Subject
Re: [THOUGHTS] The sense of touch in novel and fiction: "a
good-bye to objects"
good-bye to objects"
From
Date
Body
PS - Jansy Mello: "Moving ahead, from V.Nabokov's (1951) poem "Voluptates Tactionum" and the lines from his novel ADA, intrigued by what appears to me as a particular quandary he found himself in, one that's related to the enhanced experiences he achieves by visual and auditory "synesthaesia" because he cannot reach them by his registers of touch, I noticed ...
Second thoughts: (if I may????)
I hadn't noticed that one of my arguments, related to the distinction between tactile "sensuous" and "sensual/sensorial" responses, has in its favor the title of VN's 1951 poem: "Voluptates Tactionum." The magnotack may produce volupty, although it's produced by simulacra and it offers more than letters in braille to a blind person's touch because it recreates the object's or person's form, like it take place in a photograph: the magnotack substitutes words (verbal representation) for concrete "images" and this is why it allows the blind to experience the voluptuous contours of an absent object.
However, blind "fingertrips" (in the fictional level) ought to be as satisfactory as we've learned Ada's sensations have been when she was exploring Van's tumescent veins and skin, something that the tone of VN's poem denies - but I'm still unable to put my finger onto something more definite. Perhaps because I'm not dealing well enough with the difference between what is real but absent (all sorts of imagetic reproductions demand a particular distance beween the stimuli and a response) and what is alive and palpably responsive.
Besides, one of my issues concerns VN's sensuous style in writing - as if he always needed to "contact" his readership and make them share his sensations instead of merely acquiring information from abstract images, as if words never fully gave way to "voluptates tactionum," like the auditory and the visual images did. Perhaps, in the future, we'll be able to read his novels allied to the sensations that'll be offered by a "Nabokovian magnotack"...
Returning to the quote from ADA I, ch.16: "After the first contact, so light, so mute, between his soft lips and her softer skin had been established - high up in that dappled tree, with only that stray ardilla daintily leavesdropping - nothing seemed changed in one sense, all was lost in another. Such-contacts evolve their own texture; a tactile sensation is a blind spot; we touch in silhouette."
and adding one more quote, unrelated to blind touch: "He satisfied himself that those flowers were artificial and thought it puzzling that such imitations always pander so exclusively to the eye instead of also copying the damp fat feel of live petal and leaf [ ] In passing, he touched a half-opened rose and was cheated of the sterile texture his fingertips had expected when cool life kissed them with pouting lips. 'My daughter,' said Mrs Tapirov, who saw his surprise, 'always puts a bunch of real ones among the fake pour attraper le client. You drew the joker.' " In this instance, although Van could experience the pouting lips of cool life, he couldn't transmit the roses's actual feel to his readers, only sensuously describe the image in a way that the emerging visual sensations could be shared by both to provide a fully transmissible (physical and spiritual?) "aesthetic bliss."*
...........................................................
*- Related to "shades and shadows" (visual silhouettes of the world?), here's an unpublished part of a paper I read at the 2007 MLA Annual Conference. Chicago, Illinois. December 29 (Yarn-spinning and magic wands: true fairy-tales Jansy Berndt de Souza Mello)
"Nabokov was open to the mysteries of an external reality perceived as an expanse of referents in search of another Adam, a space that exceeds linguistic boundaries, the field of enchanters in its relation to artifacts and the reader. Writers who work with language experimentally may privilege only of its two faces, namely, the signifier or the signified. Umberto Eco places James Joyce in the first category, with his word-plays, puns, anagrams and neologisms, while Jorge Luis Borges, juggling with ideas, comes in the second. Nevertheless, Nabokov's work with "sounds" and "signifiers" does not fit into this (too neat) distinction. Nabokov believed that "we do not think continuously in words" (RY 425) and, in his opinion, James Joyce's "stream of consciousness" has its origin in a mere stylistic convention, perhaps so literal that it "altered the time element" and "placed too great a reliance on typography."
Nabokov's position was not always unambiguous. In a letter quoted by B. Boyd (RY: 425; Cf. SO:102), he maintains that through Joyce's "abstract puns, the verbal masquerade, the shadows of words, the diseases of words. wit sinks behind reason" whereas, several years later, he writes : "We think not in words but in shadows of words. James Joyce. gives too much verbal body to his thoughts" (SO:30). James Joyce breaks up words to achieve the abnihilation of the ethym, whereas Nabokov often paints a vision with words hinting at different levels of ideas and perception that lie beyond the verbal domain: "The narrator forefeels what he is going to tell. The forefeeling can be defined as an instant vision turning into rapid speech. If some instrument were to render this rare and delightful phenomenon, the image would come as a shimmer of exact details, and the verbal part as a tumble of merging words".
James Joyce cultivated his particular vision of "shadows" for he considered "all art as a shadow of the Incarnation" and he borrowed from the Catholic religion the term "epiphany" which, in some respects, is strongly reminiscent of VN's experience of "aesthetic bliss". "By an epiphany" Joyce's protagonist Stephen Hero, means "a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in memorable phrase of the mind itself", and that "it was for the man of letters to record those epiphanies with extreme care, seeing that they themselves are the most delicate and evanescent of moments." [1] Joyce's epiphanies, like VN's aesthetic bliss, result from a particular way of apprehending reality by allowing all senses to work together in anticipation of a transformation that is undergone, and later revealed, by the artist (it is when "the soul is born", writes J. Joyce in "Portrait of An Artist as a Young Man"). Both authors apparently indicate an ineffable experience which has gained spiritual and material expression through its having suddenly become manifest, although Joyce's epiphanies are cultivated by a thomistic three-step exercise in awareness before an object's "quidditas" is perceived - and therefore Joyce's revelations differ not only from Nabokov's "long-drawn sunset shadow of one's personal truth", but also from Marcel Proust's rapturous irruption of what he named "involuntary memory". Nabokov's recurrent use of the word "shadow" is, in itself, rather striking. In his lectures at Cornell, he refers not only to the "tall story" about a boy crying wolf, as told in "Good Readers and Good Writers", but he mentions shadows and dreams: "the magic of art is manifested in the dream about the wolf, in the shadow of the invented wolf" (1955, 347). This is why he is not simply dealing with deception, enchantment, and metamorphosis, the three themes which are "akin to the fairy tale" in Alfred Appel's interpretation. Nor do I agree with Appel when he says that "several of Nabokov's novels, stories and poems are fairy tales in the sense that they are set in imaginary lands." Nabokov investigated poetic resources to reach "true fiction", instead of such writings like the ones which are "borrowed from the circulating library of public truths" (Nabokov 1980:2). For him,"between the wolf in the tall grass and the wolf in the tall story there is a shimmering go-between. That go-between, that prism, is the art of literature. (GRGW). We may conclude that, differently from Borges, Joyce and Eco ( perhaps closer to Shelley), Nabokov believes that literature searches a secret depth, crossed by "substantial shadows" (as he wrote in his biography of Nikolai Gogol) cast on our present by other past, future or unknown dimensions, the reality of which challenges the illusions of everyday life. At the same time, in contrast, Nabokov asserts fiction's independence from "the material world" according to the writer's ability to express his own (in VN's case, always multiple) individual world, including its windows unto still other worlds."
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[1] A century before Shelley (A Defense of Poetry:1819) qualified the shock of poetic inspiration as "a visitation": "We are aware of evanescent visitations of thought and feeling ... sometimes regarding our own mind alone". For him, "reason is to imagination as the instrument to the agent, as the body to the spirit, as the shadow to the substance."
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Second thoughts: (if I may????)
I hadn't noticed that one of my arguments, related to the distinction between tactile "sensuous" and "sensual/sensorial" responses, has in its favor the title of VN's 1951 poem: "Voluptates Tactionum." The magnotack may produce volupty, although it's produced by simulacra and it offers more than letters in braille to a blind person's touch because it recreates the object's or person's form, like it take place in a photograph: the magnotack substitutes words (verbal representation) for concrete "images" and this is why it allows the blind to experience the voluptuous contours of an absent object.
However, blind "fingertrips" (in the fictional level) ought to be as satisfactory as we've learned Ada's sensations have been when she was exploring Van's tumescent veins and skin, something that the tone of VN's poem denies - but I'm still unable to put my finger onto something more definite. Perhaps because I'm not dealing well enough with the difference between what is real but absent (all sorts of imagetic reproductions demand a particular distance beween the stimuli and a response) and what is alive and palpably responsive.
Besides, one of my issues concerns VN's sensuous style in writing - as if he always needed to "contact" his readership and make them share his sensations instead of merely acquiring information from abstract images, as if words never fully gave way to "voluptates tactionum," like the auditory and the visual images did. Perhaps, in the future, we'll be able to read his novels allied to the sensations that'll be offered by a "Nabokovian magnotack"...
Returning to the quote from ADA I, ch.16: "After the first contact, so light, so mute, between his soft lips and her softer skin had been established - high up in that dappled tree, with only that stray ardilla daintily leavesdropping - nothing seemed changed in one sense, all was lost in another. Such-contacts evolve their own texture; a tactile sensation is a blind spot; we touch in silhouette."
and adding one more quote, unrelated to blind touch: "He satisfied himself that those flowers were artificial and thought it puzzling that such imitations always pander so exclusively to the eye instead of also copying the damp fat feel of live petal and leaf [ ] In passing, he touched a half-opened rose and was cheated of the sterile texture his fingertips had expected when cool life kissed them with pouting lips. 'My daughter,' said Mrs Tapirov, who saw his surprise, 'always puts a bunch of real ones among the fake pour attraper le client. You drew the joker.' " In this instance, although Van could experience the pouting lips of cool life, he couldn't transmit the roses's actual feel to his readers, only sensuously describe the image in a way that the emerging visual sensations could be shared by both to provide a fully transmissible (physical and spiritual?) "aesthetic bliss."*
...........................................................
*- Related to "shades and shadows" (visual silhouettes of the world?), here's an unpublished part of a paper I read at the 2007 MLA Annual Conference. Chicago, Illinois. December 29 (Yarn-spinning and magic wands: true fairy-tales Jansy Berndt de Souza Mello)
"Nabokov was open to the mysteries of an external reality perceived as an expanse of referents in search of another Adam, a space that exceeds linguistic boundaries, the field of enchanters in its relation to artifacts and the reader. Writers who work with language experimentally may privilege only of its two faces, namely, the signifier or the signified. Umberto Eco places James Joyce in the first category, with his word-plays, puns, anagrams and neologisms, while Jorge Luis Borges, juggling with ideas, comes in the second. Nevertheless, Nabokov's work with "sounds" and "signifiers" does not fit into this (too neat) distinction. Nabokov believed that "we do not think continuously in words" (RY 425) and, in his opinion, James Joyce's "stream of consciousness" has its origin in a mere stylistic convention, perhaps so literal that it "altered the time element" and "placed too great a reliance on typography."
Nabokov's position was not always unambiguous. In a letter quoted by B. Boyd (RY: 425; Cf. SO:102), he maintains that through Joyce's "abstract puns, the verbal masquerade, the shadows of words, the diseases of words. wit sinks behind reason" whereas, several years later, he writes : "We think not in words but in shadows of words. James Joyce. gives too much verbal body to his thoughts" (SO:30). James Joyce breaks up words to achieve the abnihilation of the ethym, whereas Nabokov often paints a vision with words hinting at different levels of ideas and perception that lie beyond the verbal domain: "The narrator forefeels what he is going to tell. The forefeeling can be defined as an instant vision turning into rapid speech. If some instrument were to render this rare and delightful phenomenon, the image would come as a shimmer of exact details, and the verbal part as a tumble of merging words".
James Joyce cultivated his particular vision of "shadows" for he considered "all art as a shadow of the Incarnation" and he borrowed from the Catholic religion the term "epiphany" which, in some respects, is strongly reminiscent of VN's experience of "aesthetic bliss". "By an epiphany" Joyce's protagonist Stephen Hero, means "a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in memorable phrase of the mind itself", and that "it was for the man of letters to record those epiphanies with extreme care, seeing that they themselves are the most delicate and evanescent of moments." [1] Joyce's epiphanies, like VN's aesthetic bliss, result from a particular way of apprehending reality by allowing all senses to work together in anticipation of a transformation that is undergone, and later revealed, by the artist (it is when "the soul is born", writes J. Joyce in "Portrait of An Artist as a Young Man"). Both authors apparently indicate an ineffable experience which has gained spiritual and material expression through its having suddenly become manifest, although Joyce's epiphanies are cultivated by a thomistic three-step exercise in awareness before an object's "quidditas" is perceived - and therefore Joyce's revelations differ not only from Nabokov's "long-drawn sunset shadow of one's personal truth", but also from Marcel Proust's rapturous irruption of what he named "involuntary memory". Nabokov's recurrent use of the word "shadow" is, in itself, rather striking. In his lectures at Cornell, he refers not only to the "tall story" about a boy crying wolf, as told in "Good Readers and Good Writers", but he mentions shadows and dreams: "the magic of art is manifested in the dream about the wolf, in the shadow of the invented wolf" (1955, 347). This is why he is not simply dealing with deception, enchantment, and metamorphosis, the three themes which are "akin to the fairy tale" in Alfred Appel's interpretation. Nor do I agree with Appel when he says that "several of Nabokov's novels, stories and poems are fairy tales in the sense that they are set in imaginary lands." Nabokov investigated poetic resources to reach "true fiction", instead of such writings like the ones which are "borrowed from the circulating library of public truths" (Nabokov 1980:2). For him,"between the wolf in the tall grass and the wolf in the tall story there is a shimmering go-between. That go-between, that prism, is the art of literature. (GRGW). We may conclude that, differently from Borges, Joyce and Eco ( perhaps closer to Shelley), Nabokov believes that literature searches a secret depth, crossed by "substantial shadows" (as he wrote in his biography of Nikolai Gogol) cast on our present by other past, future or unknown dimensions, the reality of which challenges the illusions of everyday life. At the same time, in contrast, Nabokov asserts fiction's independence from "the material world" according to the writer's ability to express his own (in VN's case, always multiple) individual world, including its windows unto still other worlds."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[1] A century before Shelley (A Defense of Poetry:1819) qualified the shock of poetic inspiration as "a visitation": "We are aware of evanescent visitations of thought and feeling ... sometimes regarding our own mind alone". For him, "reason is to imagination as the instrument to the agent, as the body to the spirit, as the shadow to the substance."
Search archive with Google:
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Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
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Visit "Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
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