''Vladimir Nabokov's Comic Quest for Reality' - Nottingham eTheses

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graphical elements in literary works, he explains that
imagination is
...
a form of memory...
An image depends on the power of association,
and association is supplied
and prompted by memory. When we speak
of a vivid individual recollection we
are paying a compliment not to our capacity
of retention but to Mnemosyne's
mysterious foresight in having stored
up this or that element which creative
imagination may use when combining it
with later recollections and inventions.
43
It is, then, for purely artistic reasons that per-
sonal recollections and thoughts find entrance into
an author's work. They are taken out of their orig-
inal context and combined with other elements accord-
ing to the demands of the individual work, so that
they may in fact no longer contain any information
about the author; the critic and biographer should
therefore beware of "dotting all the its, with the
author's head"44 or of otherwise establishing too
close a connection between the characters and ideas
of a book and its author.
Even if one does not look for direct hints, and
concrete information about the author's life but ap-
proaches the work as the expression of his mind: how
can one hope to read it exactly as he conceived it?
How can one be sure to discover in it exactly what
went on in his mind when composing it, what processes
of forming and combining preceded the creation of
what we are reading?. How can one be sure exactly what in-
spired it and what the sources of the final product
were? Words are open to misinterpxetation. There is
the danger that the biographer will find in them only