
Last week in a nonfiction class we discussed truth in creative nonfiction.
There are many truths; your own skewed and faulty memory, for one. But then there are the philosophical tangents in the mind that make memory an art.
Here is Vladimir Nabokov’s first page of Speak, Memory, an Autobiography Revisited.
“The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for (at some forty-five hundred heart-beats an hour.) I know, however, of a young chronophobiac who experienced something like panic when looking for the first time at homemade movies that had been taken a few weeks before his birth. He saw a world that was practically unchanged—the same house, the same people—and then realized that he did not exist there at all and that nobody mourned his absence. He caught a glimpse of his mother waving from an upstairs window, and that unfamiliar gesture disturbed him, as if it were some mysterious farewell. But what particularly frightened him was the sight of a band-new baby carriage standing there on the porch, with the smug, encroaching air of a coffin; even that was empty, as if, in the reverse course of events, his very bones disintegrated.”
Nabokov is looking at a bit of old film before he was born and had a strange feeling about his own absence. In this small moment, he unpacked and interrogated this feeling through simile and dark imagination. He could have simply said how uncanny he felt, that his pre-life resembled his after-life in his imagination.
Is this passage true? Yes – it’s his own truth through his imagination. We can surmise that his father is on the street filming his mother waving down to him and that the carriage is brand new because she’s about to have this baby, Vladimir. But now, through this account with Nabokov’s switching into third person about himself, he’s seeing a “glimpse” of the world without him in it and it’s disturbing. A happy gesture turns into a dark one. Instead of his mother waving excitedly down to his father in anticipation of having him, he imagine it as a “mysterious farewell.” The gift of a brand new carriage is to his mind a harbinger of something pre-existence and therefore can exist in any time that doesn’t include his presence, as in his death.
This is all true, but it is also imagined and we know that Nabokov did not lie to us. He is simply dissecting this feeling of unease. It is this same feeling that he wants to communicate to us to set the tone of his autobiography. Beginnings, he feels, can be exchanged with the end.