JM: A commentary, related to the interview with Jenefer
Coates (for the Wesleyan Argus), when she notes that "Nabokov made an art
not only out of the content of his writing, but also out of its structure...When
writing, he recorded fractions of a story on separate cards. These fractions
became dispersed pieces within the single, final piece, and posed a 'game of
cards' for readers. 'You as a reader have to gather them back up
again'."
Most Nabokov scholars can now easily gather and rearrange his "game of
cards" without the help of a pack of note-cards. Brian Boyd's Ada
Online certainly follows these nabokovian tricks (but readers may
assemble the items as they think it fit), since his commentaries are
thematically ordered. If one has access to the digitalized copy
of "Ada", a click on the search-button
with thematic sub-items, such as
"butler," "bottle", "bouteille" for example, reveals an
amusing dispersed story about the servant's loves and lore in
Ardis.
A few years ago I tried to find a term in English for the
old correction-masks that were applied to exams, carrying small
holes that isolate only the correct, or the
wrong, answers. The closest I got to it was a "template
sheet." (it's related to Ada's Babagge, computers and the mechanism
that animates music-boxes and the
commands inside organ-grinders).. This sort of selection reveals
lots of delicate little stories, lost the body of the novel...
I'm certain that some of the interpretative quandaries, in
"Lolita" and "Pale Fire," instead of being solved, can be
delightfully enhanced after one tries to identify the specific
logic and rethoric devices related to anamorphic constructions,
or to the tricks shaped by "anamorphic doubleness that allows
two different images or manings to inhabit the same textual space."* One of
the arguments for applying the concept of anamorphosis to the structure of
a literary work, examined in an "oblique way",* as it's
been advanced by Anna Riehl** is that, if "anamorphosis possesses
its own strict logic; likewise, anamorphic constructions engender a rhetoric
specific to their needs.... Even in the absence of explicit references to
perspective, seeing, or painting, a text may nevertheless operate according to
the rules of anamorphic logic and rhetoric" Departing from John Donne's
poetry, she illustrates how its "concern with epistemological
reliability, its communicative disasters, its rhetorical tricks are shaped by
the distinctly anamorphic doubleness that allows two different images or
meanings to inhabit the same textual space."
My fascination with "nonnons" and Nabokov's use of mirroring surfaces
initially derived from my readings as a Freudian practitioner.
Here are two, very general, entries which I collected from the
internet:
1. [ Holbein's painting] "The Ambassadors was used for the cover of the
French edition of Lacan's Séminaire XI : Les quatre concepts fondamentaux de la
psychanalyse. Of particular interest is the odd-looking "stain" in the middle
foreground, "cet objet étrange, suspendu, oblique." If you look at the painting
from the right "angle"—if you roll your cursor over it—the stain reveals itself
as a perfectly proportioned skull, but everything else becomes utterly
distorted. The right angle for the skull is the wrong angle for the rest of the
world. This is Lacan's example of anamorphosis, the "looking awry" necessary to
seeing the skull, which stands at once for the subject and its annihilation."
Psychoanalysis of
culture www.arts.ualberta.ca/~aoki/Research/research.htmEm cache - Similares
2. The expression "selected fact" was borrowed by Wilfred R. Bion from the
French mathematician Henri Poincaré to refer to the element that makes it
possible to give coherence to a group of scattered data. In Science and Method
(1908), Poincaré considered the "selection of facts" that enabled science to
discover laws of general validity—that is, facts that introduce order and
coherence into the complexity of the world. Bion...became interested in the
process by which the mind transforms a chaotic...experience into an experience
that is integrated, representable, and thinkable
Read more:
http://www.answers.com/topic/selected-fact#ixzz1oRg8R1dp
Jacques Lacan (French) and Wilfred Bion (British) hold very dissimilar
views about the theory and practice of psychoanalysis. However, I think
that the fundamental concept of the "selected fact" can be safely extended
to "anamorphosis," if we accept that the Bionian analytic interpretation,
that brings together the patient's scattered experiences, serves as the second
element of the catoptric employ of anamorphosis (hopefully unlike Charles
Kinbote's ambition to organize John Shade's "Pale Fire"...). I have no clue if
Lacan's elaboration over Holbein's skull in "The Ambassadors," inspired
Nabokov when he chose the names Botkin,Kinbote and the Botfly, when we
associate "Bot" to the German for "Embassy" and "message" ("Botschaft").
I heard about an exciting article about this idea being read at New
Zealand's Nabokov Upside Down conferences.
.....................................................................................
* Eying the Thought Awry: The Anamorphosis of John Donne's
Poetry,Anna Riehl, English Literary Renaissance, Volume 39, Issue 1, pages
141–162, February 2009.(The Chapman lines I recently quoted in the VN-L, to
associate them to Chapman's homer, came from A.Riehl's
article) .