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Re: [NABOKOV-L] Michael Maar's "Speak,Nabokov"
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IMHO, *Lolita *and *Pale Fire *are VN's diamonds. Comparatively, *Pnin *is
but a decent novella.
On Sat, Jul 10, 2010 at 8:35 PM, Jansy <jansy@aetern.us> wrote:
> "Ross Benjamin won an important award as the translator of Michael Maar's
> original book about Nabokov. I wonder, though, if he is not being considered
> more as Maar's ghost-writer into English...How many English readers are
> informed that the title of Maar's book is "Solus Rex: The Beautiful
> Malevolent World of Vladimir Nabokov" ? (my translation of it is
> controversial: what's the intended meaning of "Böse"? Angry?)..."
>
> In Moria in Excelsis - http://moriainexcelsis.blogspot.com/<http://www.google.com/url?sa=X&q=http://moriainexcelsis.blogspot.com/&ct=ga&cad=:s7:f2:v0:i2:ls:e1:p1:t1278805516:&cd=skiTrca9ez8&usg=AFQjCNFEhVtPcm6PmluchSOxuvN4BQhNSw>(Saturday,
> July 10, 2010 : how it's done:<http://moriainexcelsis.blogspot.com/2010/07/how-its-done.html>)
> we read:
> "The most recent *New York Review of Books* has an essay<http://moriainexcelsis.blogspot.com/2010/07/%E2%80%9Dhttp://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/jul/15/still-mysterious-enchanter/%E2%80%9D>by John Banville that purports to be a review of the newly-translated
> *Speak, Nabokov* by Michael Maar, but which is most successful in its
> evocation of just how it feels to be simultaneously put off by and in love
> with an author and his work.* It is also an extended exercise in how to
> write a review article – I give you its most stunning moment as proof:
> ‘What some deplore in Nabokov is the denial of imaginative maneuver, of
> that dreamy and delightful freedom of the reader to imagine *through* an
> author’s style and make a world of his or her own out of the materials the
> writer offers. The uncanny version of things that Nabokov presents us with
> is, for such unenchanted readers, a willful chloroforming and pinning down
> of that brightly fluttering spontaneity that is the essence of reality, or
> at least of that version of reality to be met with in prose fiction.’
> I love a well-managed metaphor, don’t you? Here’s what I love even more:
> a lesser writer would have used the word ‘butterfly,’ would have made
> explicit reference to VN’s life-long lepidopterist-hobbyism, would have
> quoted the relevant passage from *Lolita*. Almost no pop-essay on the
> author fails to do just this. Banville, however, simply winks at the
> connoisseur while deploying a figure equally accessible, and equally moving,
> to the neophyte. Then he passes on without further remark. Pitch fucking
> perfect. And I love it.** " **Banville and I agree that Speak, Nabokov is
> an atrocious title, and we both prefer the German: Solus Rex: Die schöne
> böse Welt des Vladimir Nabokov.* Irrelevantly, we agree also that not *Lo*,
> not *Pale Fire*, and certainly effing not *Ada*, but *Pnin* is VN's true
> masterwork. I like this man. I may have to read one of his books. **Yes, I
> think the blog is back for good now. We both needed some space. But I think
> we're patching things up.
>
> *JM*: What I find strange in Maar's title and Banville's commentary about
> the "Medusa" theme is that although both mention Freud and his work "The
> Uncanny" (*Das Unheimliche*)*, they fail to mention Freud's "The Medusa
> head" (1922/1940, *Das Medusenhaupt*). Maar's conceptualization couldn't
> be more distant from Freud's remarks ( for Maar speaks of "harmony with the
> universe" and "pantheistic bliss'!!!) The quote from TOoL he selects from
> Maar and expands, adds another strange slant to his comments:
> "What is most striking,” Maar writes, “is not even that Lolita has
> forerunners—it’s that she has successors.” ... “There is, there was, only
> one girl in my life, an object of terror and tenderness[...]…” Thus Phillip
> Wild, “Lecturer in Experimental Psychology, University of Ganglia,” stoutly
> confesses in *The Original of Laura*... And what about this passage, in
> which Wild in a dream encounters Aurora Lee, a revenant from Poe via *
> Lolita*?
>
> "I lifted the hem of your dress—something I never had done in the past—and
> stroked, moulded, pinched ever so softly your pale prominent nates, while
> you stood perfectly still as if considering new possibilities of power and
> pleasure and interior decoration. At the height of your guarded ecstasy I
> thrust my cupped hand from behind between your consenting thighs and felt
> the sweat-stuck folds of a long scrotum and then, further in front, the
> droop of a short member."
>
>
> *From the wikipedia*: "Freud argues that decapitation equals castration.
> The terror of Medusa is thus a terror of castration that is linked to the
> sight of something. Numerous analyses have made us familiar with the
> occasion for this: it occurs when a boy, who has hitherto been unwilling to
> believe the threat of castration, catches sight of the female genitals,
> probably those of an adult, surrounded by hair, and essentially those of his
> mother...If Medusa's head takes the place of a representation of the female
> genitals, or rather if it isolates their horrifying effects from the
> pleasure-giving ones, it may be recalled that displaying the genitals is
> familiar in other connections as an apotropaic act. What arouses horror in
> oneself will produce that same effect upon the enemy against whom one is
> seeking to defend oneself. We read in Rabelais of how the Devil took to
> flight when the woman showed her vulva."
>
>
>
> ...................................................................................................
> * Banville writes in the NY Review of Books ("The Still Mysterious
> Enchanter"): "Freud, the Viennese quack, as Nabokov repeatedly
> characterized him, conceives of the uncanny as the bringing back in changed
> form of things already known: as the defamiliarization of the familiar.
> These revenants frighten us—or, as so often in the case of Nabokov, enchant
> us—by being both old and new. Nabokov’s singular prose style burnishes the
> commonplace world so that genies jump out of it, and the reader’s response
> depends on whether he is willing to be magicked away into a realm that he
> knows well and yet feels not quite at home in."..."The theme of the uncanny,
> of the sudden transfiguration of the familiar, is raised early on in Michael
> Maar’s *Speak, Nabokov*. Maar, one of the finest of the younger generation
> of German critics [...[is a literary detective who knows where very many
> bodies are buried."..."People in Nabokov’s work, particularly narrators,
> repeatedly stumble through the looking-glass of quotidian reality into a
> world where all that had been known is transformed in an instant of ecstatic
> divination or, on occasion, overpowering terror. In *Speak, Nabokov*, Maar
> designates this phenomenon the “medusa experience,” taking his lead from the
> 1935 story “Torpid Smoke” in which the central character, a dreamy young
> émigré living in Berlin, feels that “in the same way as the luminosity of
> the water and its every throb pass through a medusa, so everything traversed
> his inner being, and that sense of fluidity became transfigured into
> something like second sight.” In this version of it, Maar writes, “the
> medusa experience is one of harmony with the universe and pantheistic bliss.”
>
>
>
> Search the archive<http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en> Contact
> the Editors <nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu> Visit "Nabokov
> Online Journal" <http://www.nabokovonline.com> Visit Zembla<http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm> View
> Nabokv-L Policies <http://web.utk.edu/%7Esblackwe/EDNote.htm> Manage
> subscription options <http://listserv.ucsb.edu/>
>
> All private editorial communications, without exception, are read by both
> co-editors.
>
--
Norky
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Manage subscription options: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/
but a decent novella.
On Sat, Jul 10, 2010 at 8:35 PM, Jansy <jansy@aetern.us> wrote:
> "Ross Benjamin won an important award as the translator of Michael Maar's
> original book about Nabokov. I wonder, though, if he is not being considered
> more as Maar's ghost-writer into English...How many English readers are
> informed that the title of Maar's book is "Solus Rex: The Beautiful
> Malevolent World of Vladimir Nabokov" ? (my translation of it is
> controversial: what's the intended meaning of "Böse"? Angry?)..."
>
> In Moria in Excelsis - http://moriainexcelsis.blogspot.com/<http://www.google.com/url?sa=X&q=http://moriainexcelsis.blogspot.com/&ct=ga&cad=:s7:f2:v0:i2:ls:e1:p1:t1278805516:&cd=skiTrca9ez8&usg=AFQjCNFEhVtPcm6PmluchSOxuvN4BQhNSw>(Saturday,
> July 10, 2010 : how it's done:<http://moriainexcelsis.blogspot.com/2010/07/how-its-done.html>)
> we read:
> "The most recent *New York Review of Books* has an essay<http://moriainexcelsis.blogspot.com/2010/07/%E2%80%9Dhttp://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/jul/15/still-mysterious-enchanter/%E2%80%9D>by John Banville that purports to be a review of the newly-translated
> *Speak, Nabokov* by Michael Maar, but which is most successful in its
> evocation of just how it feels to be simultaneously put off by and in love
> with an author and his work.* It is also an extended exercise in how to
> write a review article – I give you its most stunning moment as proof:
> ‘What some deplore in Nabokov is the denial of imaginative maneuver, of
> that dreamy and delightful freedom of the reader to imagine *through* an
> author’s style and make a world of his or her own out of the materials the
> writer offers. The uncanny version of things that Nabokov presents us with
> is, for such unenchanted readers, a willful chloroforming and pinning down
> of that brightly fluttering spontaneity that is the essence of reality, or
> at least of that version of reality to be met with in prose fiction.’
> I love a well-managed metaphor, don’t you? Here’s what I love even more:
> a lesser writer would have used the word ‘butterfly,’ would have made
> explicit reference to VN’s life-long lepidopterist-hobbyism, would have
> quoted the relevant passage from *Lolita*. Almost no pop-essay on the
> author fails to do just this. Banville, however, simply winks at the
> connoisseur while deploying a figure equally accessible, and equally moving,
> to the neophyte. Then he passes on without further remark. Pitch fucking
> perfect. And I love it.** " **Banville and I agree that Speak, Nabokov is
> an atrocious title, and we both prefer the German: Solus Rex: Die schöne
> böse Welt des Vladimir Nabokov.* Irrelevantly, we agree also that not *Lo*,
> not *Pale Fire*, and certainly effing not *Ada*, but *Pnin* is VN's true
> masterwork. I like this man. I may have to read one of his books. **Yes, I
> think the blog is back for good now. We both needed some space. But I think
> we're patching things up.
>
> *JM*: What I find strange in Maar's title and Banville's commentary about
> the "Medusa" theme is that although both mention Freud and his work "The
> Uncanny" (*Das Unheimliche*)*, they fail to mention Freud's "The Medusa
> head" (1922/1940, *Das Medusenhaupt*). Maar's conceptualization couldn't
> be more distant from Freud's remarks ( for Maar speaks of "harmony with the
> universe" and "pantheistic bliss'!!!) The quote from TOoL he selects from
> Maar and expands, adds another strange slant to his comments:
> "What is most striking,” Maar writes, “is not even that Lolita has
> forerunners—it’s that she has successors.” ... “There is, there was, only
> one girl in my life, an object of terror and tenderness[...]…” Thus Phillip
> Wild, “Lecturer in Experimental Psychology, University of Ganglia,” stoutly
> confesses in *The Original of Laura*... And what about this passage, in
> which Wild in a dream encounters Aurora Lee, a revenant from Poe via *
> Lolita*?
>
> "I lifted the hem of your dress—something I never had done in the past—and
> stroked, moulded, pinched ever so softly your pale prominent nates, while
> you stood perfectly still as if considering new possibilities of power and
> pleasure and interior decoration. At the height of your guarded ecstasy I
> thrust my cupped hand from behind between your consenting thighs and felt
> the sweat-stuck folds of a long scrotum and then, further in front, the
> droop of a short member."
>
>
> *From the wikipedia*: "Freud argues that decapitation equals castration.
> The terror of Medusa is thus a terror of castration that is linked to the
> sight of something. Numerous analyses have made us familiar with the
> occasion for this: it occurs when a boy, who has hitherto been unwilling to
> believe the threat of castration, catches sight of the female genitals,
> probably those of an adult, surrounded by hair, and essentially those of his
> mother...If Medusa's head takes the place of a representation of the female
> genitals, or rather if it isolates their horrifying effects from the
> pleasure-giving ones, it may be recalled that displaying the genitals is
> familiar in other connections as an apotropaic act. What arouses horror in
> oneself will produce that same effect upon the enemy against whom one is
> seeking to defend oneself. We read in Rabelais of how the Devil took to
> flight when the woman showed her vulva."
>
>
>
> ...................................................................................................
> * Banville writes in the NY Review of Books ("The Still Mysterious
> Enchanter"): "Freud, the Viennese quack, as Nabokov repeatedly
> characterized him, conceives of the uncanny as the bringing back in changed
> form of things already known: as the defamiliarization of the familiar.
> These revenants frighten us—or, as so often in the case of Nabokov, enchant
> us—by being both old and new. Nabokov’s singular prose style burnishes the
> commonplace world so that genies jump out of it, and the reader’s response
> depends on whether he is willing to be magicked away into a realm that he
> knows well and yet feels not quite at home in."..."The theme of the uncanny,
> of the sudden transfiguration of the familiar, is raised early on in Michael
> Maar’s *Speak, Nabokov*. Maar, one of the finest of the younger generation
> of German critics [...[is a literary detective who knows where very many
> bodies are buried."..."People in Nabokov’s work, particularly narrators,
> repeatedly stumble through the looking-glass of quotidian reality into a
> world where all that had been known is transformed in an instant of ecstatic
> divination or, on occasion, overpowering terror. In *Speak, Nabokov*, Maar
> designates this phenomenon the “medusa experience,” taking his lead from the
> 1935 story “Torpid Smoke” in which the central character, a dreamy young
> émigré living in Berlin, feels that “in the same way as the luminosity of
> the water and its every throb pass through a medusa, so everything traversed
> his inner being, and that sense of fluidity became transfigured into
> something like second sight.” In this version of it, Maar writes, “the
> medusa experience is one of harmony with the universe and pantheistic bliss.”
>
>
>
> Search the archive<http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en> Contact
> the Editors <nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu> Visit "Nabokov
> Online Journal" <http://www.nabokovonline.com> Visit Zembla<http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm> View
> Nabokv-L Policies <http://web.utk.edu/%7Esblackwe/EDNote.htm> Manage
> subscription options <http://listserv.ucsb.edu/>
>
> All private editorial communications, without exception, are read by both
> co-editors.
>
--
Norky
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/