L. Hochard: A.Makine [
quoted by Iris Neva:"On top of this, your Nabo doesn't care
about knowing whom this accent belonged to [...] He writes like a collector of
butterflies: he catches a pretty insect, knocks it out with formalin, impales it
on a needle. He proceeds the same with words...",] seems to
harbour the old outmoded idea that VN is a cold insensitive and cruel aesthete
[...] But VN's narrative system aims precisely at denouncing moralizing moralism
as too easy, over accommodating and, when all is said and done,
hypocritical...
JM: I
agree with L.Hochard about VN's narrative system aiming at denouncing
moralizing moralism. What puzzles me is the description of A.Makine's
ideas as "old outmoded" - should this conclusion derive solely from
the offered excerpts: Makine's words might have been ironical in their
context.
The same twist is noted after Barry Warren's
contextualization of C.Kunin's "Ode to Roman
Jakobson" and Gershwin's "The
Saga of Jenny."
L.Hochard's quote from V.' in RLSK is revealing: "As often was the way with Sebastian Knight [and with
Nabokov his maker], he used parody as a kind of spring-board
for leaping into the highest region of serious emotion" Would this
also apply to Makine?*
Thanks to A. Stadlen for the marvellous historical and
biological explanation about the expression "doryphore" ("a pedantic
critic of minor errors; a nit-picker."),a spear-carrying potato beetle.
Quite unlike Kafka's domed doomed beetle, btw. Alexey, your
radiant connections for FD's "The Brothers Karamasov" are a
feat. And I don't think AS-B had been thinking of you when he
first mentioned the doryphorous pest...As one of Stadlen's quotes
shows [ In 1996, Herb Caen commented in the San Francisco
Chronicle: “For a doryphore, what is more delightful than a mistake in a
correction?” ] nit-picking and pic-nicking may
be a dangerous thing, what with all those bugs on the loose!
* - while exchanging messages off-list about "crocodile tears" ( first
deliciously described by Kipling in his Elephant Child's story), it
came out that Lewis Carroll's croc who "welcomes little fishes in/ With gently
smiling jaws!" was a parody of moralizing Isaac Watts ( recently
mentioned by J.F and SK-B in connection to Derzhavin's acrocstic).