DN: a translation of VN's "The Word", a pirate
version anonymously signed "L.V.", that has been kicking around the internet for
some time,[...] my (previous and legitimate) translation of this
story [...] has been included in the most recent edition of The Stories
of Vladimir Nabokov (Knopf), and that someone who publishes an unsigned
plagiarized work is a thief and a coward.
JM: Thank you for
informing us about the inclusion of "The Word" in a legitimate
translation in the most recent edition of VN's stories. I
fully sympathize with you in your indignation against pirate versions.
J.A.: I realized you were looking more deeply into the epistemological
quiddity of the phrase [...] I'm still not quite certain what the precise
boundaries of your speculation on this front are [...] Do you mean that
Kinbote often experiences a freedom from euphemisms? As in he's straightforward
and direct about sexuality? Cause I would disagree. [...] In fact I
always thought he was a lot more vague than H.H., but perhaps I misunderstood
your point. I know I don't know what you mean by the obscene
being "outside the scene", that sounds a little like deconstructionist
talk.
JM: From the informed and
articulate article you sent on Kubrick's movies* I extracted a few
sentences which led me to conclude that you know what "obscene:ouside the
scene" means. Perhaps I could add then:"outside the limits, in excess (hybris)".
Violence, erotism and mystic experiences often touch this area that seems to lie
outside the regulated boundaries of "words". VN, so I assume,
was able to experience "otherwordly" intimations and he often tried to
indicate this in his books and stories. Therefore he could delve deep
into our "human soul", in its loftiest and its most degraded expressions, and,
in your words, could turn "an aesthetic
limitation into an amazing advantage". We often forget that VN was endowed with sinesthesia and that this
probably was ever present in his relationship with words and
prose. Independently of our abilities to
understand him in Russian, English or French there'll always be a special
quality in his writing that remains elusive to the common reader. I also wonder
about the fetichistic, enchanted or animistic power of certain "words" as
they were employed by VN.
I'm unable, at present, to explain why I thought
Kinbote was more exempt than HH from "euphemisms". Van and Ada certainly
were free - and in any case I didn't have in mind four-letter
words ( these only add noise,shock, color or smell to what is indescribable
as such).
btw: Speaking about concrete letters
and words, I don't remember any reference, among the various meanings offered to
the word "bodkin", to its use in the process of hand-printing.
I came across:"it took him a minute exactly to get his setting
rule, bodkin,composing-stick and galley out of the locked
cupboard where they were kept. These were his own [...] Tyvydordow wpent no time
in distributing the type from the reserves of the thirty-five letters and
fifteen punctuation marks..."
Later on, in this same novel: " he
picked up one or two letters from the violated upper-case, and from habit
let them fall into what could have been their right places[...] Tomorrow I shall
start downstairs with the monotype. Onto the folded apron he put his composing
stick, his setting-rule, his shears, the sponge, and
the bodkin in its cork for removing wrong letters, and with two
movements of his hands made them into a compact parcel [...] I shall throw them
in the river." (CF.Penelope
Fiztgerald, "The Beginning of Spring",pg 40-122,Flamingo,
1989)
...............................................................................................................................................................................
Excerpts:
To watch Stanley Kubrick's 1971
adaptation of Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange is to enter a nightmare, a
curiously frigid funhouse inferno where human values have been turned upside
down. The ordinary order of things has been made stale, ugly and repressive;
repulsive brutality has been given a fluid allure, a breathless excitement.
[...]In the decades since its release, critics have been pretty passionately
split on the subject[...] an appreciation of the director by James Naremore, the
author seemed oddly uneasy in his critical assessment of the movie's ultimate
value[...] Burgess eventually wearied of defending it, grew to wish he had never
written the book. Kubrick was pompous. "Although a certain amount of hypocrisy
exists about it, everyone is fascinated by violence[...] Our interest in
violence in part reflects the fact that on the subconscious level we are very
little different from our primitive ancestors . . ." He argued that the film's
violent content did not provide an audience with the easy rhetorical set-ups
that usually made its consumption guilt-free[...] it remains, as Gore Vidal once
said of the novel, "chilling and entirely other." Not to mention that the kernel
of primitive truth in the material remains ever relevant[...].you still can't
help feeling these filmmakers were really trying to do something. They shrugged
off all the old rules, the generations of genericism that had previously
dictated the spreading of creamy predigested bromides over everything, so
anything would go down nice in the end[...] After several viewings, the film's
walloping force strikes one now as not being much related to the dramatic ideas
at stake in its narrative scaffolding about free-choice either[...] "The power
of the story is in the character of Alex," Kubrick told an interviewer, "who
wins you over somehow, like Richard III despite his wickedness, because of his
intelligence and wit and total honesty. He represents the id, the savage
repressed side of our nature which guiltlessly enjoys the same pleasures of
rape."[...] 'Everything's rotten. Why shouldn't I do what I want? They're
worse than I am.' In the new mood . . . people want to believe the hyperbolic
worst, want to believe in the degradation of the victims[...]It's the crux of
Kubrick's approach. "I'd say my intention . . . was to try to see the violence
from Alex's point of view,"[...] "It was necessary to find a way of stylizing
the violence, just as Burgess does by his writing style."[...] Alex, in
Kubrick's film, is really no more than a self-centered sociopath who rapes,
batters and steals for kicks while seeing himself in heroic terms as less
corrupt than those he destroys, as the one who is essentially wronged[...].the
director's feelings about his antihero were somewhat mixed. "Alex, like Richard
[III] is a character whom you should dislike and fear," Kubrick said in an
interview with Penelope Houston, "and yet you find yourself drawn very quickly
into his world and find yourself seeing things through his eyes[...] What's so
striking about A Clockwork Orange, and what probably got on these critics'
nerves, is that Kubrick had progressed so much as a filmmaker he was able to
successfully do here what he had failed at in his somewhat satisfying 1962
adaptation of Lolita. In that earlier picture, Humbert Humbert's quest for
underage nymphets became a singular yearning for a very sexually mature-looking
Dolores Haze. The point to Vladimir Nabokov's great novel was in Humbert's
feverish sexual obsession, his wild hyperbolic projections and witty
self-justifications. The film turned the book's tricky game of moral perception
into an objective reality where Humbert, despite desiring an underage girl, came
across as a suave, sincere, desperately well-meaning lover manipulated and
cheated by everyone else around him, and not the "vain and cruel wretch"Nabokov
wrote his novel about. Though vestiges of the written character's nature remain,
despite much cleansing[...] all these do is give the film's situations and
characters a cold-fish unpleasantness that stews throughout without ever quite
coming to fruition [...]By contrast, A Clockwork Orange totally and
overwhelmingly immerses the viewer in the character's state of mind[...] You try
to pinpoint exactly where the line between both lies, which is probably being
plugged as two sides of the same ugliness, and all you come up with is a queasy
ambivalence that makes parsing the story's message impossible; a viewer's own
crude urges and fears start to trickle into the background of what's playing
across the screen. What I mean is that the audience — never told precisely where
they stand in relation to what goes on — projects its own subconscious feelings
onto what Kubrick dramatizes through Alex[...]That the film attempts to provoke
responses in viewers they may not be able to fully articulate, that Kubrick
himself may not have been able to fully articulate, I think goes without saying.
But ascribing a rigorous meta-moral to these things, as critics have permitted
themselves to do without the least self-control [...].