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Re: THOUGHTS: artists don't have to be consistent...or do
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LH ( to JA): VN warned his readers again and again that great works of art are fairy tales and he meant it! It was not just an empty phrase to tickle critics and readers. A character in fairy tales has "attributes": poor physical hygiene is one of the "attributes" of the "villain"; another example of such "attributes" is the silver object the hero uses (Baron Wolfe's silver case -sorry, I can't help it!) or is given (V's silver pencil in RLSK) or is stolen (Herman's silver pencil in D !!) and which enables him to - or not to in Herman's case - go through the ordeal of death/mortality[...]This not so silly idea crops up again and again indeed, in many other VN's stories. RLSK chapter 16: "that if you looked well at the prettiest girl while she was exuding the cream of the commonplace, you were sure to find some minute blemish in her beauty" says Sebastian, which does not prevent him from being enslaved by precisely one of these "prettiest girl"(= death/ mortality), before being saved (by the silver pencil = art)and born again under the form of V.In fact, I think this is the basic plot in nearly all VN's stories [...] BS, imo, is more about Krug's than Paduk's weaknesses.
J. Aisenberg: Why can't we have a Nabokov who lives and thrives a long time balanced with Wilde. I mean after all Lolita, like Dorian Gray, is fantastically iconic[...] Dorian Gray, which seems a little melodramatic in the Sybil Vane bits, as well as seeming homosexual without quite being so, an evasion refreshingly absent in Lolita; on the other hand who would put down a play like The Importance of being Earnest, which is wonderful. About whose letters will survive, I would not know, but I'd wager you're probably right on that front--the N. and Wilson collection is surely just for Nabokov nerds, though in the spirit of which letters will be more immortal than thou, aren't the ones exchanged between Flaubert and Louise Colet, or Flaubert and George Sand even more likely than all of them to continue to be read?
A. Sklyarenko :In the night of the Burning Barn, when Van and Ada make love for the first time, they see three silhouettes from the library window[...]The child or dwarf in this company is certainly Kim Beauharnais[...]Benten, the name of the sea goddess on several Japanese islands [...] mentioned in Ada, but on Antiterra it turns out to be a kerosene lamp's commercial name[...]The seven letters Ada has taken, S, R, E, N, O, K, I, and is sorting out in her spektrik (the little trough of japanned wood each player had before him; spektrik means "a little spectrum" in Russian) form the word she has just spoken. The miraculousness of this coincidence leaves us no time to wonder: why there is no kerosene in the lamp?[...]The kerosene from the Benten lamp[...] was used for setting the Barn on fire. Who were the arsonists? [...]What Ada doesn't say, is that this coincidence was contrived - at least, partly - by her[...] Ada doesn't seem to be "as pure as night sky" in the night of The Burning Barn; more likely, she "indulges in a cold game" with Van (of whom she already knows that he is her brother, while he still believes that she is his first cousin).
JM: Nabokov once said that "... great novels are great fairy tales" . He also wrote that the strategies of pornographic novels express "a mentality stemming from the routine of 'true' fairy tales in childhood", a curious parallel.
He accepted the English title "The Enchanter" for Volshebnik, in which Humbert Humbert's putative predecessor "casts his spell" over a sleeping girl by "passing his magic wand above her body", but he also affirmed that enchantment derives from his reaction to a particular string of sounds and patterns. In his own words, "a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords [...] aesthetic bliss" and "it is the enchanter, more than the yarn-spinner or the teacher" who interests him. Laurence Hochard's theories, themselves, afford us a sensation of listening to classic fairy-tales and its black & white stereotypes,contrived symbols and magic wands (btw, lack of hygiene can be sexually stimulating to some due to its closeness to exciting olfactory information that is enjoyed by quadrupeds).
My point is: VN mentioned fairy-tales in relation to enchantment and aesthetic bliss, but also as applying to plain erotica but, in this case, he was describing not symbology but the "structure" of the story. I wonder if LH could expand on this differentiating item (fairy-tale strategies).
Like J.A, I think we can enjoy both Nabokov and Wilde, with due respect to individual tastes. Like in the point intended by Studdard (as I surmise) we gain nothing by comparing authors in a competitive, disrespectful animus. Instead of defects we could pursue a way to have one artist enhance the qualities of the other?
SB suggested we move on from the discussion about "consistency". And yet, while I was waiting in line somewhere, I picked up a Wallace Stevens collection of essays, in which he developped his ideas on "connotation and denotation in art", and the various historical instances favoring one over the other. These are two other complicated words to introduce here but I wonder if Sklyarenko's method represents a kind of amplified game of connotations, one through which we move away from poetry onto a kind of "mathematical" thinking.Would VN have intended both, enchantment and cold reasoning encased inside a single shell?
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J. Aisenberg: Why can't we have a Nabokov who lives and thrives a long time balanced with Wilde. I mean after all Lolita, like Dorian Gray, is fantastically iconic[...] Dorian Gray, which seems a little melodramatic in the Sybil Vane bits, as well as seeming homosexual without quite being so, an evasion refreshingly absent in Lolita; on the other hand who would put down a play like The Importance of being Earnest, which is wonderful. About whose letters will survive, I would not know, but I'd wager you're probably right on that front--the N. and Wilson collection is surely just for Nabokov nerds, though in the spirit of which letters will be more immortal than thou, aren't the ones exchanged between Flaubert and Louise Colet, or Flaubert and George Sand even more likely than all of them to continue to be read?
A. Sklyarenko :In the night of the Burning Barn, when Van and Ada make love for the first time, they see three silhouettes from the library window[...]The child or dwarf in this company is certainly Kim Beauharnais[...]Benten, the name of the sea goddess on several Japanese islands [...] mentioned in Ada, but on Antiterra it turns out to be a kerosene lamp's commercial name[...]The seven letters Ada has taken, S, R, E, N, O, K, I, and is sorting out in her spektrik (the little trough of japanned wood each player had before him; spektrik means "a little spectrum" in Russian) form the word she has just spoken. The miraculousness of this coincidence leaves us no time to wonder: why there is no kerosene in the lamp?[...]The kerosene from the Benten lamp[...] was used for setting the Barn on fire. Who were the arsonists? [...]What Ada doesn't say, is that this coincidence was contrived - at least, partly - by her[...] Ada doesn't seem to be "as pure as night sky" in the night of The Burning Barn; more likely, she "indulges in a cold game" with Van (of whom she already knows that he is her brother, while he still believes that she is his first cousin).
JM: Nabokov once said that "... great novels are great fairy tales" . He also wrote that the strategies of pornographic novels express "a mentality stemming from the routine of 'true' fairy tales in childhood", a curious parallel.
He accepted the English title "The Enchanter" for Volshebnik, in which Humbert Humbert's putative predecessor "casts his spell" over a sleeping girl by "passing his magic wand above her body", but he also affirmed that enchantment derives from his reaction to a particular string of sounds and patterns. In his own words, "a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords [...] aesthetic bliss" and "it is the enchanter, more than the yarn-spinner or the teacher" who interests him. Laurence Hochard's theories, themselves, afford us a sensation of listening to classic fairy-tales and its black & white stereotypes,contrived symbols and magic wands (btw, lack of hygiene can be sexually stimulating to some due to its closeness to exciting olfactory information that is enjoyed by quadrupeds).
My point is: VN mentioned fairy-tales in relation to enchantment and aesthetic bliss, but also as applying to plain erotica but, in this case, he was describing not symbology but the "structure" of the story. I wonder if LH could expand on this differentiating item (fairy-tale strategies).
Like J.A, I think we can enjoy both Nabokov and Wilde, with due respect to individual tastes. Like in the point intended by Studdard (as I surmise) we gain nothing by comparing authors in a competitive, disrespectful animus. Instead of defects we could pursue a way to have one artist enhance the qualities of the other?
SB suggested we move on from the discussion about "consistency". And yet, while I was waiting in line somewhere, I picked up a Wallace Stevens collection of essays, in which he developped his ideas on "connotation and denotation in art", and the various historical instances favoring one over the other. These are two other complicated words to introduce here but I wonder if Sklyarenko's method represents a kind of amplified game of connotations, one through which we move away from poetry onto a kind of "mathematical" thinking.Would VN have intended both, enchantment and cold reasoning encased inside a single shell?
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/