Abstract
As we saw in Chapter 2, Nabokov’s novels contain and imply at least three layers of fictional truth: the reality of the narrator; an implied literary reality that, like Shelley’s “cave of Poesy,” provides a space from which the narrator’s claims can be examined; and the synthetic reality of the book as a whole, constructed by the author and the reader. These fictional realities are in dialogue with the real world, contesting the boundaries between countries, time periods, and metaphysical states. The previous chapter showed how those layers of reality are strategically separated in the texts of Lolita, Pale Fire, and Ada, each layer suggesting a different approach to world-creation. This chapter examines how those texts recombine the elements they have separated. In a surprisingly realist move, this recombination is made possible through the texts’ use of science to delineate their worlds’ alterity. Twentieth-century physics teaches us that even physical reality is subject to interpretation and debate and makes it possible to treat real-world facts as malleable.
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Notes
Carl Freedman, Critical Theory and Science Fiction (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 2000), 15.
Johnson, Worlds in Regression, 117; Annapaola Cancogni, The Mirage in the Mirror: Nabokov’s Ada and Its French Pre-Texts (New York: Garland, 1985).
See Kurt Johnson and Steve Coates, Nabokov’s Blues: The Scientific Odyssey of a Literary Genius (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2001).
See Gene Barabtarlo, “Vanessa Atalanta and Raisa Orlova,” The Nabokovian 13 (1984); and Dieter E. Zimmer, A Guide to Nabokov’s Butterflies and Moths (Berlin: D. E. Zimmer, 2003).
Stephen Blackwell, “The Poetics of Science in, and around, Nabokov’s Gift,” Russian Review 62 (2003): 246.
Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1966), 137.
Julie M. Johnson, “The Theory of Relativity and Modern Literature: An Overview and The Sound and the Fury,” Journal of Modern Literature 10 (1983): 219.
Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt, Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 78.
Wai Chee Dimock, “Nonbiological Clock: Literary History against Newtonian Mechanics,” South Atlantic Quarterly 102 (2003): 154.
Teri Reynolds, “Spacetime and Imagetext,” The Germanic Review 73 (1998): 161.
See Albert Einstein, Relativity, trans. Robert W. Lawson (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1995). Nabokov would have had access to Einstein’s work for the lay reader. He also took extensive notes on G. J. Whitrow, The Natural Philosophy of Time (New York, NY: Harper, 1963).
Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children (New York: Penguin, 1981), 253.
Leona Toker, “Nabokov and Bergson on Duration and Reflexivity,” in Nabokov’s World, Volume One: The Shape of Nabokov’s World, ed. Jane Grayson, Arnold McMillin, and Priscilla Meyer (London: Palgrave, 2002); Foster, Nabokov’s Art of Memory, 86.
Henri Bergson, Duration and Simultaneity, With Reference to Einstein’s Theory, trans. Leon Jacobson (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965), 38.
See the standard college text: Edwin F. Taylor and John Archibald Wheeler, Spacetime Physics (San Francisco, CA: W. H. Freeman and Co., 1963).
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© 2010 Rachel Trousdale
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Trousdale, R. (2010). Realism, Relativity, and Frames of Reference in Ada and Pale Fire. In: Nabokov, Rushdie, and the Transnational Imagination. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230106888_4
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