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Food for thought: Nabokov's "incarnate words"
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Jansy Mello: Yesterday, Carolyn Kunin (off List) questioned my selected quote from Nabokov [The brain as stomach of the soul ...] because, " for those like me trying to shed pounds, the organ that uses the most energy is in fact the brain - so think harder! [ ]There's a wonderful quote from GBS's play "Heartbreak House":
"Ellie: A soul is a very expensive thing to keep: much more so than a motor car. Captain Shotover: Really? How much does your soul eat?Ellie: Oh, a lot. It eats music and pictures and books and mountains and lakes and beautiful things to wear and nice people to be with. In this country you can't have them without lots of money: that is why our souls are so horribly starved. (126) " [ ].
In fact, metaphors are food for thought because of how the relations between signs and symbols operate. Nabokov played with both dimensions simultaneously, the literal and the abstract. He locates ineffables in the body, such as "A wise reader reads the book of genius not with his heart, not so much with his brain, but with his spine. It is there that occurs the telltale tingle..." He juggles with their physical sound and cannot avoid the homophonous thrill for an almost invisible pun ("mebrane/brain"), as found in ADA: "the rapture of her identity, placed under the microscope of reality (which is the only reality). shows a complex system of those subtle bridges which the senses traverse - laughing, embraced, throwing flowers in the air - between membrane and brain, and which always was and is a form of memory, even at the moment of its perception." .
Does Nabokov believe in "spirit/souls," or are they often only some sort of "physical/soul" (as in the sentence above about brains and stomachs)?
Never a Cartesian dualist ("I am an indivisible monist"*), would he profess an aristotelic hylemorphism and... would this influence his "incarnate" style?
btw. Freud's sentence about consciousness as a sense-organ is not really a metaphorical observation...
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* - Cf. http://www.ssees.ucl.ac.uk/blackwel.htm
Stephan H. Blackwell, "Nabokov, Mach and Monism at the Turn of the Century" = "Nabokov once quipped, "I am an indivisible monist." Perhaps nobody knows what this means. It may be that he was being facetious. Yet, however little known, monism is a serious tradition in modern philosophical thought. Indeed, near the turn of the last century, the journal The Monist was established, devoted to the philosophy of science [ ] Mach's most important ideas ... relate to Nabokov's aesthetic practise; in particular, Nabokov's implied theory of perception, including artistic perception, is shown to have an extensive background, if not necessarily a source, in Mach's thought..."
Cf. also http://etheses.nottingham.ac.uk/3286/
Madocks, Rodney "The incomplete text and the ardent core: the role of unfulfilment in the work of Vladimir Nabokov (1980) "Three related elements of Nabokov's art are introduced at the beginning of the study: Nabokov's monist philosophy and the self-contained structures of his art, the necessity of the co-operation of the reader to bring the 'objective existence' of the novel into being and lastly the development of the consciousness as the measure of his characters in relation to the master consciousness Nabokov. All three of these elements are shown to depend on a law of unfulfilment operating in his work, which always seeks to match one mode with its provisional opposite. The abstract basis of this idea is then explained in terms of Nabokov's use of mirror images which (it is shown) educates the reader by teaching him what not to do before he can fully experience Nabokov's deeper structures..."
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"Ellie: A soul is a very expensive thing to keep: much more so than a motor car. Captain Shotover: Really? How much does your soul eat?Ellie: Oh, a lot. It eats music and pictures and books and mountains and lakes and beautiful things to wear and nice people to be with. In this country you can't have them without lots of money: that is why our souls are so horribly starved. (126) " [ ].
In fact, metaphors are food for thought because of how the relations between signs and symbols operate. Nabokov played with both dimensions simultaneously, the literal and the abstract. He locates ineffables in the body, such as "A wise reader reads the book of genius not with his heart, not so much with his brain, but with his spine. It is there that occurs the telltale tingle..." He juggles with their physical sound and cannot avoid the homophonous thrill for an almost invisible pun ("mebrane/brain"), as found in ADA: "the rapture of her identity, placed under the microscope of reality (which is the only reality). shows a complex system of those subtle bridges which the senses traverse - laughing, embraced, throwing flowers in the air - between membrane and brain, and which always was and is a form of memory, even at the moment of its perception." .
Does Nabokov believe in "spirit/souls," or are they often only some sort of "physical/soul" (as in the sentence above about brains and stomachs)?
Never a Cartesian dualist ("I am an indivisible monist"*), would he profess an aristotelic hylemorphism and... would this influence his "incarnate" style?
btw. Freud's sentence about consciousness as a sense-organ is not really a metaphorical observation...
.............................................................................................................................................................................................
* - Cf. http://www.ssees.ucl.ac.uk/blackwel.htm
Stephan H. Blackwell, "Nabokov, Mach and Monism at the Turn of the Century" = "Nabokov once quipped, "I am an indivisible monist." Perhaps nobody knows what this means. It may be that he was being facetious. Yet, however little known, monism is a serious tradition in modern philosophical thought. Indeed, near the turn of the last century, the journal The Monist was established, devoted to the philosophy of science [ ] Mach's most important ideas ... relate to Nabokov's aesthetic practise; in particular, Nabokov's implied theory of perception, including artistic perception, is shown to have an extensive background, if not necessarily a source, in Mach's thought..."
Cf. also http://etheses.nottingham.ac.uk/3286/
Madocks, Rodney "The incomplete text and the ardent core: the role of unfulfilment in the work of Vladimir Nabokov (1980) "Three related elements of Nabokov's art are introduced at the beginning of the study: Nabokov's monist philosophy and the self-contained structures of his art, the necessity of the co-operation of the reader to bring the 'objective existence' of the novel into being and lastly the development of the consciousness as the measure of his characters in relation to the master consciousness Nabokov. All three of these elements are shown to depend on a law of unfulfilment operating in his work, which always seeks to match one mode with its provisional opposite. The abstract basis of this idea is then explained in terms of Nabokov's use of mirror images which (it is shown) educates the reader by teaching him what not to do before he can fully experience Nabokov's deeper structures..."
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/