On 22/10/06 07:01, "jansymello" <jansy@AETERN.US> wrote:
//snip
One more voice, here added "inter-texturely": Why not examine more and go beyond "PF and Commentary"?
For example. In "ADA" we find Van's treatise on "Texture of Time"and his insight on the interval between events. Now, ADA begins, on Chapter 1, part One, with:
"All happy families are more or less dissimilar; all unhappy ones are more or less alike" (a great Russian writer)
If we should turn to Pale Fire, Commentary to line 894, when CK quotes JS denying Zemblan re-semblances ( initially CK had changed the "subject" saying "all Chinese look alike") we end with:
"Resemblances are the shadows of differences. Different people see different similarities and similar diferences" .
Various voices seem to be chiming in at various points in a diastema of different textures along distinct works...
Jansy: the ‘voices’ I often hear include large doses of VN mocking those trite, paradoxical aphorisms that we so readily take as ineffable wisdom — sometimes characterized as the “Less is More; More is Less” school.
Consider Dan Lloyd’s book “Radiant Cool: A Novel Theory of Consciousness” (MIT Press, 2003). I’ve read only Jerry Fodor’s scathing critique (LRB, Mar 4, 2004) so I’m not sure if the title is a conscious reversal of “Pale Fire??” Temperature markers are forever changing: nowadays the hottest songs and microchips are the coolest.
As the pun on ‘novel’ indicates, Lloyd’s epistemological philosophies are presented in dramatic narrative form (contrary to VN’s advice?). Lloyd uses the Dickensian and Nabokovian character- and place-naming tricks we’ve been discussing (there’s a Prof Max GRUE, and you are expected to know the infamous Grue paradox (qv!) that disturbs the very foundations of scientific induction; the café is called GODOT to allow the obvious joke with the waitress: “How long have you been waiting for Godot?”) YET finally, as Fodor, anxious to debate actual theories of consiousness, concludes: “YOU CAN’T ARGUE WITH A NOVEL!”
Stan Kelly-Bootle