“Speak, Memory” and “Look at the Harlequins!”: Fictional, non-fictional and burlesque discourse in Vladimir Nabokov’s memoir novels

Abstract

The paper explores the correlating principles of fictional and non-fictional narration in memoir novels “Speak, Memory” and “Look at the Harlequins!” by V. Nabokov and their artistic features. His memoir-philosophical novel “Speak, Memory” is a correlation of fictional and non-fictional reflections on “time and myself”. Using the associative style of narration, the author effectively reconstructs the lost “time pattern”, overlapping three time layers in the novel “Speak, Memory” with the help of symbolic images and leitmotifs generated by them. “Look at the Harlequins!” proves to be a grotesque postmodern autoparody on the “biographie romancée” of the mentally insane author – Russian emigrée V. V. Irisin (the anagrammatic twin of V. V. Sirin). Envious of his fortunate compatriot’s fame, Irisin takes credit for a number of this author’s already published novels surrealistically distorting them in his own whimsical way. As a result, it becomes a postmodern novel with such tendencies as: deliberate anti-aesthetics in delineation of illness and personal decay, presence of the untraditional mentally insane marginal narrator, taboo themes, double characters and spreading intertextuality. By creating such a postmodern writer’s biography, Nabokov vented his spleen after the long conflict with the young American researcher A. Field, the author of the book titled “Nabokov: His Life in Part” that contained innumerable absurdities and various speculations on the writer’s biography.