Subject
Eco & Post Modern "Loss of innocence"
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Date
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"Everything is a cipher and of everything he is the theme".
(V.Nabokov, Signs and Symbols)
While going through Pale Fire I selected a few lines about Aunt Maud (90-98), where the poet states that "she lived to hear the next babe cry" (the baby cannot be Hazel, chronologically speaking), and that he and Sybil have "kept her room intact" (Why? Did they also maintain Hazel's trivia in a "still-lfe" condition, like Aunt Maud's?).Indeed, too much puzzling about Nabokoviana leads one into fictional "referential mania."
Now. Consider Lolita's married name: Could it represent a veiled reference to Friedrich Schiller, the German writer? By having HH's Lolita marry a Richard Schiller, would this serve as an indication of VN's anger, once we learn that Doestoevsky was an ardent admirer of Schiller's works? And VN's constant mention of "Moor" (as in Aunt Maud's "verse book open at the Index (Moon, Moonrise, Moor, Moral)," or like ADA's voluptuous "moorish lips," or in connection to the plot of Sir Walter Scott's, and of Donizetti's, Lucia di Lammermoor?, etc), could it relate to Schiller's play "The Robbers" with the fraticidal fights between two Moor brothers, a play that was particularly quoted, mimetized and admired by Dostoevsky?*
Charles Kinbote himself is amusingly led astray, like some of his readers. His commentary on PF's line 98 (On Chapman's Homer) implies that he imagines it's not a matter of a curious newspaper cutting that bears witness to a coincidence (Homer and homer, both related to a Chapman), but simiply the consequence of "a printer's absent-mindedness...drolly transposed" from the title of Keat's famous sonnet. Various misprints are recollected (mountain/fountain; korona/vorona/korova-crown/crow/cow) while he raves about Zembla's mountainous landscape. This led me into a fresh swamp of references. Take the substitution of a letter (m/f) or of its sound, in English and in Russian like the G and the H. What about that H and G biblical couple, Hoseas and his unfaithful wife Gomer in the Old Testament? Aunt Maud's "homer" could express what Kinbote jokingly describes as a coincidence in the "lexical playfields" that defies computation: Keats, Baseball and an unfaithful wife who bears an illegitimate child ( Hoseas' and Gomer's Loruhamah and Lo-ammi).I don't take this assumption very seriously, of course, inspite of the coincidence about G-H substitutions and a long forgotten theory about who was the "next crying babe" in the Shade household. However, it's equally illustrative of how other people's stories and novels are thickly interwoven inside everything new a novelist writes. Umberto Eco describes it as a post-modern loss of innocence. Vladimir Nabokov's resort to parodies mingled with seriousness confirms his wisdom in relation to his future readers.
...................................................................................................................................................
*At the age of ten, Dostoyevsky was enthusiastic about Die Räuber, performedin Moscow with the great actor Mochalov in the part of Karl Moor; in his last novel, The Brothers Karamazov, he pays Schiller a vibrant homage."..Dmitrit Karamazov recites Schiller and "Old Karamazov blasphemously says Ivan is 'the very respectable Karl Moor', while he himself is the 'Regienderender Graf von Moor in person'. Dostoyevsky's long journey in the company of Schiller ended with the tragedy he had admired so much as a child.//Between these two moments, half a century apart, Dostoyevsky never stopped mentioning or recallling Schiller..."
Ch. The heritage: literature, p.39 in "Dostoyevsky and the process of literary creation" Jacques Catteau (1989)
** -
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(V.Nabokov, Signs and Symbols)
While going through Pale Fire I selected a few lines about Aunt Maud (90-98), where the poet states that "she lived to hear the next babe cry" (the baby cannot be Hazel, chronologically speaking), and that he and Sybil have "kept her room intact" (Why? Did they also maintain Hazel's trivia in a "still-lfe" condition, like Aunt Maud's?).Indeed, too much puzzling about Nabokoviana leads one into fictional "referential mania."
Now. Consider Lolita's married name: Could it represent a veiled reference to Friedrich Schiller, the German writer? By having HH's Lolita marry a Richard Schiller, would this serve as an indication of VN's anger, once we learn that Doestoevsky was an ardent admirer of Schiller's works? And VN's constant mention of "Moor" (as in Aunt Maud's "verse book open at the Index (Moon, Moonrise, Moor, Moral)," or like ADA's voluptuous "moorish lips," or in connection to the plot of Sir Walter Scott's, and of Donizetti's, Lucia di Lammermoor?, etc), could it relate to Schiller's play "The Robbers" with the fraticidal fights between two Moor brothers, a play that was particularly quoted, mimetized and admired by Dostoevsky?*
Charles Kinbote himself is amusingly led astray, like some of his readers. His commentary on PF's line 98 (On Chapman's Homer) implies that he imagines it's not a matter of a curious newspaper cutting that bears witness to a coincidence (Homer and homer, both related to a Chapman), but simiply the consequence of "a printer's absent-mindedness...drolly transposed" from the title of Keat's famous sonnet. Various misprints are recollected (mountain/fountain; korona/vorona/korova-crown/crow/cow) while he raves about Zembla's mountainous landscape. This led me into a fresh swamp of references. Take the substitution of a letter (m/f) or of its sound, in English and in Russian like the G and the H. What about that H and G biblical couple, Hoseas and his unfaithful wife Gomer in the Old Testament? Aunt Maud's "homer" could express what Kinbote jokingly describes as a coincidence in the "lexical playfields" that defies computation: Keats, Baseball and an unfaithful wife who bears an illegitimate child ( Hoseas' and Gomer's Loruhamah and Lo-ammi).I don't take this assumption very seriously, of course, inspite of the coincidence about G-H substitutions and a long forgotten theory about who was the "next crying babe" in the Shade household. However, it's equally illustrative of how other people's stories and novels are thickly interwoven inside everything new a novelist writes. Umberto Eco describes it as a post-modern loss of innocence. Vladimir Nabokov's resort to parodies mingled with seriousness confirms his wisdom in relation to his future readers.
...................................................................................................................................................
*At the age of ten, Dostoyevsky was enthusiastic about Die Räuber, performedin Moscow with the great actor Mochalov in the part of Karl Moor; in his last novel, The Brothers Karamazov, he pays Schiller a vibrant homage."..Dmitrit Karamazov recites Schiller and "Old Karamazov blasphemously says Ivan is 'the very respectable Karl Moor', while he himself is the 'Regienderender Graf von Moor in person'. Dostoyevsky's long journey in the company of Schiller ended with the tragedy he had admired so much as a child.//Between these two moments, half a century apart, Dostoyevsky never stopped mentioning or recallling Schiller..."
Ch. The heritage: literature, p.39 in "Dostoyevsky and the process of literary creation" Jacques Catteau (1989)
** -
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/