SK-B [answers " VN considered
Gogol's prose as "four-dimensional, at least. He may be compared to his
contemporary, the mathematician Lobachevsky ..."] an
intriguing ...reference... slightly misleading! Lobachevsky and Bolyai certainly
"[co-]invented" Non-Euclidean Geometry independently... but not in the
4-dimensional sense apparently implied by VN...One must avoid confusing the
concepts of dimension and euclideanism!! VN had in mind, I suppose, the emerging
Theory of General Relativity ... unknown to Bolyai or Lobachevsky at the
time.
......................................
Can Jansy tell us if this quote ( all reality is
a mask) pre- or post-dates VN's famous warning that references to reality
should always (really!) be protected with quotational caution: "reality"?...
Being neither a tenured philosopher nor a Quantum Cosmologist (dieu soit loue),
VN the novelist/poet is not required to give us formally consistent explanations
for what David Deutsch calls "The Fabric of Reality!" (See my forthcoming "The
Fabrication of Reality," CACM, July, 2008)
...................................
JM: My New Directions
edition doesn't inform the original date of VN's biography of Gogol, but my
translated copy acknowledges copyrights in
1944.
This being so the comparison bt. Gogol's
four-dimensional prose and Lobachevsky must antecede "Reality, is the only word in the language that has no
meaning without quotation marks." ( I know this sentence appears in
Strong Opinions but I could not locate my copies at home to find the
exact date of the interview.)
Lacan, as you know, considered material reality as
pertaining to the "imaginary register", and I think VN would concur. Cf.
SO, a 1962 interview:
In your new novel, Pale
Fire, one of the characters says that reality is neither the subject nor the
object of real art, which creates its own reality. What is that
reality? Reality is
a very subjective affair. I can only define it as a kind of gradual
accumulation of information; and as specialization... You can get nearer and
nearer, so to speak, to reality; but you never get near enough because reality
is an infinite succession of steps, levels of perception, false bottoms, and
hence unquenchable, unattainable...So that we live surrounded by more or less
ghostly objects ...
You say that reality is an intensely subjective
matter, but in your books it seems to me that you seem to take an almost
perverse delight in literary deception. The
fake move in a chess problem, the illusion of a solution or the conjuror's
magic: ...all art is deception and so is nature; all is
deception in that good cheat, from the insect that mimics a leaf to the popular
enticements of procreation.
Nevertheless, when considering the
concept of "species" ( 1935/37- but published in 2000, as
a chapter on Father's Butterflies), VN's views depart from a
different perspective...
Jansy
PS: Please, let me see your forthcoming CACM article on
"The Fabrication of Reality".
(I always thought Tom Lehrer was
mocking & accusing Lobachevsky of doing a
thorough "research", but I never seriously considered the matter
any further, just followed the lines.)