J.Aisenberg: in SO, in his interview, Nabokov doesn't ever give us any
specifics, because, as he says, implies, suggests, no afterlife can be explained
in living terms [...] it does not matter whether or not a fountain or a mountain
hovers beyond the veil, but the fact he was nearly drawn to think so. That was
my point.[...] neither of them can describe it[...] or do much than more than
poetically sense it through the grid of their own unerstanding. I suppose, in my
secular way, I take Shade's thoughts as just a way of not having to be
disappointed with the little he can actually know[...]If the novel is meant to
be a model of a specific "otherworld" then the book would have to be considered
a failure [...]... significant, why? Because of the reader's urge, which
mirrors Kinbote's urge to find zembla in Shadowland, and Shade's urge to
discover an afterlife for he and sybil and his dead daughter....
JM: In the first place, a
spelling correction related to former message.
The immortal ( or nearly immortal) medusa is called
turritopsis nutricula*. One of the articles even
questions our common beliefs
about an inevitable doom awaiting every "solitary organism",
and mentions this strange multitentacled animal as a proof for some
kind of biological immortality, of the kind that VN would spurn, I
think! It seems to me that his "serial souls" would always "embody" (?)
Vladimir Nabokov.
For J. A "no afterlife can be explained in living terms"
and yet, he employs words, such as "beyond the veil",just
as J.Friedman mentioned "above our world", which are spacial
indicators. Or adds that Shade expects to find Sybil and Hazel,
perfectly identifiable as such, after their deaths. At the same time he admits that, as least in VN's fiction
related to the "hereafter", there are characters who
may "poetically sense it through the grid of their own unerstanding"
( in his example, Shade also puts faith in patterns and
correlations) so they must "sense" something that is apprehensible, even
without words or traditional sensorial inputs.
Does this indeterminacy spoil our pleasure when we read
VN? No. It is part of the enjoyment! Afterlife may be indeterminate, but
style, structure, the corpus of his text, are not. Although his preoccupation with an afterlife often
intrudes in his writings, it is not an essential part of his literary
achievements when taken as constituting a private belief: Nabokov
uses it as part of his conjuring tricks, games,
satire, poetic metaphors.
Hope, ghosts, evolving shadows... aren't
they incorporated in his style? In my opinion his talent also
lies in his ability to projects them onto the reader, who then
perpetuates them (at least while he is reading.)
........................................................................................
*Excerpt: Solitary organisms are
(according to current belief) doomed to die, after they completed their life
cycle[...] Turritopsis nutricula (could we call it Joe??)
managed to find a way to beat that [...] they revert completely to a sexually
immature, colonial stage after they reach sexual maturity[...]They’re able to
return to polyp stage due to a cell change in the external screen (Exumbrella),
which allows them to bypass death. As far as scientists have been able to find
out, this change renders the hydrozoa virtually immortal.www.zmescience.com/meet-the-worlds-only-immortal-animal -
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