Subject
Fw: [NABOKV-L] Pnin and Victor Lake's Studio II
From
Date
Body
PS:...Pnin: "Rembrandt or Veronese?" "In Victor's art teacher Lake's studio there are only two framed pictures..."a copy of Gertrude Kasebier's photographic masterpiece 'Mother and Child' ...and a similarly toned reproduction of the head of Christ from Rembrandt's 'The Pilgrims of Emmaus'..."
Rembrandt or Veronese? | Vladimir Nabokov
In Victor's art teacher Lake's studio there are only two framed pictures that adorn the pale gray walls: "a copy of Gertrude Kasebier's photographic masterpiece ...
blogs.pomona.edu/rust185-2012s/.../rembrandt-or-veronese/
JM: So many discrepant things pop up once our attention is invited to dwell on Nabokovian references and particular words.
My first reaction to Lake's reproduction of "The Pilgrims of Emmaus" was a futuristic one: I'd recently finished reading Alessandro Baricco's* "Emmaus," a novel that's distant in style and spirit from those other works of his that I read before ("Silk", "Ocean Sea," "Without Blood"). In this novel, the theme about the Emmaus pilgrims and "resurection" are elaborated through the experiences lived by a group of students in a Catholic School. They roughly divide into "the common bourgeois Catholics" and "the rich and decadent Atheists." This experience helped me to shun the indications about uncertainties related to Lake's painters (Veronese?Rembrandt?), to search for something else, although still related to Nabokov (who was fascinated by King Charles II, the Restoration, his father's Afterlife, Resurection and even,possibly,the Portuguese Sebastianists belief in a second coming).
From the Wiki on Emmaus: "Some interpreters have concluded that Mark's intended readers already knew the traditions of Jesus' appearances, and that Mark brings the story to a close here to highlight the resurrection and leave anticipation of the parousia (Second Coming)....Some have argued that this announcement of the resurrection and Jesus going to Galilee is the parousia (see also Preterism), but Raymond E. Brown argues that a parousia confined only to Galilee is improbable.." I ( of course) searched for "Preterism"..."a Christian eschatological view that interprets prophecies of the Bible, especially Daniel and Revelation, as events which have already happened in the first century A.D. Preterism holds that Ancient Israel finds its continuation or fulfillment in the Christian church at the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70. The term preterism comes from the Latin praeter, which is listed in Webster's 1913 dictionary as a prefix denoting that something is "past" or "beyond," signifying that either all or a majority of Bible prophecy was fulfilled by AD 70. Adherents of preterism are commonly known as preterists."
When I returned to Pale Fire's lines about "preterists" I was surprised at the secondary link between PF and Pnin.
John Shade: "I have a thousand parents. Sadly they/ Dissolve in their own virtues and recede,/ But certain words, chance words I hear or read,/ Such as "bad heart" always to him refer,/And "cancer of the pancreas" to her./A preterist: one who collects cold nests."
Pnin: "... One had to forget - because one could not live with the thought that this graceful, fragile, tender young woman with those eyes, that smile, those gardens and snows in the background, had been brought in a cattle car to an extermination camp and killed by an injection of phenol into the heart...And since the exact form of her death had not been recorded, Mira kept dying a great number of deaths in one's mind, and undergoing a great number of resurrections, only to die again and again, led away by a trained nurse, inoculated with filth, tetanus bacilli, broken glass, gassed in a sham shower-bath with prussic acid, burned alive in a pit on a gasoline-soaked pile of beechwood.."
(hint: Shade's "a thousand parents" and Mira who "kept dying a great number of deaths in one's mind and undergoing a great number of resurrections.")
The second link was differently oriented. I noticed that in Lake's studio there were reproductions of an ancient photograph and an ancient painting, i.e., there were two different medias, in a copy, lying side by side. This fact became meaningful to me because I'd been recovering Walter Benjamin's essays related to the "aura,"** particularly his writings about Baudelaire,Proust and "la mémoire involontaire" *** (strangely connected to Kinbote's Biblical "in a glass, darkly"). For Benjamin, "to experience the aura of a phenomenon means that it invites the eyes to be raised upwards... it's the unrepeatable manifestation of distance." (there are many other descriptions which I didn't translate)
Benjamin quotes Proust's commentary about the emptying of sensations related to the repetition of the simple name, "Venice," in connection to his discovery that the objects which arise by an "involuntary memory" possess an "aura," whereas daguerreotypes and photographic reproductions effect the "decadence of the aura" by their reproducibility, imitation and, most of all, by the vacant indifferent look that the spectator encounters (this oily blankness is masterfully described by Baricco in his Emmaus novel). #
......................................................................
* - Alessandro Baricco (born January 25, 1958 in Turin, Piedmont) is a popular Italian writer, director and performer. His novels have been translated into a wide number of languages. He currently lives in Rome with his wife and two sons....After receiving degrees in philosophy (under Gianni Vattimo) and piano, he published essays on music criticism: Il genio in fuga (1988) onGioachino Rossini, and L'anima di Hegel e le mucche del Wisconsin ("Hegel's Soul and the Cows of Wisconsin", 1992) on the relation between music and modernity. He subsequently worked as musical critic for La Repubblica and La Stampa, and hosted talk shows on Rai Tre. Baricco debuted as a novelist with Castelli di rabbia (translated as Lands of Glass) in 1991...In 1993 he co-founded a creative writing school in Turin, naming it Scuola Holden after J. D. Salinger's Holden Caulfield. The Scuola Holden hosts a variety of courses on narrative techniques including screenwriting, journalism, videogames, novels and short stories...In the following years his fame grew enormously throughout Europe, with his works topping the Italian and French best-seller lists. Larger recognition followed the adaptation of his theatrical monologue Novecento into the movie The Legend of 1900, directed by Academy Award-winning director Giuseppe Tornatore....He has also worked with the French band Air, releasing "City Reading", a mix of the band's music with Baricco's reading of his novel City. He has directed the film Lezione 21 on Beethoven's Fifth Symphony and its critical reception. Novels: Castelli di rabbia, Rizzoli 1991, Tascabili Bompiani 1994; Lands of Glass, Penguin 1992. Awarded with Prix Médicis étranger - France ;Oceano Mare, Rizzoli 1993; Ocean Sea, ISBN 0375703950, 1993. Awarded with 'Palazzo al Bosco' - Italy ;Novecento. Un monologo, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore, Milan, 1994; Novecento: pianist, 1994.;Seta, Rizzoli 1996; Silk, ISBN 9780307277978, 1996. (See Silk (2007 film) for the film adaptation.);City (original title), ISBN 9780375725487 (edition in English), Rizzoli 1999.;Constellations (Mozart, Rossini, Benjamin, Adorno) (original title), 1999. Senza sangue, Rizzoli 2002; Without Blood ISBN 1400034787, 2002. (Also published in revised form in The New Yorker)
Questa storia, Fandango 2005. Emmaus, Feltrinelli 2009;Mr Gwyn, Feltrinelli 2011.(wikipedia)
** - related to shadowgraphs, lythophanies and recollecting: Stan Kelly-Bootle's past VN-L posting (recently quoted) notes that: "Yet am I the first to report the following suggestive support for DZ's "ombriole" derivation ? [...] from VN's Russian translation of "Speak Memory" [his mum is picking mushrooms, (II:3)] ... Clearly, VN's "second thoughts" transformed the mundane "mist all around her" into the magical ????????? ??????. It's at least arguable that "aureole" graced a favoured place in VN's lexis"
*** - "A modernidade e os Modernos," Ed. Tempo Brasileiro, 1975,RJ from the German Das Argument n. 46, Verlag,1967 and Schriften, Suhrcamp,Verlag,1955
# - Fredson Bower's prologue to "Lectures on Russian Literature" quotes John Simon (n.xi) "But Nabokov does demand, for all his rejection of crude reality - 'those farcical and fraudulent characters called Facts' - a powerful semblance of reality which, as he himself might have put it, is not the same as a re/semblance. " And here we have a link bt. semblance-re/semblance, le vrai/ le vrai-semblable to the evanescent quality that's manifested in special episodes that set them outside historical time and which may bring about, or most probably destroy, by its fake repetition, an "aura." ( I wonder now about what VN saw in the relation he established bt. Art and Mimetism, but I suppose the latter doesn't refers to the process of simple imitation)
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/
Rembrandt or Veronese? | Vladimir Nabokov
In Victor's art teacher Lake's studio there are only two framed pictures that adorn the pale gray walls: "a copy of Gertrude Kasebier's photographic masterpiece ...
blogs.pomona.edu/rust185-2012s/.../rembrandt-or-veronese/
JM: So many discrepant things pop up once our attention is invited to dwell on Nabokovian references and particular words.
My first reaction to Lake's reproduction of "The Pilgrims of Emmaus" was a futuristic one: I'd recently finished reading Alessandro Baricco's* "Emmaus," a novel that's distant in style and spirit from those other works of his that I read before ("Silk", "Ocean Sea," "Without Blood"). In this novel, the theme about the Emmaus pilgrims and "resurection" are elaborated through the experiences lived by a group of students in a Catholic School. They roughly divide into "the common bourgeois Catholics" and "the rich and decadent Atheists." This experience helped me to shun the indications about uncertainties related to Lake's painters (Veronese?Rembrandt?), to search for something else, although still related to Nabokov (who was fascinated by King Charles II, the Restoration, his father's Afterlife, Resurection and even,possibly,the Portuguese Sebastianists belief in a second coming).
From the Wiki on Emmaus: "Some interpreters have concluded that Mark's intended readers already knew the traditions of Jesus' appearances, and that Mark brings the story to a close here to highlight the resurrection and leave anticipation of the parousia (Second Coming)....Some have argued that this announcement of the resurrection and Jesus going to Galilee is the parousia (see also Preterism), but Raymond E. Brown argues that a parousia confined only to Galilee is improbable.." I ( of course) searched for "Preterism"..."a Christian eschatological view that interprets prophecies of the Bible, especially Daniel and Revelation, as events which have already happened in the first century A.D. Preterism holds that Ancient Israel finds its continuation or fulfillment in the Christian church at the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70. The term preterism comes from the Latin praeter, which is listed in Webster's 1913 dictionary as a prefix denoting that something is "past" or "beyond," signifying that either all or a majority of Bible prophecy was fulfilled by AD 70. Adherents of preterism are commonly known as preterists."
When I returned to Pale Fire's lines about "preterists" I was surprised at the secondary link between PF and Pnin.
John Shade: "I have a thousand parents. Sadly they/ Dissolve in their own virtues and recede,/ But certain words, chance words I hear or read,/ Such as "bad heart" always to him refer,/And "cancer of the pancreas" to her./A preterist: one who collects cold nests."
Pnin: "... One had to forget - because one could not live with the thought that this graceful, fragile, tender young woman with those eyes, that smile, those gardens and snows in the background, had been brought in a cattle car to an extermination camp and killed by an injection of phenol into the heart...And since the exact form of her death had not been recorded, Mira kept dying a great number of deaths in one's mind, and undergoing a great number of resurrections, only to die again and again, led away by a trained nurse, inoculated with filth, tetanus bacilli, broken glass, gassed in a sham shower-bath with prussic acid, burned alive in a pit on a gasoline-soaked pile of beechwood.."
(hint: Shade's "a thousand parents" and Mira who "kept dying a great number of deaths in one's mind and undergoing a great number of resurrections.")
The second link was differently oriented. I noticed that in Lake's studio there were reproductions of an ancient photograph and an ancient painting, i.e., there were two different medias, in a copy, lying side by side. This fact became meaningful to me because I'd been recovering Walter Benjamin's essays related to the "aura,"** particularly his writings about Baudelaire,Proust and "la mémoire involontaire" *** (strangely connected to Kinbote's Biblical "in a glass, darkly"). For Benjamin, "to experience the aura of a phenomenon means that it invites the eyes to be raised upwards... it's the unrepeatable manifestation of distance." (there are many other descriptions which I didn't translate)
Benjamin quotes Proust's commentary about the emptying of sensations related to the repetition of the simple name, "Venice," in connection to his discovery that the objects which arise by an "involuntary memory" possess an "aura," whereas daguerreotypes and photographic reproductions effect the "decadence of the aura" by their reproducibility, imitation and, most of all, by the vacant indifferent look that the spectator encounters (this oily blankness is masterfully described by Baricco in his Emmaus novel). #
......................................................................
* - Alessandro Baricco (born January 25, 1958 in Turin, Piedmont) is a popular Italian writer, director and performer. His novels have been translated into a wide number of languages. He currently lives in Rome with his wife and two sons....After receiving degrees in philosophy (under Gianni Vattimo) and piano, he published essays on music criticism: Il genio in fuga (1988) onGioachino Rossini, and L'anima di Hegel e le mucche del Wisconsin ("Hegel's Soul and the Cows of Wisconsin", 1992) on the relation between music and modernity. He subsequently worked as musical critic for La Repubblica and La Stampa, and hosted talk shows on Rai Tre. Baricco debuted as a novelist with Castelli di rabbia (translated as Lands of Glass) in 1991...In 1993 he co-founded a creative writing school in Turin, naming it Scuola Holden after J. D. Salinger's Holden Caulfield. The Scuola Holden hosts a variety of courses on narrative techniques including screenwriting, journalism, videogames, novels and short stories...In the following years his fame grew enormously throughout Europe, with his works topping the Italian and French best-seller lists. Larger recognition followed the adaptation of his theatrical monologue Novecento into the movie The Legend of 1900, directed by Academy Award-winning director Giuseppe Tornatore....He has also worked with the French band Air, releasing "City Reading", a mix of the band's music with Baricco's reading of his novel City. He has directed the film Lezione 21 on Beethoven's Fifth Symphony and its critical reception. Novels: Castelli di rabbia, Rizzoli 1991, Tascabili Bompiani 1994; Lands of Glass, Penguin 1992. Awarded with Prix Médicis étranger - France ;Oceano Mare, Rizzoli 1993; Ocean Sea, ISBN 0375703950, 1993. Awarded with 'Palazzo al Bosco' - Italy ;Novecento. Un monologo, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore, Milan, 1994; Novecento: pianist, 1994.;Seta, Rizzoli 1996; Silk, ISBN 9780307277978, 1996. (See Silk (2007 film) for the film adaptation.);City (original title), ISBN 9780375725487 (edition in English), Rizzoli 1999.;Constellations (Mozart, Rossini, Benjamin, Adorno) (original title), 1999. Senza sangue, Rizzoli 2002; Without Blood ISBN 1400034787, 2002. (Also published in revised form in The New Yorker)
Questa storia, Fandango 2005. Emmaus, Feltrinelli 2009;Mr Gwyn, Feltrinelli 2011.(wikipedia)
** - related to shadowgraphs, lythophanies and recollecting: Stan Kelly-Bootle's past VN-L posting (recently quoted) notes that: "Yet am I the first to report the following suggestive support for DZ's "ombriole" derivation ? [...] from VN's Russian translation of "Speak Memory" [his mum is picking mushrooms, (II:3)] ... Clearly, VN's "second thoughts" transformed the mundane "mist all around her" into the magical ????????? ??????. It's at least arguable that "aureole" graced a favoured place in VN's lexis"
*** - "A modernidade e os Modernos," Ed. Tempo Brasileiro, 1975,RJ from the German Das Argument n. 46, Verlag,1967 and Schriften, Suhrcamp,Verlag,1955
# - Fredson Bower's prologue to "Lectures on Russian Literature" quotes John Simon (n.xi) "But Nabokov does demand, for all his rejection of crude reality - 'those farcical and fraudulent characters called Facts' - a powerful semblance of reality which, as he himself might have put it, is not the same as a re/semblance. " And here we have a link bt. semblance-re/semblance, le vrai/ le vrai-semblable to the evanescent quality that's manifested in special episodes that set them outside historical time and which may bring about, or most probably destroy, by its fake repetition, an "aura." ( I wonder now about what VN saw in the relation he established bt. Art and Mimetism, but I suppose the latter doesn't refers to the process of simple imitation)
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/