Subject
Lolita's reversions and anamorphosis.
From
Date
Body
In Strong Opinions, Nabokov wrote: "No, I shall never regret Lolita. She was like the composition of a beautiful puzzle - its composition and its solution at the same time, since one is a mirror view of the other, depending on the way you look....There is a queer, tender charm about that mythical nymphet." (1964)
While reading Sarah Funke Butler's "Nabokov's Notes" in The Paris review on line (February 29, 2012), I found a quote in which Nabokov describes art in a "looking glass" in an intriguing way, should one relate it to what he'd said about the composition of Lolita:"The mistakes and misstatements in [Wilson's review] form an uninterrupted series so complete as to seem artistic in reverse, making one wonder if, perhaps, it had not been woven that way on purpose to be turned into something pertinent and coherent when reflected in a looking glass "
There are all kinds of mirrors (flat and curved ones) and these present different kinds of distorted images, which have to be looked at from a specific perspective so that the imagetic information they reflect can be recovered. Quite often Nabokov resorts to convex surfaces (a samovar, the roof of an automobile. Even rear-mirrors are important in more than a metaphorical way...). At least once, in PF's foreword, the pauline lines related to "in a mirror, darkly", are cited (also in part) and an azure sky reflected on a windowpane is shown to be deathly. There are inverted images (isn't there a scene in which Van reads the headlines 'Crimea Capitulates' from a flat mirror lying behind Demon?), a profound familiarity with some of the "adventures through the looking glass." and there are reversions ("the underside of the weave", in PF). Most of the time Nabokov writes about optical phenomena and yet, in LATH, the mental operation of imagining the world from different spacial orientations, gains a special inclusion.
In Lolita, Nabokov asserts that the book comprises the simultaneous composition and solution of a beautiful puzzle, because they are a mirror view of the other.
This seems to be unrelated to what he detailed concerning Edmund Wilson's mistakes and misstatements unless, in irony, he were suggesting that there was a conscious purpose, as in an artistic composition, reflected by EW's misapprehensions. It would be quite fascinating should an instrument, that allowed the reader to "revert" some of the scenes, or spirit in Lolita,.exist. Such as the reconstitution of the mangled faces and objects impressed on a cilinder when they are placed on a flat mirror in an anamorphosis.
Stephen Blackwell suggested an added "reference to the "nonnons" from ITAB, which are exactly what VN is describing re: Wilson here." How could I have forgotten all about that! When I tried to retrieve a past discussion at the N-L, I was surprised and thrilled by Dmitri Nabokov's participation in the discussion. The themes were related to Nonnons, Nitkto, Anamorphosis Dmitri Nabokov's second contribution is particularly wonderful ( as in "To return to the question of the state of nature before the origin of this concept [of species], and imagine the immeasurably distant times when "the specimen reigned supreme," we can, with the aid of parlor verse, if not of armchair science, indistinctly perceive this undulating, iridescent world, and nature's first attempts at stabilizing something." )
A selection of the discussions.(they are not reproduced in chronological order and some of the exchanges were not available to me):
1. Victor Fet on Nikto Botkin (15 October 2006)
"It probably was Andrew Field who first noticed "Nikto" in Botkin in his "VN" (1986, p. 346). He thought that extra "b"["Nova Zembla, poor thing, with that B in her bonnet" as VN wrote before] went to "Zembla"! (that would be a nice Scrabble move). "Nabokov, of course, strongly denied all this," Field wrote (!). "Nikto b" was also already mentioned in NABOKOV-L rather long time ago (see exchange below). On the other hand, did anybody notice that "Nikto Botkin" ["Nobody
Botkin"] forms a perfect palindrome? You only have to substitute "V." (Botkin's first name) for Nikto. Or, if you wish Nikto to be the last name, make an anagram "B. NIKTO" and, as a bonus, read "B." in Russian where it is of course "V." There is a nice Botkin article on Zembla by Josh Kaplan,'A Delineation of Botkin's Role in Pale Fire, & His Fate Beyond'." (http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/kaplan1.htm)
2 .Abdellah Bouazza on Netki/ nonnons/ anamorphosis in Invitation (Sat, 14 Oct 2006)
"Nonnons" See page 135 of the 1st ed. of INVITATION TO A BEHEADING, where Cecilia C. describes them.
[EDNOTE. Jenefer Coates spoke about nonnons as exemplary of VN's aesthetic and use of allusion at the Nice conference last June. --
3. Dmitri Nabokov on Netki/ nonnons/..
"Bravo,Abdel! There it is on page 135, big as life. I don't recall which one of us made this nice translational find, but strongly suspect it was my father...."
4. George Shimanovich on Netko/ nonnons/ PF (15 Oct 2006)
"I think that is what happened to Kinbote (Botkin) in PF. In his delusional self he searched and found Zembla's reflection in Shade's poem. Alas, when the mirror image dissipated that ugly thing remained. Belatedly he recognized that reflection worked the other way: the art reflected him. Isn't that when he killed himself? *
In VN's oeuvre art and consciousness convincingly win when challenged by cruelty (Bent Sinister), tyranny (Invitation to Beheading), banality (e.g.Cloud, Castle, Lake), delusions of all sorts and sources (Pale Fire).Isn't that most recurring theme of VN's? Other than that, there is no polyphony here - all by design, including red herrings and short cirtcuts. MPD hype is ours. The uniqueness of PF is that this counterpoint spilled out from the novel into criticism - that is to us.
Here is the full quote:
"Nonnons, absolutely absurd objects, shapeless, mottled, knobby things, like some kind of fossils -- but ... when you placed one of these incomprehensible, monstrous objects so that it was reflected in the incomprehensible, monstrous mirror, everything was fine, and the shapeless speckledness became in the mirror a wonderful, sensible image; flowers, a ship, a person, a landscape." Note "a person, a landscape". Zembla anyone?
I copied it from chapter 'Artistic reality' of 'O Window in the Dark! The Early Career of Vladimir Nabokov' by Michael Fleming http://www.dutchgirl.com/foxpaws/biographies/O_Window_in_the_Dark!/nabokovbi
Nabokov explicitly describes in the "Invitation to the beheading" some kind of "puzzles" (I don't know how it is called in the english translation, in Russian it was called "netki", "net" means "no") which included a strange shape and an equally strange curvy mirror, such that only in this mirror you may see a beautiful object instead of the strange thing. "Nonnons"
5. Jansy Mello on Nekti/ nonnons/ Nice (15 Oct 2006)
"I'll try to look into "netki" and "nonnon" and check "Invitation".Sergei's description fits exactly with the kind of anamorphosis I had in mind...I wonder how often VN applied "anamorphosis" in his writing - and I mean not in a description or by direct mention, but through verbally distorted images that only mirrors or doubles make us see them ( I'd never thought about echoes and symmetries in that sense. What of Shade, Gradus and Kinbote/Botkin, now?). Would these fascinating names ( still rather vague to me: netki & nonnons) apply to some kind of "double negation" ...ED Note: I'll invite Jenefer Coates to contribute to the discussions of "nonnons," however. There's a similar description I have always liked of a samovar in Ada, "which expressed fragments of its surroundings in demented fantasies of a primitive genre" (p. 89, Vintage ed.). -- SES]
6. Dmitri Nabokov on anamorphosis (15 Oct 2006)
"...The reason for this post, however, is Jansy's most recent, interesting entry. I wonder if she finds a nexus between the phenomena she mentions and what follows: The duration of a species, its sitting as a model, its presence before nature' s mirror, cannot be measured in increments of time that would presuppose radical changes incompatible with the preservation of its idea. To say that, over the centuries, one species evolves into another by a genealogical line is to disrupt, to the same degree, the basic idea of species, as would admitting that between two extant species intermediate forms were to be represented as well. Yet the appearance of species is unarguable; and neither the evolutionist "how" nor the metaphysical "whence" can be answered until we agree to admit it was not species that evolved in nature, but the very concept of species. To return to the question of the state of nature before the origin of this concept, and imagine the immeasurably distant times when "the specimen reigned supreme," we can, with the aid of parlor verse, if not of armchair science, indistinctly perceive this undulating, iridescent world, and nature's first attempts at stabilizing something. A crawling root, the extremity of a tropical creeper vivified by the wind, turned into a snake solely because nature, noticing movement, wished to reproduce it, as a child amused by the flight of a forest leaf picks it up and tosses it back into the air. But it is only in nature's fingers
that the leaf could turn into a Kallima. It would be more accurate to say, though, that it was not the work of the wind, but some energizing, thought-engendering rotation -- not just the earth's rotation, but the even force that so festively animates the Dance of the Planets that is the universe.."
7. Leona Toker "Nabokov in Hebrew: Invitation to a Beheading"
"In the fall of 1995 "Invitation to a Beheading" was published in Hebrew by "HaKibutz Hameuhad." The translator is Peter Kriksunov, originally from the USSR, whose command of modern Hebrew and of its stylistic potentialities is quite stunning. The translation makes excellent reading: Kriksunov has managed to keep all the Nabokovian interplay of stylistic registers as well as most of the elegance and emotional effect. He has produced an excellent nonce creation to render the "nonnons"; but the charge on which Cincinnatus is arrested is rendered as "epistemological
turpitude," an interpretation of the Russian "gnoseologicheskaya gnustnost,'" rather than of the English "gnostic turpitude." Some of Kriksunov's separate lexical choices might have been different had he been more attentive to the English version and to the English-language critical studies of the novel. But whatever connotations may be regarded as lost in his version of the text, the loss in partly compensated by Biblical echoes (e.g. from Isiah) of which even modern Hebrew tends to be quite productive and which are thematically quite appropriate in a novel about the fall of a kingdom. The issue of gnosticism and related themes is dealt with in the Afterword written by Maya Kaganskaya. The afterword is followed by an analytic narratological essay by Menahem Perry, who is also the editor of the book. "
"Nonnenmacher" is sometimes thought to refer to the "nonnons" of Invitation to a Beheading. See for example Leona Toker's Nabokov: The Mystery of Literary Structures, pp. 120-21. If I am not mistaken the detail of Nonnenmacher and his ten-volume History of Art was added only in Nabokov's revised 1938 translation, which puts it quite close in time to the composition of ITAB.
..................................................................
* I promised to find the title of a book about Art and Perversion by Joyce McDougall. No wonder I couldn't find it in the internet since the work I was looking for is:"Ethique et esthetique de la perversion (L'Or d'Atalante)", by Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel (1984). There is no special entry about pedophilia and, after I leafed through the book, I discovered that it will not be of interest the N-L participants. However, by some particular mnemic trick, I found a chapter devoted to Oscar Wilde and some of his tales and writings. In "The Decay of Lying" there's a reference to a dialogue between Cyril and Vivian in which they discuss nature's imperfections and the wonders of "ars gratia artis". Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel connects Wilde's "The Young King" (1888) to "The Birthday of the Infanta," by discussing the abundance of lavish mirrors and the delusions of grandeur, suddenly reverted into ugliness and horror. They seem to be in a similar spirit as the one reported by George Shimanovich, in relation to Kinbote's reaction to Shade's "Zembla".I read these tales a long time ago so I'm uncertain if they fit into this extension of our original subject, but they can be read independently of J.C.Smirgel's psychoanalytic ideas.
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Manage subscription options: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/
While reading Sarah Funke Butler's "Nabokov's Notes" in The Paris review on line (February 29, 2012), I found a quote in which Nabokov describes art in a "looking glass" in an intriguing way, should one relate it to what he'd said about the composition of Lolita:"The mistakes and misstatements in [Wilson's review] form an uninterrupted series so complete as to seem artistic in reverse, making one wonder if, perhaps, it had not been woven that way on purpose to be turned into something pertinent and coherent when reflected in a looking glass "
There are all kinds of mirrors (flat and curved ones) and these present different kinds of distorted images, which have to be looked at from a specific perspective so that the imagetic information they reflect can be recovered. Quite often Nabokov resorts to convex surfaces (a samovar, the roof of an automobile. Even rear-mirrors are important in more than a metaphorical way...). At least once, in PF's foreword, the pauline lines related to "in a mirror, darkly", are cited (also in part) and an azure sky reflected on a windowpane is shown to be deathly. There are inverted images (isn't there a scene in which Van reads the headlines 'Crimea Capitulates' from a flat mirror lying behind Demon?), a profound familiarity with some of the "adventures through the looking glass." and there are reversions ("the underside of the weave", in PF). Most of the time Nabokov writes about optical phenomena and yet, in LATH, the mental operation of imagining the world from different spacial orientations, gains a special inclusion.
In Lolita, Nabokov asserts that the book comprises the simultaneous composition and solution of a beautiful puzzle, because they are a mirror view of the other.
This seems to be unrelated to what he detailed concerning Edmund Wilson's mistakes and misstatements unless, in irony, he were suggesting that there was a conscious purpose, as in an artistic composition, reflected by EW's misapprehensions. It would be quite fascinating should an instrument, that allowed the reader to "revert" some of the scenes, or spirit in Lolita,.exist. Such as the reconstitution of the mangled faces and objects impressed on a cilinder when they are placed on a flat mirror in an anamorphosis.
Stephen Blackwell suggested an added "reference to the "nonnons" from ITAB, which are exactly what VN is describing re: Wilson here." How could I have forgotten all about that! When I tried to retrieve a past discussion at the N-L, I was surprised and thrilled by Dmitri Nabokov's participation in the discussion. The themes were related to Nonnons, Nitkto, Anamorphosis Dmitri Nabokov's second contribution is particularly wonderful ( as in "To return to the question of the state of nature before the origin of this concept [of species], and imagine the immeasurably distant times when "the specimen reigned supreme," we can, with the aid of parlor verse, if not of armchair science, indistinctly perceive this undulating, iridescent world, and nature's first attempts at stabilizing something." )
A selection of the discussions.(they are not reproduced in chronological order and some of the exchanges were not available to me):
1. Victor Fet on Nikto Botkin (15 October 2006)
"It probably was Andrew Field who first noticed "Nikto" in Botkin in his "VN" (1986, p. 346). He thought that extra "b"["Nova Zembla, poor thing, with that B in her bonnet" as VN wrote before] went to "Zembla"! (that would be a nice Scrabble move). "Nabokov, of course, strongly denied all this," Field wrote (!). "Nikto b" was also already mentioned in NABOKOV-L rather long time ago (see exchange below). On the other hand, did anybody notice that "Nikto Botkin" ["Nobody
Botkin"] forms a perfect palindrome? You only have to substitute "V." (Botkin's first name) for Nikto. Or, if you wish Nikto to be the last name, make an anagram "B. NIKTO" and, as a bonus, read "B." in Russian where it is of course "V." There is a nice Botkin article on Zembla by Josh Kaplan,'A Delineation of Botkin's Role in Pale Fire, & His Fate Beyond'." (http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/kaplan1.htm)
2 .Abdellah Bouazza on Netki/ nonnons/ anamorphosis in Invitation (Sat, 14 Oct 2006)
"Nonnons" See page 135 of the 1st ed. of INVITATION TO A BEHEADING, where Cecilia C. describes them.
[EDNOTE. Jenefer Coates spoke about nonnons as exemplary of VN's aesthetic and use of allusion at the Nice conference last June. --
3. Dmitri Nabokov on Netki/ nonnons/..
"Bravo,Abdel! There it is on page 135, big as life. I don't recall which one of us made this nice translational find, but strongly suspect it was my father...."
4. George Shimanovich on Netko/ nonnons/ PF (15 Oct 2006)
"I think that is what happened to Kinbote (Botkin) in PF. In his delusional self he searched and found Zembla's reflection in Shade's poem. Alas, when the mirror image dissipated that ugly thing remained. Belatedly he recognized that reflection worked the other way: the art reflected him. Isn't that when he killed himself? *
In VN's oeuvre art and consciousness convincingly win when challenged by cruelty (Bent Sinister), tyranny (Invitation to Beheading), banality (e.g.Cloud, Castle, Lake), delusions of all sorts and sources (Pale Fire).Isn't that most recurring theme of VN's? Other than that, there is no polyphony here - all by design, including red herrings and short cirtcuts. MPD hype is ours. The uniqueness of PF is that this counterpoint spilled out from the novel into criticism - that is to us.
Here is the full quote:
"Nonnons, absolutely absurd objects, shapeless, mottled, knobby things, like some kind of fossils -- but ... when you placed one of these incomprehensible, monstrous objects so that it was reflected in the incomprehensible, monstrous mirror, everything was fine, and the shapeless speckledness became in the mirror a wonderful, sensible image; flowers, a ship, a person, a landscape." Note "a person, a landscape". Zembla anyone?
I copied it from chapter 'Artistic reality' of 'O Window in the Dark! The Early Career of Vladimir Nabokov' by Michael Fleming http://www.dutchgirl.com/foxpaws/biographies/O_Window_in_the_Dark!/nabokovbi
Nabokov explicitly describes in the "Invitation to the beheading" some kind of "puzzles" (I don't know how it is called in the english translation, in Russian it was called "netki", "net" means "no") which included a strange shape and an equally strange curvy mirror, such that only in this mirror you may see a beautiful object instead of the strange thing. "Nonnons"
5. Jansy Mello on Nekti/ nonnons/ Nice (15 Oct 2006)
"I'll try to look into "netki" and "nonnon" and check "Invitation".Sergei's description fits exactly with the kind of anamorphosis I had in mind...I wonder how often VN applied "anamorphosis" in his writing - and I mean not in a description or by direct mention, but through verbally distorted images that only mirrors or doubles make us see them ( I'd never thought about echoes and symmetries in that sense. What of Shade, Gradus and Kinbote/Botkin, now?). Would these fascinating names ( still rather vague to me: netki & nonnons) apply to some kind of "double negation" ...ED Note: I'll invite Jenefer Coates to contribute to the discussions of "nonnons," however. There's a similar description I have always liked of a samovar in Ada, "which expressed fragments of its surroundings in demented fantasies of a primitive genre" (p. 89, Vintage ed.). -- SES]
6. Dmitri Nabokov on anamorphosis (15 Oct 2006)
"...The reason for this post, however, is Jansy's most recent, interesting entry. I wonder if she finds a nexus between the phenomena she mentions and what follows: The duration of a species, its sitting as a model, its presence before nature' s mirror, cannot be measured in increments of time that would presuppose radical changes incompatible with the preservation of its idea. To say that, over the centuries, one species evolves into another by a genealogical line is to disrupt, to the same degree, the basic idea of species, as would admitting that between two extant species intermediate forms were to be represented as well. Yet the appearance of species is unarguable; and neither the evolutionist "how" nor the metaphysical "whence" can be answered until we agree to admit it was not species that evolved in nature, but the very concept of species. To return to the question of the state of nature before the origin of this concept, and imagine the immeasurably distant times when "the specimen reigned supreme," we can, with the aid of parlor verse, if not of armchair science, indistinctly perceive this undulating, iridescent world, and nature's first attempts at stabilizing something. A crawling root, the extremity of a tropical creeper vivified by the wind, turned into a snake solely because nature, noticing movement, wished to reproduce it, as a child amused by the flight of a forest leaf picks it up and tosses it back into the air. But it is only in nature's fingers
that the leaf could turn into a Kallima. It would be more accurate to say, though, that it was not the work of the wind, but some energizing, thought-engendering rotation -- not just the earth's rotation, but the even force that so festively animates the Dance of the Planets that is the universe.."
7. Leona Toker "Nabokov in Hebrew: Invitation to a Beheading"
"In the fall of 1995 "Invitation to a Beheading" was published in Hebrew by "HaKibutz Hameuhad." The translator is Peter Kriksunov, originally from the USSR, whose command of modern Hebrew and of its stylistic potentialities is quite stunning. The translation makes excellent reading: Kriksunov has managed to keep all the Nabokovian interplay of stylistic registers as well as most of the elegance and emotional effect. He has produced an excellent nonce creation to render the "nonnons"; but the charge on which Cincinnatus is arrested is rendered as "epistemological
turpitude," an interpretation of the Russian "gnoseologicheskaya gnustnost,'" rather than of the English "gnostic turpitude." Some of Kriksunov's separate lexical choices might have been different had he been more attentive to the English version and to the English-language critical studies of the novel. But whatever connotations may be regarded as lost in his version of the text, the loss in partly compensated by Biblical echoes (e.g. from Isiah) of which even modern Hebrew tends to be quite productive and which are thematically quite appropriate in a novel about the fall of a kingdom. The issue of gnosticism and related themes is dealt with in the Afterword written by Maya Kaganskaya. The afterword is followed by an analytic narratological essay by Menahem Perry, who is also the editor of the book. "
"Nonnenmacher" is sometimes thought to refer to the "nonnons" of Invitation to a Beheading. See for example Leona Toker's Nabokov: The Mystery of Literary Structures, pp. 120-21. If I am not mistaken the detail of Nonnenmacher and his ten-volume History of Art was added only in Nabokov's revised 1938 translation, which puts it quite close in time to the composition of ITAB.
..................................................................
* I promised to find the title of a book about Art and Perversion by Joyce McDougall. No wonder I couldn't find it in the internet since the work I was looking for is:"Ethique et esthetique de la perversion (L'Or d'Atalante)", by Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel (1984). There is no special entry about pedophilia and, after I leafed through the book, I discovered that it will not be of interest the N-L participants. However, by some particular mnemic trick, I found a chapter devoted to Oscar Wilde and some of his tales and writings. In "The Decay of Lying" there's a reference to a dialogue between Cyril and Vivian in which they discuss nature's imperfections and the wonders of "ars gratia artis". Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel connects Wilde's "The Young King" (1888) to "The Birthday of the Infanta," by discussing the abundance of lavish mirrors and the delusions of grandeur, suddenly reverted into ugliness and horror. They seem to be in a similar spirit as the one reported by George Shimanovich, in relation to Kinbote's reaction to Shade's "Zembla".I read these tales a long time ago so I'm uncertain if they fit into this extension of our original subject, but they can be read independently of J.C.Smirgel's psychoanalytic ideas.
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/