J. Aisenberg: Why can't we have a
Nabokov who lives and thrives a long time balanced with Wilde. I mean after all
Lolita, like Dorian Gray, is fantastically iconic[...] Dorian Gray, which
seems a little melodramatic in the Sybil Vane bits, as well as seeming
homosexual without quite being so, an evasion refreshingly absent
in Lolita; on the other hand who would put down a play like The Importance
of being Earnest, which is wonderful. About whose letters will survive, I would
not know, but I'd wager you're probably right on that front--the N. and Wilson
collection is surely just for Nabokov nerds, though in the spirit of which
letters will be more immortal than thou, aren't the ones exchanged between
Flaubert and Louise Colet, or Flaubert and George Sand even more likely than all
of them to continue to be read?
A. Sklyarenko :In the night of the
Burning Barn, when Van and Ada make love for the first time, they see three
silhouettes from the library window[...]The child or dwarf in this company is
certainly Kim Beauharnais[...]Benten, the name of the sea goddess on several
Japanese islands [...] mentioned in Ada, but on Antiterra it turns out to be a
kerosene lamp's commercial name[...]The seven letters Ada has taken, S, R, E, N,
O, K, I, and is sorting out in her spektrik (the little trough of japanned wood
each player had before him; spektrik means "a little spectrum" in Russian) form
the word she has just spoken. The miraculousness of this coincidence leaves us
no time to wonder: why there is no kerosene in the lamp?[...]The kerosene from
the Benten lamp[...] was used for setting the Barn on fire. Who were the
arsonists? [...]What Ada doesn't say, is that this coincidence was contrived -
at least, partly - by her[...] Ada doesn't seem to be "as pure as night sky" in
the night of The Burning Barn; more likely, she "indulges in a cold game" with
Van (of whom she already knows that he is her brother, while he still believes
that she is his first cousin).
JM: Nabokov once said that "... great novels are great fairy tales” . He also wrote
that the strategies of pornographic novels express “a mentality stemming from the routine of ‘true’ fairy tales in
childhood”, a curious parallel.
He accepted the English title “The Enchanter” for Volshebnik, in which
Humbert Humbert’s putative predecessor “casts his
spell” over a sleeping girl by “passing his magic
wand above her body”, but he also affirmed that enchantment derives from
his reaction to a particular string of sounds and patterns. In his own words,
“a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords [...]
aesthetic bliss” and “it is the enchanter, more than
the yarn-spinner or the teacher” who interests him. Laurence
Hochard's theories, themselves, afford us a sensation of listening
to classic fairy-tales and its black & white stereotypes,contrived
symbols and magic wands (btw, lack of hygiene can be sexually stimulating
to some due to its closeness to exciting olfactory information that is enjoyed
by quadrupeds).
My point is: VN mentioned fairy-tales in relation to enchantment and
aesthetic bliss, but also as applying to plain erotica but, in this
case, he was describing not symbology but the "structure" of the story. I
wonder if LH could expand on this differentiating item (fairy-tale
strategies).
Like J.A, I think we can enjoy both Nabokov and Wilde, with due
respect to individual tastes. Like in the point intended
by Studdard (as I surmise) we gain nothing
by comparing authors in a competitive, disrespectful animus. Instead
of defects we could pursue a way to have one artist enhance the qualities
of the other?
SB suggested we move on from the discussion about
"consistency". And yet, while I was waiting in line somewhere, I
picked up a Wallace Stevens collection of essays, in which he developped his
ideas on "connotation and denotation in art", and the various
historical instances favoring one over the other. These are two other
complicated words to introduce here but I wonder if Sklyarenko's method
represents a kind of amplified game of connotations, one through which
we move away from poetry onto a kind of "mathematical" thinking.Would
VN have intended both, enchantment and cold reasoning encased inside a
single shell?