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Re: Fw: VN speaks for himself to on pets,peats and petards
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----- Forwarded message from as-brown@comcast.net -----
Date: Sun, 6 Mar 2005 19:21:53 -0500
From: Andrew Brown <as-brown@comcast.net>
Reply-To: Andrew Brown <as-brown@comcast.net>
Subject: Re: Fw: VN speaks for himself to on pets,peats and petards
To: Vladimir Nabokov Forum
Readers of Richard Ellmann's biography of Joyce, as well as readers of the
now-hard-to-find letters Joyce sent Nora from Dublin in December of 1909 know
that Bloom's predelictions and peccadillos are, basically, those of Joyce
himself. With respect to the writer of the Lectures on Literature quoted
below, I demure and suggest instead that in art, which Joyce and Nabokov both
pursued, in fact, in the modernist tradition formulated by Wilde and others,
taste and morals mean much less than whether a work is written well or badly.
Nabokov was a man who could not find it in himself to accept a work like
Huckleberry Finn because of what he considered its vulgarity. In this matter my
own views part company with VNs, in spite of my considering him the greatest
American writer of the 20th century. When it comes to art (and much else,
actually), you don't have to agree with anybody, not even your heroes, all of
the time.
Andrew
----- Original Message -----
From: D. Barton Johnson
To: NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU
Sent: Sunday, March 06, 2005 4:10 PM
Subject: Fw: VN speaks for himself to on pets,peats and petards
----- Original Message -----
From: Jansy Berndt de Souza Mello
Sent: Sunday, March 06, 2005 11:45 AM
Subject: VN speaks for himself to on pets,peats and petards
Dear List,
There is an important reference in VN´s lecture on Joyce which I couldn´t find
yesterday but that I can now add:
I´m copying from Fredon Bowers edition of Lectures on Literature, page 287:
"Another consideration in relation to Bloom: those so many who have written so
much about "Ulysses" are either very pure men or very depraved men. They are
inclined to regard Bloom as a very ordinary nature, and apparently Joyce
himself intended to portray an ordinary person. It is obvious, however, that
in the sexual department Bloom is, if not on the verge of insanity, at least a
good clinical example of extreme sexual preoccupation and perversity with all
kinds of curious complications. His case is strictly heterosexual, of course -
not homosexual as most of the ladies and gentlemen are in Proust (...) - but
within the wide limits of Bloom´s love for the opposite sex he indulges in acts
and dreams that are definitely subnormal in the zoological, evolutional sense.
I shall not bore you with a list of his curious desires, but this I will say:
in Bloom´s mind and in Joyce´s book the theme of sex is continually mixed and
intertwined with the theme of the latrine. God knows I have no objection
whatsoever to so-called frankness in novels. On the contrary, we have too
little of it, and what there is has become in its turn conventional and trite,
as used by so-called tough writers, the darlings of the book clubs, the pets of
clubwomen. But I do object to the folowing: Bloom is supposed to be a rather
orginary citizen. Now it is not true that the mind of an ordinary citizen
continuously dwells on physiological things. I object to the continuously, not
to the disgusting. All this very special pathological stuff seems artificial
and unnecessary in this particular context".
..............................................
There are other comments by VN about Joyce´s and Bloom´s "extraordinariness"
which are as vivid as the one here quoted.
Young Eric´s or any Veen or Zemski (explicit) sexual fantasy should not be
confused with VN´s own, to the point of " continuously" permeating his novel
like a bass background.
VN ( on page 346) writes about Joyce´s parodies :
"We can thus define clichés as bits of dead prose and of rotting poetry.
However the parody has its interruptions. Now what Joyce does here is to cause
some of that dead and rotten stuff to reveal here and there its live source,
its primary freshness (...) Joyce manages to build up something real - pathos,
pity, compassion - out of the dead formulas which he parodies".
I also think that this very real, compassionate and golden atmosphere is
something VN achieved in ADA, albeit by other means no less "extraordinary".
Paradise regained?
Jansy
----- End forwarded message -----