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Re: Fw: something for the N-list?
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Hello, Geeta
In your reply you brought up a theme that has fascinated Nabokov (the reference to when (if) people are reunited in heaven and the fear of mingling with a shrivelled lame soul.) Not only in fiction when, for example, Humbert often perceived Lolita as a very common little girl, but also in his comments about Proust's Recherche, the vision of Albertine's vulgarity in the interstices of his character's narcisistic blindness. Also found in Nabokov's indignation related to Flaubert's choice to bring to life a bourgeois Emma (if I attribute this shock to him correctly).
I've been plodding thru Helen Deutsch's "Loving Dr. Johnson," for I'm not English nor am I familiar with all the academic references she sows along, like a happy ploughman of regional references. She even envisions Samuel Johnson as a kind of pineal gland in the body of Descartes! Anyway, inspite of my own qualms, I dare recommend her book to you on the matter of "imitation" (by Pope, Johnson, among other authors of that period).
A few quotes (HD,p.212):
"In its endless play with mirrors and in its tragicomic exploration of author love, Pale Fire has been acknowlegded by critics for a host of creative transformations of literary sources, but it has never been read as perhaps the ultimate homage to Boswell's autoptic vision and proprietaty devotion to his dead hero in the Life... (and bring that) particular strand of Nabokov's complicated pattern of allusion and imitation to light."
"Nabokov's Pale Fire and Boswell's Life are both blocked mirrors of readerly desire, a desire that creates art out of the death of the author...This motif (Shakespeare's lines from Timon of Athens) of resemblance as both theft and transformation...is rendered deathly by the first lines of the poem "Pale Fire"... To repeat an image, to borrow its "pale fire," is not only to steal but to deceive, with potentially deathly consequences. But while art's resemblances can kill, they can also transform death." (op.cit.215)
Jansy
From: Geeta Roopnarine
Sent: Thursday, July 22, 2010 7:28 AM
To: NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU
Subject: Re: [NABOKV-L] Fw: something for the N-list?
Thank you, Jansy for the detailed coments on my pastiche.
You are right about Lisa. She is more a haughty cold Queen of the North than a finicky princess:
'She always felt hot and buoyant no matter the cold...' Pnin, pg 44 (Penguin 1997)
This idea of a haughty coldness bears out with her continuous attempt to 'castrate' Pnin from the moment she married him on the rebound, then forcing him to pay an allowance to Victor, to criticising his friends, his home and even the colour of his suit.
The sadness or rather the beauty of this relationship is that Pnin recognises her for what she is, recognises that he is unable to do anything about his feelings about her here on this earth and yet wonders:
'If people are reunited in heaven (...) then how shall I stop it from creeping upon me, over me, that shrivelled, helpless, lame thing, her soul?'
Pnin, pg48
Steve,
Yes, I took the approximation to David Foster Wallace with a big pinch of salt after being overwhelmed with gratitude initially that it was not compared to Dan Brown. Then I spent an hour submitting various pieces of my own work. I submitted maybe five different portions from one chapter and I got a range of writers from Stephen King, Joyce and Hemingway. Then I submitted from another chapter and it was biased intially to Orwell and then heavily towards Stephen King. It was an interesting exercise in the sense I could see where my writing was loose and where it tended to become tighter.
I totally agree with your statement:
"Be yourself, without trying to imitate anyone."
Most writers are egoistic enough to want to see what comes out. I know I am interested in seeing what lurks within me. But I believe new writers (like young artists who copy great draughtsmen like Da Vinci or Raphael) can open their eyes to new ways of seeing and understanding by looking closely at a master.
Thank you both,
Geeta
----- Original Message -----
From: Jansy
To: NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU
Sent: Wednesday, July 21, 2010 6:27 PM
Subject: [NABOKV-L] Fw: something for the N-list?
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).
Search the archive Contact the Editors Visit "Nabokov Online Journal"
Visit Zembla View Nabokv-L Policies Manage subscription options
All private editorial communications, without exception, are read by both co-editors.
Search the archive Contact the Editors Visit "Nabokov Online Journal"
Visit Zembla View Nabokv-L Policies Manage subscription options
All private editorial communications, without exception, are read by both co-editors.
Search archive with Google:
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Visit "Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
Manage subscription options: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/
In your reply you brought up a theme that has fascinated Nabokov (the reference to when (if) people are reunited in heaven and the fear of mingling with a shrivelled lame soul.) Not only in fiction when, for example, Humbert often perceived Lolita as a very common little girl, but also in his comments about Proust's Recherche, the vision of Albertine's vulgarity in the interstices of his character's narcisistic blindness. Also found in Nabokov's indignation related to Flaubert's choice to bring to life a bourgeois Emma (if I attribute this shock to him correctly).
I've been plodding thru Helen Deutsch's "Loving Dr. Johnson," for I'm not English nor am I familiar with all the academic references she sows along, like a happy ploughman of regional references. She even envisions Samuel Johnson as a kind of pineal gland in the body of Descartes! Anyway, inspite of my own qualms, I dare recommend her book to you on the matter of "imitation" (by Pope, Johnson, among other authors of that period).
A few quotes (HD,p.212):
"In its endless play with mirrors and in its tragicomic exploration of author love, Pale Fire has been acknowlegded by critics for a host of creative transformations of literary sources, but it has never been read as perhaps the ultimate homage to Boswell's autoptic vision and proprietaty devotion to his dead hero in the Life... (and bring that) particular strand of Nabokov's complicated pattern of allusion and imitation to light."
"Nabokov's Pale Fire and Boswell's Life are both blocked mirrors of readerly desire, a desire that creates art out of the death of the author...This motif (Shakespeare's lines from Timon of Athens) of resemblance as both theft and transformation...is rendered deathly by the first lines of the poem "Pale Fire"... To repeat an image, to borrow its "pale fire," is not only to steal but to deceive, with potentially deathly consequences. But while art's resemblances can kill, they can also transform death." (op.cit.215)
Jansy
From: Geeta Roopnarine
Sent: Thursday, July 22, 2010 7:28 AM
To: NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU
Subject: Re: [NABOKV-L] Fw: something for the N-list?
Thank you, Jansy for the detailed coments on my pastiche.
You are right about Lisa. She is more a haughty cold Queen of the North than a finicky princess:
'She always felt hot and buoyant no matter the cold...' Pnin, pg 44 (Penguin 1997)
This idea of a haughty coldness bears out with her continuous attempt to 'castrate' Pnin from the moment she married him on the rebound, then forcing him to pay an allowance to Victor, to criticising his friends, his home and even the colour of his suit.
The sadness or rather the beauty of this relationship is that Pnin recognises her for what she is, recognises that he is unable to do anything about his feelings about her here on this earth and yet wonders:
'If people are reunited in heaven (...) then how shall I stop it from creeping upon me, over me, that shrivelled, helpless, lame thing, her soul?'
Pnin, pg48
Steve,
Yes, I took the approximation to David Foster Wallace with a big pinch of salt after being overwhelmed with gratitude initially that it was not compared to Dan Brown. Then I spent an hour submitting various pieces of my own work. I submitted maybe five different portions from one chapter and I got a range of writers from Stephen King, Joyce and Hemingway. Then I submitted from another chapter and it was biased intially to Orwell and then heavily towards Stephen King. It was an interesting exercise in the sense I could see where my writing was loose and where it tended to become tighter.
I totally agree with your statement:
"Be yourself, without trying to imitate anyone."
Most writers are egoistic enough to want to see what comes out. I know I am interested in seeing what lurks within me. But I believe new writers (like young artists who copy great draughtsmen like Da Vinci or Raphael) can open their eyes to new ways of seeing and understanding by looking closely at a master.
Thank you both,
Geeta
----- Original Message -----
From: Jansy
To: NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU
Sent: Wednesday, July 21, 2010 6:27 PM
Subject: [NABOKV-L] Fw: something for the N-list?
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).
Search the archive Contact the Editors Visit "Nabokov Online Journal"
Visit Zembla View Nabokv-L Policies Manage subscription options
All private editorial communications, without exception, are read by both co-editors.
Search the archive Contact the Editors Visit "Nabokov Online Journal"
Visit Zembla View Nabokv-L Policies Manage subscription options
All private editorial communications, without exception, are read by both co-editors.
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/