4˝ × 6˝ Time Machines: Nabokovian Mnemotechnics and Interwar Psychical Research

abstract: Taking the recently published records of Vladimir Nabokov's 1964 dream experiments as a point of departure, this article considers media affinities between transatlantic interwar psychical research—taking John William Dunne's 1927 An Experiment with Time , which inspired the novelist's experiments, as a focal point—and Nabokov's idiosyncratic conception of narrative fiction as a spatial (rather than temporal) medium. I suggest that, instead of modernity's better-known time media, both Dunne and Nabokov appropriated the media logic of older inscription technologies in their respective attempts (a metaphysics of serial time for Dunne and an aesthetics of timelessness for Nabokov) to overcome time's linearity.