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Coates, Riehl, Boyd, Psycoanalysis and anamorphosis in Nabokov
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JM: A commentary, related to the interview with Jenefer Coates (for the Wesleyan Argus), when she notes that "Nabokov made an art not only out of the content of his writing, but also out of its structure...When writing, he recorded fractions of a story on separate cards. These fractions became dispersed pieces within the single, final piece, and posed a 'game of cards' for readers. 'You as a reader have to gather them back up again'."
Most Nabokov scholars can now easily gather and rearrange his "game of cards" without the help of a pack of note-cards. Brian Boyd's Ada Online certainly follows these nabokovian tricks (but readers may assemble the items as they think it fit), since his commentaries are thematically ordered. If one has access to the digitalized copy of "Ada", a click on the search-button with thematic sub-items, such as "butler," "bottle", "bouteille" for example, reveals an amusing dispersed story about the servant's loves and lore in Ardis.
A few years ago I tried to find a term in English for the old correction-masks that were applied to exams, carrying small holes that isolate only the correct, or the wrong, answers. The closest I got to it was a "template sheet." (it's related to Ada's Babagge, computers and the mechanism that animates music-boxes and the commands inside organ-grinders).. This sort of selection reveals lots of delicate little stories, lost the body of the novel...
I'm certain that some of the interpretative quandaries, in "Lolita" and "Pale Fire," instead of being solved, can be delightfully enhanced after one tries to identify the specific logic and rethoric devices related to anamorphic constructions, or to the tricks shaped by "anamorphic doubleness that allows two different images or manings to inhabit the same textual space."* One of the arguments for applying the concept of anamorphosis to the structure of a literary work, examined in an "oblique way",* as it's been advanced by Anna Riehl** is that, if "anamorphosis possesses its own strict logic; likewise, anamorphic constructions engender a rhetoric specific to their needs.... Even in the absence of explicit references to perspective, seeing, or painting, a text may nevertheless operate according to the rules of anamorphic logic and rhetoric" Departing from John Donne's poetry, she illustrates how its "concern with epistemological reliability, its communicative disasters, its rhetorical tricks are shaped by the distinctly anamorphic doubleness that allows two different images or meanings to inhabit the same textual space."
My fascination with "nonnons" and Nabokov's use of mirroring surfaces initially derived from my readings as a Freudian practitioner.
Here are two, very general, entries which I collected from the internet:
1. [ Holbein's painting] "The Ambassadors was used for the cover of the French edition of Lacan's Séminaire XI : Les quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse. Of particular interest is the odd-looking "stain" in the middle foreground, "cet objet étrange, suspendu, oblique." If you look at the painting from the right "angle"-if you roll your cursor over it-the stain reveals itself as a perfectly proportioned skull, but everything else becomes utterly distorted. The right angle for the skull is the wrong angle for the rest of the world. This is Lacan's example of anamorphosis, the "looking awry" necessary to seeing the skull, which stands at once for the subject and its annihilation." Psychoanalysis of culture www.arts.ualberta.ca/~aoki/Research/research.htmEm cache - Similares
2. The expression "selected fact" was borrowed by Wilfred R. Bion from the French mathematician Henri Poincaré to refer to the element that makes it possible to give coherence to a group of scattered data. In Science and Method (1908), Poincaré considered the "selection of facts" that enabled science to discover laws of general validity-that is, facts that introduce order and coherence into the complexity of the world. Bion...became interested in the process by which the mind transforms a chaotic...experience into an experience that is integrated, representable, and thinkable
Read more: http://www.answers.com/topic/selected-fact#ixzz1oRg8R1dp
Jacques Lacan (French) and Wilfred Bion (British) hold very dissimilar views about the theory and practice of psychoanalysis. However, I think that the fundamental concept of the "selected fact" can be safely extended to "anamorphosis," if we accept that the Bionian analytic interpretation, that brings together the patient's scattered experiences, serves as the second element of the catoptric employ of anamorphosis (hopefully unlike Charles Kinbote's ambition to organize John Shade's "Pale Fire"...). I have no clue if Lacan's elaboration over Holbein's skull in "The Ambassadors," inspired Nabokov when he chose the names Botkin,Kinbote and the Botfly, when we associate "Bot" to the German for "Embassy" and "message" ("Botschaft").
I heard about an exciting article about this idea being read at New Zealand's Nabokov Upside Down conferences.
.....................................................................................
* Eying the Thought Awry: The Anamorphosis of John Donne's Poetry,Anna Riehl, English Literary Renaissance, Volume 39, Issue 1, pages 141-162, February 2009.(The Chapman lines I recently quoted in the VN-L, to associate them to Chapman's homer, came from A.Riehl's article) .
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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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Most Nabokov scholars can now easily gather and rearrange his "game of cards" without the help of a pack of note-cards. Brian Boyd's Ada Online certainly follows these nabokovian tricks (but readers may assemble the items as they think it fit), since his commentaries are thematically ordered. If one has access to the digitalized copy of "Ada", a click on the search-button with thematic sub-items, such as "butler," "bottle", "bouteille" for example, reveals an amusing dispersed story about the servant's loves and lore in Ardis.
A few years ago I tried to find a term in English for the old correction-masks that were applied to exams, carrying small holes that isolate only the correct, or the wrong, answers. The closest I got to it was a "template sheet." (it's related to Ada's Babagge, computers and the mechanism that animates music-boxes and the commands inside organ-grinders).. This sort of selection reveals lots of delicate little stories, lost the body of the novel...
I'm certain that some of the interpretative quandaries, in "Lolita" and "Pale Fire," instead of being solved, can be delightfully enhanced after one tries to identify the specific logic and rethoric devices related to anamorphic constructions, or to the tricks shaped by "anamorphic doubleness that allows two different images or manings to inhabit the same textual space."* One of the arguments for applying the concept of anamorphosis to the structure of a literary work, examined in an "oblique way",* as it's been advanced by Anna Riehl** is that, if "anamorphosis possesses its own strict logic; likewise, anamorphic constructions engender a rhetoric specific to their needs.... Even in the absence of explicit references to perspective, seeing, or painting, a text may nevertheless operate according to the rules of anamorphic logic and rhetoric" Departing from John Donne's poetry, she illustrates how its "concern with epistemological reliability, its communicative disasters, its rhetorical tricks are shaped by the distinctly anamorphic doubleness that allows two different images or meanings to inhabit the same textual space."
My fascination with "nonnons" and Nabokov's use of mirroring surfaces initially derived from my readings as a Freudian practitioner.
Here are two, very general, entries which I collected from the internet:
1. [ Holbein's painting] "The Ambassadors was used for the cover of the French edition of Lacan's Séminaire XI : Les quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse. Of particular interest is the odd-looking "stain" in the middle foreground, "cet objet étrange, suspendu, oblique." If you look at the painting from the right "angle"-if you roll your cursor over it-the stain reveals itself as a perfectly proportioned skull, but everything else becomes utterly distorted. The right angle for the skull is the wrong angle for the rest of the world. This is Lacan's example of anamorphosis, the "looking awry" necessary to seeing the skull, which stands at once for the subject and its annihilation." Psychoanalysis of culture www.arts.ualberta.ca/~aoki/Research/research.htmEm cache - Similares
2. The expression "selected fact" was borrowed by Wilfred R. Bion from the French mathematician Henri Poincaré to refer to the element that makes it possible to give coherence to a group of scattered data. In Science and Method (1908), Poincaré considered the "selection of facts" that enabled science to discover laws of general validity-that is, facts that introduce order and coherence into the complexity of the world. Bion...became interested in the process by which the mind transforms a chaotic...experience into an experience that is integrated, representable, and thinkable
Read more: http://www.answers.com/topic/selected-fact#ixzz1oRg8R1dp
Jacques Lacan (French) and Wilfred Bion (British) hold very dissimilar views about the theory and practice of psychoanalysis. However, I think that the fundamental concept of the "selected fact" can be safely extended to "anamorphosis," if we accept that the Bionian analytic interpretation, that brings together the patient's scattered experiences, serves as the second element of the catoptric employ of anamorphosis (hopefully unlike Charles Kinbote's ambition to organize John Shade's "Pale Fire"...). I have no clue if Lacan's elaboration over Holbein's skull in "The Ambassadors," inspired Nabokov when he chose the names Botkin,Kinbote and the Botfly, when we associate "Bot" to the German for "Embassy" and "message" ("Botschaft").
I heard about an exciting article about this idea being read at New Zealand's Nabokov Upside Down conferences.
.....................................................................................
* Eying the Thought Awry: The Anamorphosis of John Donne's Poetry,Anna Riehl, English Literary Renaissance, Volume 39, Issue 1, pages 141-162, February 2009.(The Chapman lines I recently quoted in the VN-L, to associate them to Chapman's homer, came from A.Riehl's article) .
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/