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

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307
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interference.
Hermann, then, in trying to shape his own future is
trying to do something that has proved to be impossible.
He is also extremely badly qualified even to make the
attempt, for it becomes clear by and by that he has
not got the artistic gifts he claims to possess.
In order to re-combine or re-create the given world
"the artist should know the given world. " 15 The artist's
main instrument in acquiring knowledge of the
given world and using it for his creations is his memory:
"The act of retention is the act of art, artistic
selection, artistic blending, artistic re-combination
of actual events"
16,
and in the re-creation of the
past the same process must be at work: "... the combination
and juxtaposition of remembered details is
a main factor in the artistic process of reconstructing
one's past.. " 17
The discussion in the introduction of the process
of creation has shown that there is in Nabokov's view
nothing arbitrary either in the act of selection performed
by memory or in the way in which the artist
recombines events and recreates the world. Nabokov
hints at some "mysterious foresight" at work when mem-
ory stores elements in sich a way as to reveal links
and interrelations between them and make the pattern
they form transparent; and the artist, recreating the
world, or, specifically, recreating his past, selects
the elements he uses on the basis of the insight made
possible by memory. Hermann does claim to possess an
"artist's memory" (213), but his memory exhausts itself