Alexey
Sklyarenko: I read with great interest Matt Roth & Tiffany
DeRewal's article in NOJ [...] I have permitted myself to point out a few minor
errors that don't undermine the authors' theory and that could have been easily
avoided [...] These comments will do for now.
JM:
Marvellous contribution, Alexey and basic clarifications. Although I'm still
doubtful of Hazel's falterings as a Red Vanessa, there is a corroboration in
what you wrote to Matt and T.D: "Adam Falter, a character in Ultima Thule, is a
medium, like Hazel Shade in Pale Fire. There are many more parallels,"
when we consider that "Falter" means "butterfly" in German.
Fran
Assa:Here's a wonderful birthday treat: http://www.d-e-
Zimmer.de/LolitaUSA/LoUSpre.htm
JM: Linking to Zimmer's
birthday homage and A.S's parallel ( A.Falter and Hazel Shade), I selected D.Z's
last paragraph on VN's "arcane riddles and reality." (equally demonstrated by
V.Fet's article in The Nabokovian about scientific labels):
"In recent
years,critics have tended to laud Nabokov as a metaphysical seeker, a composer
of arcane riddles, a postmodern juggler of erudite associations.
However true that may be, the "realistic" side to his art deserves not be
overlooked. He himself did not like the words "reality" and
"realistic"[...] Perhaps that has dissuaded critics from noticing how much
"average reality" he had to assemble in order to make his invented miniature
worlds credible, how much robust reality he had to study to make his choices of
telling detail. His geography is a case in point. F or a change, it may
pay to look for his "sources" not in remote literature but in the real
world. Whenever one encounters some weird place in his fiction it is safer
to assume it has some basis in reality than to take it as a fact that everything
is imaginary. In those of his novels and stories he himself called
"realistic-pychological," that is in all except Invitation to a Beheading, Bend
Sinister and three of his four last novels, just about all of the seemingly
imaginary places have some counterpart on the map. You bet they
do."
B.Wyllie[Could anyone help me locate these
two quotations? "an unwarranted leap into the empyrean";"a blue-tinted or
rose-shaded photograph taken by a stranger"¨]: "a blue-tinted or
rose-shaded photograph taken by a stranger" Strong Opinions, p.
186
JM:
Copying from SO, after Wyllie's localization:
"The act of retention
is the act of art, artistic selection, artistic blending, artistic
re-combination of actual events. The bad memoirist re-touches his past, and the
result is a blue-tinted or pink-shaded photograph taken by a stranger to console
sentimental bereavement. The good memoirist, on the other hand, does his best to
preserve the utmost truth of the detail. One of the ways he achieves his intent
is to find the right spot on his canvas for placing the right patch of
remembered color."
On the same theme, I'll
add Boyd's lines, in his preface to J.Holabird's
book (VN Alphabet in Color), about Véra Nabokov's objection to the
opinion that "VN's metaphors to specify the exact colors he associated
with each letter of the alphabet...were a concession to literature," when
she insisted that Nabokov "considers his prose scientific and would have
used the same metaphors in a scientific article."