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TO INSCRIBE SOMETHING IS first of all an act of memory. Regardless of what, to whom, or why I write, my words become traces of the past at the very moment when they are imprinted. Accordingly, writing has a capacity to store historical data, to document and record what has taken place. By inscribing what happens on a particular occasion, I provide myself with a supplement that can retain details even if I forget them. I thus increase my chances of recalling past events-of holding on to my own life-but by the same token I mark a precarious temporality. Without the thought of a reader to come (whether myself or someone else), there would be no reason for me to write. The addressed future, however, is essentially perilous. When someone reads my text I may already be dead, or the significance of my words may no longer be the same. Moreover, the inscriptions themselves always risk being erased.
Thus, if writing can counter oblivion, it simultaneously reveals a latent threat. Writing would be superfluous for an immortal being, who could never experience the fear of forgetting. Conversely, the need to write (if only a memo or a mental note) stems from the temporal finitude of everything that happens. My act of inscribing something already indicates that I may forget it. Writing thus testifies to my dependence on that which is "exterior" to me.1 Even my own thoughts disappear from me at the moment they occur and must be imprinted as traces in their very event.
The texts of Vladimir Nabokov strongly reinforce the desire to keep what can be taken away, to remember what can be forgotten. Many of Nabokov's novels are fictive memoirs where the protagonists narrate their own lives. I will track how such writing is haunted by temporal finitude.
A good place to begin is Nabokov's own autobiography Speak, Memory. Here, Nabokov ascribes a tremendous power to his proper consciousness and emphasizes his wakeful ability to recreate the past. This posture may appear to confirm Nabokov's notorious hubris, but such a reproach disregards the innate risks of Nabokov's self-assurance. The celebrated consciousness in Speak, Memory is not an idealized entity, but one hypersensitive to the temporality of its own existence. The section...