-------- Original Message --------
--- On Mon, 3/9/09, joseph Aisenberg <vanveen13@SBCGLOBAL.NET>
wrote:
[...]
> But
> at the end this doesn't resolve itself in any kind of
> concrete dramatic form, and Kinbote suggests that he, like V
> of The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, or the hero of Bend
> Sinister, comes close to meeting or somehow crazily
> intuiting the author himself, the happy
> hetorsexual Russian, and the illusion disappears, the
> fiction is dismissed.
Now you're talking! Though I think there's another
point or two where the fiction is even more clearly
dismissed.
> The question that remains, is why with
> all the clues did we become so emotionally involved with
> such
> shiny artifice; and two, we laugh at how compelling the
> idea of seeing correspondences all over the place is, yet
> in spite of ourselves continue to see them proliferate--as
> Shade tells us, the correspondences in of themselves
> really don't matter, it's the urge to find them
> that does:
I don't think that's what Shade tells us at all. To him,
the fact that the correspondences exist matters, even if
we don't understand what they tell us.
> Nabokov suggests that this obssessive need
> to discover ultimate meanings is both pathetic and
> poignant, a foible that makes us fumble in all kinds of
> brutal and ludicrous ways, but poignant because it
> represents the genuinely spiritual part of ourselves as
> well, the part looking for transcendance, the part that
> makes us see Lolita's pain through Humbert's sociopathy.
And the part that lets him know more about God than he
can express, as he said in SO (not to mention the essay on
"commonsense"--I forget how explicit this is in /Speak,
Memory/). I'm happy with what you say if you add that
Nabokov suggests this obsessive need can lead us to our
closest approach to the truth.
And with this in mind, I think the disappearance of the
illusion and dismissal of the fiction look quite different--
as Victoria Alexander pointed out, and William Dowling may
have been planning to, and Brian Boyd pointed out for
different reasons, it leads us toward what Nabokov believed
was the real transcendental above our world.
Jerry Friedman