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Fw: something for the N-list?
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Carolyn Kunin sent an illustration for the List, related to bubbling glasses and blue (not green) mermaids. They seem to thrive with acid lemons!
Like the blinis, with thin slices of lemon and sour cream that, in Pnin's pastiche, were lovingly prepared for his ex-wife in Geeta Roopnarine's pastiche of "Pnin." (Cf. " I am an MA Creative Writing student who follow your discussions closely. The mention of 'writealikes' perked my interest as I had written a pastiche on Nabokov's Pnin ... the relationship of Lisa (whom I call Lara) to Pnin. Instead of having her compose horrible poetry, I gave her an awful voice and instead of asking for money for Victor (Claude), I had her ask for one of Pnin's kidneys instead.It would be nice to get some feedback on the pastiche and how closely it approximates Nabokov's writing.]
JM: (On Roopnarine's Pastiche of "Pnin"): I loved the details about perfect blinis linked to "princess with the pea." Lara's demand that "Pnin" should
give away not his ova (like the popping round eggs of caviar he intended for her) but donate his kidney ( a new rage, postmodern project!) is fun. His
shying away from a cascade of scrambled words emerging from an open-ended funnel is great. The alternation between Pnin's love's submissiveness and
satirical objectivity is apt and so is the sentence: "...she left, dragging the light with her," as are the last lines related to it: "leaving him in the remembrance of the cold darkness of her heart-shaped mouth.// Well, I always said he looked moth-like with those two tuffs of hair sprouting behind his ears. And she, an inverted comet, pulling him in her wake." The only non-Nabokov item, as I see it from my foreign standpoint, is the predominant use of dialogue.
The reference to the oversensitive princess (a pea hidden below a pile of duvets) comes from a H.C.Andersen's story. It led me to Michael Maar's "Speak,Nabokov", when he details the presence of Andersen's "Little Mermaid" in the work of Nabokov. (I felt cheated by not finding her in Copenhagen but I was told that she'd been carried away, perhaps with stone and a few grains of salt, to an exhibit in Japan). Maar stresses the theme of homosexual love and androgyny.*Geeta, in her pastiche, hinted at Andersen/Nabokov's "cold queens," besides the rendering of a finicky Pnin-allergic Lara...
............................................................................................................................
* Cf.M.Maar "Speak, Nabokov", sub-chapter "Mermaids and Hetaerae" where he wrote: "the most brutal wars are civil and fratricidal ones. Along with Freud and Doestoyevsky, Mann occupies a few posts in the borderland that Nabokov claims for himself alone.// An important arena in this disputed territory is the fairy tale...Nabokov, too, was under the spell of the Danish writer...And the Snow Queen appears in it in various guises. The famous beginning of the fairy tale even plays a hidden key role in his novel Pnin."(18-19)
"Hans Andersen had been - take note! - a stained-glass artist in Lübeck before losing his mind and believing himself to be a cathedral. The man from Lübeck...fuses with the fairy-tale Dane into one person....Literature can be a great ballroom resounding with echoes...no more an accident that Humbert gives his nymphet a deluxe volume of Andersen's The Little Mermaid...His late novel Ada is a thinly veiled retelling of the sad fairy tale." (19-20)
"How closely Nabokov cleaves to his model in Ada becomes apparent when the novel is superimposed over the Andersen tale... Van and Ada are lovers against whom the little mermaid Lucette has no chance...She remains the third wheel, suffers in silence like the mermaid, and shares with her a watery death."(21)
"The death of the little mermaid must have been intended as Ada's climx from the beginning...It's astounding that Nabokov simultaneously manages to keep one eye on the Lübeck cathedral... Esmeralda and mermaid - the coupling comes directly from Thomas Mann"(22).
"Mermaids prior to Andersen have in common that they're cold and soulless.. Andersen's undine also wants an immortal soul, but the actual reason for her ascent into the human world is her silent love for the prince... In this fairy tale, Andersen was writing in code about his passion for Edvard Collin, the true love of his life. Like the fairy-tale prince, Collin tolerated the presence of the unusual old maid as a good friend in his house, but reserved his bedroom for real women. The Little Mermaid was written when Collin got married..." (23) "The mermaid is an androgynous male who loves another man and wants to be close to him, even if it brings him nothing but torments." (24) and much more with the link to Lolita/Aurora Lee as presented in TOOL (33).
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Like the blinis, with thin slices of lemon and sour cream that, in Pnin's pastiche, were lovingly prepared for his ex-wife in Geeta Roopnarine's pastiche of "Pnin." (Cf. " I am an MA Creative Writing student who follow your discussions closely. The mention of 'writealikes' perked my interest as I had written a pastiche on Nabokov's Pnin ... the relationship of Lisa (whom I call Lara) to Pnin. Instead of having her compose horrible poetry, I gave her an awful voice and instead of asking for money for Victor (Claude), I had her ask for one of Pnin's kidneys instead.It would be nice to get some feedback on the pastiche and how closely it approximates Nabokov's writing.]
JM: (On Roopnarine's Pastiche of "Pnin"): I loved the details about perfect blinis linked to "princess with the pea." Lara's demand that "Pnin" should
give away not his ova (like the popping round eggs of caviar he intended for her) but donate his kidney ( a new rage, postmodern project!) is fun. His
shying away from a cascade of scrambled words emerging from an open-ended funnel is great. The alternation between Pnin's love's submissiveness and
satirical objectivity is apt and so is the sentence: "...she left, dragging the light with her," as are the last lines related to it: "leaving him in the remembrance of the cold darkness of her heart-shaped mouth.// Well, I always said he looked moth-like with those two tuffs of hair sprouting behind his ears. And she, an inverted comet, pulling him in her wake." The only non-Nabokov item, as I see it from my foreign standpoint, is the predominant use of dialogue.
The reference to the oversensitive princess (a pea hidden below a pile of duvets) comes from a H.C.Andersen's story. It led me to Michael Maar's "Speak,Nabokov", when he details the presence of Andersen's "Little Mermaid" in the work of Nabokov. (I felt cheated by not finding her in Copenhagen but I was told that she'd been carried away, perhaps with stone and a few grains of salt, to an exhibit in Japan). Maar stresses the theme of homosexual love and androgyny.*Geeta, in her pastiche, hinted at Andersen/Nabokov's "cold queens," besides the rendering of a finicky Pnin-allergic Lara...
............................................................................................................................
* Cf.M.Maar "Speak, Nabokov", sub-chapter "Mermaids and Hetaerae" where he wrote: "the most brutal wars are civil and fratricidal ones. Along with Freud and Doestoyevsky, Mann occupies a few posts in the borderland that Nabokov claims for himself alone.// An important arena in this disputed territory is the fairy tale...Nabokov, too, was under the spell of the Danish writer...And the Snow Queen appears in it in various guises. The famous beginning of the fairy tale even plays a hidden key role in his novel Pnin."(18-19)
"Hans Andersen had been - take note! - a stained-glass artist in Lübeck before losing his mind and believing himself to be a cathedral. The man from Lübeck...fuses with the fairy-tale Dane into one person....Literature can be a great ballroom resounding with echoes...no more an accident that Humbert gives his nymphet a deluxe volume of Andersen's The Little Mermaid...His late novel Ada is a thinly veiled retelling of the sad fairy tale." (19-20)
"How closely Nabokov cleaves to his model in Ada becomes apparent when the novel is superimposed over the Andersen tale... Van and Ada are lovers against whom the little mermaid Lucette has no chance...She remains the third wheel, suffers in silence like the mermaid, and shares with her a watery death."(21)
"The death of the little mermaid must have been intended as Ada's climx from the beginning...It's astounding that Nabokov simultaneously manages to keep one eye on the Lübeck cathedral... Esmeralda and mermaid - the coupling comes directly from Thomas Mann"(22).
"Mermaids prior to Andersen have in common that they're cold and soulless.. Andersen's undine also wants an immortal soul, but the actual reason for her ascent into the human world is her silent love for the prince... In this fairy tale, Andersen was writing in code about his passion for Edvard Collin, the true love of his life. Like the fairy-tale prince, Collin tolerated the presence of the unusual old maid as a good friend in his house, but reserved his bedroom for real women. The Little Mermaid was written when Collin got married..." (23) "The mermaid is an androgynous male who loves another man and wants to be close to him, even if it brings him nothing but torments." (24) and much more with the link to Lolita/Aurora Lee as presented in TOOL (33).
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/
