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TOoL: Formal Experiments
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If I may continue for a moment on a thread from my last posting:
I forgot to mention Cortazar's Hopscotch, which can be read straight
through ending at Chapter 56, or read following a pre-set non-
chronological sequence which incorporates many more of 99 "expendable"
chapters.
Markson has written several "novels" composed of fragments or
statements of historical fact, many simply single sentence entries to
achieve a type of tapestry effect for lack of a better description.
( This is not a Novel; Vanishing Point; etc. )
Dunn's Ibid: A Life, is a "novel" whose narrative has been lost by the
publisher or something, and only contains the footnotes to the
missing, unknown text.
( Of course there's Wallace's Infinite Jest, and Koster's Dissertation
modeled on the Pale Fire scheme with a hundred or 2 hundred pages of
notes following the text. )
I guess my point is Nabokov broke ground for so much of this
experimentation-- I know there's Ulysses, and Tristram Shandy; and I
know he was the ultimate perfectionist dictating how the reader
received his work-- but did it ever cross his mind to try something
like Hopscotch, or Michner's shuffled page Kaleidoscope, or the
current incarnation of Laura allowing us to "rearrange" at our whim?
Darryl Schade
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I forgot to mention Cortazar's Hopscotch, which can be read straight
through ending at Chapter 56, or read following a pre-set non-
chronological sequence which incorporates many more of 99 "expendable"
chapters.
Markson has written several "novels" composed of fragments or
statements of historical fact, many simply single sentence entries to
achieve a type of tapestry effect for lack of a better description.
( This is not a Novel; Vanishing Point; etc. )
Dunn's Ibid: A Life, is a "novel" whose narrative has been lost by the
publisher or something, and only contains the footnotes to the
missing, unknown text.
( Of course there's Wallace's Infinite Jest, and Koster's Dissertation
modeled on the Pale Fire scheme with a hundred or 2 hundred pages of
notes following the text. )
I guess my point is Nabokov broke ground for so much of this
experimentation-- I know there's Ulysses, and Tristram Shandy; and I
know he was the ultimate perfectionist dictating how the reader
received his work-- but did it ever cross his mind to try something
like Hopscotch, or Michner's shuffled page Kaleidoscope, or the
current incarnation of Laura allowing us to "rearrange" at our whim?
Darryl Schade
Search archive with Google:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
Visit "Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
Manage subscription options: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/