James Twiggs (to
J.Friedman):"If the otherworld model is the
dominant paradigm, then it follows that you're not the only member of what
clearly seems to be a "school."*
JM: I'll trust Jim's tolerance
on "otherwordly" classificatory matters, because I don't think anyone can
read Nabokov and ignore his "intimations of immortality,"
present even while he was opposing certain evolutionary theories in
the field of science.
More than any "otherworld" school, it's
Nabokov's emphasis on the sense obtained through pattern and
morphology that which, in literature, places him among the
late modernist writers, not with the postmodernists** (as
if he'd care about that!).
One doesn't have to adhere to VN's beliefs, to
dwell in the parallel universes his texts promote. Nor is it
necessary to belong to either group when one accepts VN's dominant paradigm, nor
to any other "school."
There's one mathematician which I learned to
appreciate (but not to fully understand) through psychoanalysis, when Wilfred
Bion borrowed from him the "selected fact" and a new definition for "caesura"
(artificial, spacial or temporal, interruptions of what, from a distance,
forms a continuous flow). Henri Poincaré
brings fascinating developments for "gaps" and " newtonian causality"
and, quite often, when reading S.Blackwell's exposition about Nabokov's research
with butterflies, I was reminded of Poincaré and... John
Shade. To further develop this line of
inquiry ( if it is justified by any VN bibliographical
corroboration) only mathematicians will do...
................................................................................................................................
* other excerpts from JT's
posting:
"As for your question about a school of
“otherworlders,” I refer you to Don Johnson’s and Brian Boyd’s “Prologue: The
Otherworld,” in Nabokov’s World, Vol. 1: The Shape of Nabokov’s World
(Palgrave-Macmillan, 2002), in which Johnson provides an overview of the history
of Nabokov criticism. What I meant by “otherworlders” is summed up by Johnson as
follows: "Much of Nabokov’s work is best understood ...Death is, speculatively,
merely the dividing line between levels of consciousness...the basic conceptual
categories underlying most, if not all of Nabokov’s work. Much of the technical
virtuosity in Nabokov’s work is in aid of hinting at this relationship between
dimensions..." ... I’m not drawn to this approach to my favorite Nabokov
books, and I'm especially suspicious of its application to Pale Fire--in part
because the novel is so overtly about these very matters. I was therefore
gratified when Johnson goes on to say that "My present discomfort stems from the
thought that this dominant critical paradigm discourages critics and readers
from attending to the very concrete details that constitute the basis of
Nabokov’s stature as an artist...Would acknowledging such assumptions
significantly diminish our delight? Would Nabokov be less the consummate artist?
Apart from whatever heuristic value they may have, our reigning paradigms should
be regarded with scepticism, lest they deflect attention from the area of
Nabokov’s greatest originality--the brilliance of his style and wit."
... most of what he [Boyd] has presented as
Nabokov's "deep" side is indeed shopworn, and was shopworn long before Nabokov
came on the scene. As Boyd has described it in the pages I've read by him, the
"philosophy" is a hodgepodge of familiar ideas--a bit of Ancient Wisdom here
(Gnosticism, neo-Platonism, etc.), a spot of pseudo-science there (Blavatsky,
Steiner, Dunne, Ouspensky, et al.), pretty standard intimations of immortality
and nature mysticism, and some ideas about design that have been around for a
very long while."
** While googling for
the original Russian designation for "hereafter" I serendipitously
encountered a pertinent paper, written in 1995, about
a "(post)modern Nabokov." (Herbert Grabes: A Prize for the
(Post-)Modernist Nabokov) in which Grabes
sustains that VN's "Moebius-strip structure concerning authorship can
also be seen as a further ironical comment on the ineradicable metaphysical
presumptions concerning art, the inveterate attempt to interpret the artistic
'game of words' as a 'game of worlds' in an ontological sense. Against this
modernist stance Nabokov quite clearly posited the postmodern one: that, like
the despicable Humbert Humbert, he has “only words to play with,” but then he
adds that "the very fact that he is throughout his work concerned with a subject
like this proves how removed he is from the postmodern agenda, within which
metaphysical questions are anathema." For him John Shade is aware of "the conjunction of pattern-generating
coincidences, a much more significant trait of Nabokovian writing...that through
artistic pattern-making [Shade] can 'see the web of the world, and the warp and
the weft of that web” while "we know from the works of Proust and Joyce and
Virginia Woolf, such pattern-making is a distinct feature of modernist fiction,
a last-ditch attempt to signify the unity of consciousness in face of the
chaotic swarm of sensations and
impressions."