Subject
Rimbaud, Baudelaire and "sympathy"
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Date
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Away from home, my chances of reaching familiar VN books are nul, neither can I access his digitalized novels.
I remember Alexey Sklyarenko's article in The Nabokovian about Ada's triple dreams and, researching internet Rimbaud, I came to "Le dormeur du val", also probably referred to in ADA: " C'est un trou de verdure où chante une rivière,/ ...,/.. c'est un petit val qui mousse de rayons.// Un soldat jeune, bouche ouverte, tête nue,/...Dort ; il est étendu dans l'herbe, sous la nue,/...il dort. Souriant comme/Sourirait un enfant malade, /../Les parfums ne font pas frissonner sa narine ;/Il dort dans le soleil, la main sur sa poitrine,/Tranquille. Il a deux trous rouges au côté droit."
I had plans to check two kinds of elective afinities, or sympathetic resonances and synesthaesia:
(a) two loving hearts beating in unison, as in MR's Glanvill lute or VN's amorandola ( explained by CK), which have a non-romantic equivalent, a pathology described in Psychoanalysis by M.Klein - of which VN was certainly aware since, already in "The Enchanter", we find it described when a lady leaves the train-compartment she shared with the seducer and his little girl - i.e, the mechanism of "projective identification" that describes the risks of emotional contamination from someone else's "evil" wishes, of entering the same distorted frequency as the emittent's. Like separating a newborn dog from its mother and checking the effect, upon the latter, of small tortures caused to her offspring ( as in Dava Sobel's description for a measure of longitude).
In the human sense, this represents an involuntary kind of "sympathy"...
(b) the extension of correspondences to the encompassing "synaesthesia", an interchangeability and summation of sensations which may be externalized in words, but which also carryies the risk of shutting out one's routine relation with fellow human beings ( I remember here, Lolita's Barber of Kasbean scene, or from TLSK, all the conscious efforts of paying attention to someone else's emotions). It represents the opposite of what happens in (a), an involuntary kind of lack of empathy.
My argument derives from my hypothesis about VN's permanent acknowledgement of conflict and the concommittance of good and evil, as of some kind of undecided, unresolvable element in human nature.
From Luzhin's difficulties to attend school under his father's surname ( no longer simply Alexander), we follow VN's own oscillations from the arrow-sparrow crossing a Christian lighted hall to cyclical time, with no definite "eschaton", final judgement with a triumph of Word over image. In my view, the opposites in Nabokov, are not subjected to a definite final synthesis...
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I remember Alexey Sklyarenko's article in The Nabokovian about Ada's triple dreams and, researching internet Rimbaud, I came to "Le dormeur du val", also probably referred to in ADA: " C'est un trou de verdure où chante une rivière,/ ...,/.. c'est un petit val qui mousse de rayons.// Un soldat jeune, bouche ouverte, tête nue,/...Dort ; il est étendu dans l'herbe, sous la nue,/...il dort. Souriant comme/Sourirait un enfant malade, /../Les parfums ne font pas frissonner sa narine ;/Il dort dans le soleil, la main sur sa poitrine,/Tranquille. Il a deux trous rouges au côté droit."
I had plans to check two kinds of elective afinities, or sympathetic resonances and synesthaesia:
(a) two loving hearts beating in unison, as in MR's Glanvill lute or VN's amorandola ( explained by CK), which have a non-romantic equivalent, a pathology described in Psychoanalysis by M.Klein - of which VN was certainly aware since, already in "The Enchanter", we find it described when a lady leaves the train-compartment she shared with the seducer and his little girl - i.e, the mechanism of "projective identification" that describes the risks of emotional contamination from someone else's "evil" wishes, of entering the same distorted frequency as the emittent's. Like separating a newborn dog from its mother and checking the effect, upon the latter, of small tortures caused to her offspring ( as in Dava Sobel's description for a measure of longitude).
In the human sense, this represents an involuntary kind of "sympathy"...
(b) the extension of correspondences to the encompassing "synaesthesia", an interchangeability and summation of sensations which may be externalized in words, but which also carryies the risk of shutting out one's routine relation with fellow human beings ( I remember here, Lolita's Barber of Kasbean scene, or from TLSK, all the conscious efforts of paying attention to someone else's emotions). It represents the opposite of what happens in (a), an involuntary kind of lack of empathy.
My argument derives from my hypothesis about VN's permanent acknowledgement of conflict and the concommittance of good and evil, as of some kind of undecided, unresolvable element in human nature.
From Luzhin's difficulties to attend school under his father's surname ( no longer simply Alexander), we follow VN's own oscillations from the arrow-sparrow crossing a Christian lighted hall to cyclical time, with no definite "eschaton", final judgement with a triumph of Word over image. In my view, the opposites in Nabokov, are not subjected to a definite final synthesis...
Search the archive: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/archives/nabokv-l.html
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