nabokov’s autobiographical works, to show that even if these writing tools are not presented as subjects or agents, they have a “style,” as Marielle Macé would put it, or a “mode of existence” of their own—to borrow one of Bruno Latour’s key concepts.