Memorious Discourse: Reprise and Representation in Postmodernism (review)
Though it is not exactly clear who believes it to do otherwise (Plato and Eleanor Heartney being the main suspects), Christian Moraru's book sets out to show that postmodernism does actually perform the task of representing or re-representing. In his view, postmodernism does this as it does most things, paradoxically, so that the work of representation is done at once digressively and through direct parading of a work's indebtedness to previous models. To construct his argument, Moraru makes Nabokov keep company with Borges, DeLillo, Derrida, Toni Morrison, Pynchon, and Phillip Roth, and what that unlikely company produces is what Moraru (with a nod to Borges) calls "memorious discourse," writing that recycles other writing but does so while evading the charges usually leveled at postmodernism: political apathy and cultural amnesia.
Although only about forty pages of Moraru's text are devoted specifically to Nabokov and his name does pop up frequently, it is Speak, Memory, and "The Assistant Producer" that receive the most sustained discussion. Moraru reads Nabokov's autobiography not only as one of "the first texts [End Page 207] to thumb its nose" at the distinction between fiction and history (236) but also as if it were a gloss on Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu: "the memoir can be read as a critical essay of sorts: where Marcel interprets his own past […] Nabokov's narrator interprets Proust besides his own past." Consequently, Speak, Memory emerges "as a rewriting of the Recherche's temporal-aesthetic discourse" (46). Moraru's discussion of "The Assistant Producer" also treads over familiar ground: "Nabokov tears down the wall between life and its double; his gesture is both the theme and the outcome of the performative act, of the text titled 'The Assistant Producer'" (182). While Moraru's discussion of postmodernism will no doubt be of interest to those who write and discuss the subject, the Nabokov sections would have greatly profited from a deeper familiarity with the 1995 Nice Conference and the Cycnos volume, edited by Maurice Couturier, that published the proceedings of the effort to locate Nabokov within the matrices of modernism and/or postmodernism. As my old teacher Ihab Hassan insisted, a single element (intertextual presence of another text, meta-fictionality, parody, self-reflection) is by itself never really a sufficiently reliable indicator of text's postmodernism even, or especially, if one believes postmodernism to be a predominant intellectual worldview.
Nabokov Studies has a policy of not publishing materials already published in one of the more often taught languages or reviewing collections of materials when all of the collected pieces are readily available individually. As a result of the proscription on reviewing collections of readily-available materials, some important books like Pekka Tammi's Russian Subtexts in Nabokov's Fiction (1999) did not receive their due notice from this journal. The title of Dolinin's volume Istinnaia zhizn' pisatelia Sirina: Raboty o Nabokove suggests that the book may evade our self-imposed ban by containing a previously unpublished monograph-length essay before its title's colon and adding nine published essays in what follows, including the Russian version of the essay, "Nabokov's Time Doubling: From The Gift to Lolita," whose English translation [End Page 208] was published in Nabokov Studies Volume 2. But, alas, that is not the case. Although the monograph occupies 151 of the book's 400 pages, it is the collection of the prefatory essays used in the five-volume Symposium edition of Nabokov's works Dolinin edited. Although some of the essays have undergone minor changes, the only previously unpublished material is the essay "Proza Nabokova i 'Peterburgskii tekst' russkoi literatury." I confess I breathed a sigh of relief at realizing this, since Dolinin's erudite prose...
