Looking forward to Nostalgia?
Retrospection Anticipated in Nabokov's Short Stories
This
paper will be part of a wider exploration of the retroactive dynamics
of representation in narrative, a topic which has far-reaching
implications for the study of the structure of narratives (temporal
structure, point of view, closure, etc.) as well as for the narrative
structuration of reality. "Anticipated retrospection", a notion first
used in the study of plot dynamics by Peter Brook, is a temporal figure
which invites further theoretical development using the concept of the
hermeneutic circle, especially in its recent formulations in the work
of Gadamer and Ricoeur. It can also be further grounded and its
implications expanded with reference to the analysis of "backshadowing"
and "sideshadowing" in narrative as developed by Gary Saul Morson and
Michael André Bernstein. The concept of "anticipated retrospection"
will also benefit from the many recent contributions to the topic of
the 'hindsight bias' in the field of the theory of action. Such will be
the guidelines for the theoretical underpinning of the paper. This
analysis will be developed with reference to Vladimir Nabokov's poetics
of prose. The peculiar mode of temporal experience described in the
paper, anticipated retrospection, was explored by Vladimir Nabokov in a
variety of contexts, most prominently in his short fiction. Nabokov
conceived of anticipated retrospection as a deliberate experiment in
the narrativization of reality, in order to counter and deconstruct the
compulsion to nostalgia which was pervasive among the émigré Russian
circles after the Revolution. This mode of temporal representation is
thus associated in Nabokov to the experience of emigration and its
consequences for a sense of personal identity. The paper will focus on
the stories "A Guide to Berlin," and "Time and Ebb", although some
links will be drawn to Nabokov's longer works, especially to his
autobiography Speak, Memory, to his English novels, and to the use of this temporal figure by other Modernist writers (notably Proust).
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