Excerpts:
C.Kunin: As usual, our dear JM has
left out a bit of connective tissue that keeps her reference to "la Golconda"
from being the complete non-sequiter it appears to be. The name of the Magritte
painting is in fact LA GOLCONDA[...] I saw quite clearly that the hatted
"raining" men are NOT caring umbrellas.
JM: While researching after Magritte's
La Golconda, I came accross several paintings of his that are surrealistically
suggestive of a mood in Pale Fire: the shattered windowpane with reflected and
actual landscape[...] So, here they are to compensate for my mistaken umbrella (
it went on holidays with Hegel ) in the Golconda reproduction..
J.
Aisenberg: ...Hegel's Holiday. It led me to read Hegel [...] Is it
a dialectical gag? Thesis: rain. Antithesis unmbrella. Synthesis: pesron under
protected by rain [...] A holiday from Hegelian reasoning?
JM: Nice! You focused on the umbrella
I'd hallucinated in the Golconda painting. There are lots of things that can be
said for a holiday from Hegelian reasoning...
R S Gwynn: This Magritte, known as "Not to Be
Reproduced," has always struck me as very Nabokovian. Surely VN knew
Magritte's work. Does anyone have a direct link between the
two?
JM: Yes, I do. VN's novels and
Magritte's paintings. Any other links would be indirect?
James Twiggs [ to Aisenberg] "Those
are interesting thoughts about Magritte's painting called Hegel's Holiday. You
can read what he himself said about it, along with a lot more in the way of
commentary, by going here: SOVEREIGN STAIN: ON RENÉ MAGRITTE'S HEGEL'S
HOLIDAY,Rex Butler
http://www.artdes.monash.edu.au/globe/issue3/hegels.html
JM: I'd been bothered with the
answer I sent to RSGwynn because the "direct link" obtained by setting
novel and painting side by side, would only bring out their imagetic
dimension (visual metaphors). It would not indicate another aspect
they have in common and which is of the utmost importance: Nabokov and Magritte
are artists who deal with "art about art".
I had remembred Jacques Lacan's
lines: instead of departing from "a picture is worth a thousand
words", Lacan went on to say that "every painting is hyperverbal", a
painting invites verbalizations about it.
Nabokov's art is often an
"hyperverbal picture" hanging on the wall (as he referred to the
finished "Lolita") but it contains inside it myriads of other
hyperverbal images, and those he himself sets out to discuss
inside the novel and not only as ideas and metaphors, but as
structural elements.
Rex Butler (following James Twiggs important
indication) discusses Magritte's own developments about "Hegel's Holiday,"
as he described them in a letter to Suzi Gablik (then he went on to
discuss Lacan's "gaze") ,wrote ( and I've
underlined several words):
"Can we not say that Hegel's Holiday
is a painting of painting itself, an attempt to show or represent the
very thing that allows painting - painting as the transformation of
unidentifiable blobs of paint into identifiable and nameable objects? Is not
that passage from the mark or stain to the object we see there the very passage
implied in all painting? And the impossible equivalence each drawing attempts
to make - the two opposing things it must bring together - is just that between
this knowing and this seeing. We would say that each of these drawings is
this equivalence, but that it would always require another drawing for him to
recognise this, a comparison of it to something else. Or, as Magritte said
about another painting we shall be coming to in a moment, if what is produced
finally has the "unequivocal character of an image."
...........................................................................
PS: A delayed answer to C.Kunin's announcement to the
List: It has been fun,
but I think I have really said all I have to say about Pale Fire. I wish to
retire - - at least in so far as Pale Fire is concerned. I never heard
Gertrude Stein's famous remark, so I think the time has come to start hiding my
ignorance under a bushel.
JM: How very biblically Kinbotean this
remark, dear Carolyn. It hasn't been ignorance that
which shone forth before...even James will agree will agree will
agree with that, I suppose. Besides,
baskets may act like sieves and I hope your newly-attired
modesty won't prevent you from participating around the mulberry
bush.