Nabokov's Afterlife: A Reply to Brian Boyd

Brian Boyd's reply to my essay proceeds from the assumption that I appeal to Nabokov's philosophy of time in order to make my argument and that I charge Boyd with having misconstrued Nabokov's philosophy. This is not the case. I clearly acknowledge that Boyd's arguments stem from a "reconstruction of Nabokov's metaphysics" and that Nabokov himself sometimes describes time as a "prison" that he wants to escape. However, my essay seeks to elucidate what I call the logic of chronophilia in Nabokov's writing. This logic opens a new way of reading Nabokov's work, which does not rely on Nabokov's own philosophy but rather reveals the internal contradictions in the metaphysical system reconstructed by Boyd. Thus, Boyd's lengthy demonstration that his reading is defensible on the level of Nabokov's declared intentions does not affect my argument. The "evidence" presented by Boyd is well known to me from reading his books and does not add anything new to the picture. Indeed, the philosophical position that Boyd rehearses in his reply is precisely the position that my essay shows is incoherent. It does not become any more coherent just because the incoherence in question can be traced back to Nabokov's own thinking. My argument is rather that the logic of chronophilia undercuts the Nabokovian metaphysics that Boyd assumes must serve as the foundation for a reading of his work.

Boyd's reconstruction of Nabokov's metaphysics hinges on the assumption that the affirmation of mortal life is compatible with the desire for immortality. In contrast, I argue that the affirmation of mortal life allows us to read the purported desire for immortality against itself. If one did not affirm mortal life, there would be no desire to save anything from death, since only mortal life can be threatened by death. Thus, without the affirmation of mortal life, there would be no fear of death and no desire to live on. But for the same reason, the idea of immortality cannot even hypothetically appease the fear of death or satisfy the desire to live on. If one desires to live on after death, one does not desire immortality, since to live on is to remain subjected to temporal finitude. The state of immortality cannot answer to the desire to save the mortal, since it would put an end to the time of mortal life.

Thus, religious sages have had good reasons to preach detachment from the mortal as the path to the salvation of immortality. If one is bound to the mortal, the positive can never be released from the negative. Any mortal bond is a double bind, since whatever is desirable cannot be dissociated from the undesirable fact that it will be lost. This is why I argue that there can be no chronophilia without chronophobia. The desire for mortal life (chronophilia) cannot overcome the fear of death (chronophobia). On the contrary, the desire for mortal life is opposed to death and tries to defer it for as long as possible. But since mortal life is essentially linked to death, it is internally bound to what it opposes.

What I find compelling about Nabokov's work is how he stages such a constitutive attachment to the mortal and thus undermines the idea that immortality is desirable. In my essay, I analyze a passage in Ada where Van Veen makes this point by emphasizing that immortality would cancel out "our marvelous mortality."¹ I also provide an extensive analysis (in note 7) of how Boyd misreads this passage and its implications in his book on Ada. Instead of responding to this detailed argument, Boyd takes me to task for failing to engage with his work on Ada, when he in fact fails to engage with my critique of his work on Ada.²

Boyd alleges that my reading of Ada is "hardly original" and that my ideas have been anticipated in his own work, but he does not provide a single example to substantiate this claim. Moreover, it is clear that Boyd has not grasped the basic logic...