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Fwd: Re: Joyce, coarseness of; and Nina/Nora
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----- Forwarded message from bunsan@direcway.com -----
Date: Thu, 10 Mar 2005 14:44:29 -0500
From: Alexander Drescher <bunsan@direcway.com>
To: Vladimir Nabokov Forum
Andrew, List -
The London letters to which we refer capture but a moment in time, as
you indicate. I think that Joyce intended them as love missals, but
that Nora did not find them fetching; and to fetch was their purpose.
Particularly, they express the manic anxiety Joyce experienced when
alone for several months; a trip in which happily he learned how
Nora-at-his-side was a necessity for personal and artistic well-being.
Today, readers of Joyce accept the conjunction of the excretory and
amorous as a matter of taste and culture. Bloom is a great and loveable
creature, even though this old gent would have preferred the genteel
[when sober] Mr. Dedalus as a pub companion. "Coarseness" is no longer
the point.
Would it be too great a stretch to suggest that Joyce intended both to
draw in his readers and also to hold them at a distance, in parallel
with his uxorial stance? And is this not central to the wonderfully
manic quality of Joycean humor?
Perhaps we agree that the whatever-it-is that keeps couples together
is valuable and resistant to explanation.
Tangentially, might you or the List know whether Nabokov had the
Joyces in mind when he wrote:
At the time we met, his Passage à niveau was being acclaimed in Paris;
he was, as they say, "surrounded", and Nina (whose adaptability was an
amazing substitute for the culture she lacked) had already assumed if
not the part of a muse at least that of a soul mate and subtle adviser,
following Ferdinand's creative convolutions and loyally sharing his
artistic tastes; for although it is wildly improbable that she had ever
waded through a single volume of his, she had a magic knack of gleaning
all the best passages from the shop talk of literary friends. [Spring
in Fialta, p 421, Stories]
-Sandy Drescher
On Wednesday, March 9, 2005, at 08:03 PM, Donald B. Johnson wrote:
>
> Sandy,
>
> I don't know if I've ever seen the Joyce/Nora letters of 1909
> described as
> "erotic," though it wouldn't surprise me that some not-very-deep
> thinker
> would so describe them. I learned about them in 1991, from Jane Flood,
> the
> Joyce scholar with whom I studied Finnegans Wake. The reason I was not
> turned off by them may simply be my own incorrigibly coarse nature. I
> did
> not find the letters "distancing" though, nor exploitative. Jim may
> have had
> infantile needs, but he seems to have had adult needs as well, as
> seemingly,
> did Nora. In any case, they stayed together through life's two major
> calamities: failure and success. And that has seemed more to me than a
> handful of lunatic letters written in the course of less than one
> month out
> of over thirty years.
>
> Andrew
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Donald B. Johnson" <chtodel@gss.ucsb.edu>
> To: <NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU>
> Sent: Monday, March 07, 2005 7:27 PM
> Subject: Fwd: Joyce
>
>
>>
>>
>> Some readers are turned off by Joyce's "erotic" letters to Nora - and
>> in parallel by Bloom's musings; and this response is probably evidence
>> of careful, empathic reading. The apparently "intimate" letters are
>> surprisingly distancing, concerned with Nora's physiological functions
>> and Jim's infantile needs. Apparently, only the genius was to have
>> feelings of interest. Great book; difficult author.
>>
>> -Sandy Drescher
>>
>> ----- End forwarded message -----
>
> ----- End forwarded message -----
>
----- End forwarded message -----