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Dear Don and List,
I made a brief reference to Jerrie Friedman´s almost Taoist butterfly then
metamorphosing in "Pale Fire".
I´d like to connect this suspension of a dilemma now with "Transparent
Things", ch.24.
"Another thing we are not supposed to do is to explain the inexplicable.
Men have learned to live with a black burden, a huge aching hump: the
supposition that "reality" may be only a "dream". How much more dreadful it
would be if the very awareness of your being aware of reality´s dreamlike
nature were also a dream, a built-in hallucination! One should bear in mind,
howver, that there is no mirage without a vanishing point, just as there is
no lake without a closed circle of reliable land".
Actually I had been looking for another sentence in TT, as follows:
"Total rejection of all religions ever dreamt up by man and total composure
in the face of total death! If I could explain this triple totality in one
big book, that book would become no doubt a new bible and its author the
founder of a new creed. Fortunately for my self-esteem that book will not be
written - not merely because a dying man cannot write books but because that
particular one would never express in one flash what can only be understood
immediately" (Ch21)
since I was searching VN´s reference to "a flash of an immediate vision" and
the impossibility of rendering into the sequencial time of a written book
because it made me think of Borges and his short-story named " El Aleph".
I´ll add a very short quotation from Borges´ very short-story now:
"Lo que vieron mis ojos fue simultáneo; lo que transcribiré, sucesivo,
porque el lenguaje lo es. Algo, sin embargo, recogeré."
"What my eyes saw was simultaneous; what I´ll transcribe, a succession
because such is language. But I´ll undoubtedly glean something" .
----- Original Message -----
From: Jansy Berndt de Souza Mello
To: Vladimir Nabokov Forum
Sent: Thursday, March 17, 2005 8:09 AM
Subject: Re: Re: Query: Lolita and Keats-Bailey correspondence?
Andrew,
You described what I meant and was unable to put into so many words (
actually, not that many!):" memories that come unbidden" instead of
"specific memories that are sought but not obtained". But your observation
that these memories are "often unwelcome" adds a Freudian dimension that I
didn´t find in Proust´s elaborations.
I think that what HH sought was not a specific memory - but that he did
seek a specific state of mind that could lead him into the experience of an
"aesthetic bliss".
You wrote, in the end of your note: "until the fateful day he winds up in
Ramsdale. And there he finds the real thing, of which Annabel was merely
simulacrum".
I cannot agree with you that "Lolita was the real thing" because I believe,
like Freud, that there is no such "real thing" except the "real loss" of a
"some-thing" that always haunts every one of us and which Nabokov could
render in such a taunting heartbreaking way in almost all his novels.
Jerrie Friedman wrote beautifully about his reading of "Pale Fire" and
shared his vision with us where a "red admiral" became "the" thing. But
Friedman also implied a level of apprehension like Taoist Chuang Tzu´s story
about having dreamt that he was a butterfly and upon awakening finding
himself not as certain as he´d been about who he was: a Chuang Tzu person ?
A butterfly dreaming Chuang Tzy? ( i.e: are dreams more real than our
conscious vigil-state sense of "I am"? )
Thinking about movies and Ada, there would never be " a one only real
translation/transposition" of VN´s novel. That´s not what movies are about
( "transpositions" ), I think.
Concerning "Lolita", for example, film-critic Richard Corliss wrote about
Kubrick´s achievement saying that Nabokov had written a extravagantly
cinematic screen-play that could only exist on the printed page and Adrian
Lyne's screen-writer, Stephen Schiff, argued that Kubrick's movie tended
more to a Quilty than to a Lolita.
Schiff viewed "Lolita" not as a mere book, but as a jig-saw puzzle, and, in
transposing it into film he intended "to write a movie that an audience
could take in entirely the first time; I hope that we have achieved
something like the effect Nabokov intends after several readings, though our
means are entirely different (...) attempting to translate into a kind of
exciting sign language - the language of the film - what one of the
century's greatest masters of prose rendered so incomparably on the page".
Interviewed by Suellen
Stringer-Hye(www.libraries.psu.edu/iasweb/nabokov/schiffl.htm)
What is "really" Ada? Where is the "real Lolita"?
Jansy
----- Forwarded message from as-brown@comcast.net -----
Date: Wed, 16 Mar 2005 19:57:34 -0500
From: Andrew Brown <as-brown@comcast.net>
Reply-To: Andrew Brown <as-brown@comcast.net>
Query: Lolita and Keats-Bailey correspondence?Jansey,
It seems to me more that Proust's involuntary memory meant memories that
come
unbidden, often unwelcome, more so than specific memories that are sought
but
not obtained. Proust's characters are more often engulfed in memories,
overpowered by them. The involuntary action is memory's abundance. But from
the
moment Humbert reports Annabel's death in Corfu, he can fairly easily, and
coldbloodedly, proceed without much of a backward glance for her. The
passage
in which HH writes his ironic essay is in the period when he also writes his
fleshless (and stillborn) pastiche, and hangs out at the Deux Magot, and
basically lives as a banal left bank cliche. He admits to being an artiste
manque which also supports my idea about the idleness of his essay. The
nympholeptic contact has him in thrall, and he is less pining for the past
than
he is muddling toward a future, through a string of desultory adventures,
until
the fateful day he winds up in Ramsdale. And there he finds the real thing,
of
which Annabel was merely simulacrum.
Andrew Brown
----- End forwarded message -----
I made a brief reference to Jerrie Friedman´s almost Taoist butterfly then
metamorphosing in "Pale Fire".
I´d like to connect this suspension of a dilemma now with "Transparent
Things", ch.24.
"Another thing we are not supposed to do is to explain the inexplicable.
Men have learned to live with a black burden, a huge aching hump: the
supposition that "reality" may be only a "dream". How much more dreadful it
would be if the very awareness of your being aware of reality´s dreamlike
nature were also a dream, a built-in hallucination! One should bear in mind,
howver, that there is no mirage without a vanishing point, just as there is
no lake without a closed circle of reliable land".
Actually I had been looking for another sentence in TT, as follows:
"Total rejection of all religions ever dreamt up by man and total composure
in the face of total death! If I could explain this triple totality in one
big book, that book would become no doubt a new bible and its author the
founder of a new creed. Fortunately for my self-esteem that book will not be
written - not merely because a dying man cannot write books but because that
particular one would never express in one flash what can only be understood
immediately" (Ch21)
since I was searching VN´s reference to "a flash of an immediate vision" and
the impossibility of rendering into the sequencial time of a written book
because it made me think of Borges and his short-story named " El Aleph".
I´ll add a very short quotation from Borges´ very short-story now:
"Lo que vieron mis ojos fue simultáneo; lo que transcribiré, sucesivo,
porque el lenguaje lo es. Algo, sin embargo, recogeré."
"What my eyes saw was simultaneous; what I´ll transcribe, a succession
because such is language. But I´ll undoubtedly glean something" .
----- Original Message -----
From: Jansy Berndt de Souza Mello
To: Vladimir Nabokov Forum
Sent: Thursday, March 17, 2005 8:09 AM
Subject: Re: Re: Query: Lolita and Keats-Bailey correspondence?
Andrew,
You described what I meant and was unable to put into so many words (
actually, not that many!):" memories that come unbidden" instead of
"specific memories that are sought but not obtained". But your observation
that these memories are "often unwelcome" adds a Freudian dimension that I
didn´t find in Proust´s elaborations.
I think that what HH sought was not a specific memory - but that he did
seek a specific state of mind that could lead him into the experience of an
"aesthetic bliss".
You wrote, in the end of your note: "until the fateful day he winds up in
Ramsdale. And there he finds the real thing, of which Annabel was merely
simulacrum".
I cannot agree with you that "Lolita was the real thing" because I believe,
like Freud, that there is no such "real thing" except the "real loss" of a
"some-thing" that always haunts every one of us and which Nabokov could
render in such a taunting heartbreaking way in almost all his novels.
Jerrie Friedman wrote beautifully about his reading of "Pale Fire" and
shared his vision with us where a "red admiral" became "the" thing. But
Friedman also implied a level of apprehension like Taoist Chuang Tzu´s story
about having dreamt that he was a butterfly and upon awakening finding
himself not as certain as he´d been about who he was: a Chuang Tzu person ?
A butterfly dreaming Chuang Tzy? ( i.e: are dreams more real than our
conscious vigil-state sense of "I am"? )
Thinking about movies and Ada, there would never be " a one only real
translation/transposition" of VN´s novel. That´s not what movies are about
( "transpositions" ), I think.
Concerning "Lolita", for example, film-critic Richard Corliss wrote about
Kubrick´s achievement saying that Nabokov had written a extravagantly
cinematic screen-play that could only exist on the printed page and Adrian
Lyne's screen-writer, Stephen Schiff, argued that Kubrick's movie tended
more to a Quilty than to a Lolita.
Schiff viewed "Lolita" not as a mere book, but as a jig-saw puzzle, and, in
transposing it into film he intended "to write a movie that an audience
could take in entirely the first time; I hope that we have achieved
something like the effect Nabokov intends after several readings, though our
means are entirely different (...) attempting to translate into a kind of
exciting sign language - the language of the film - what one of the
century's greatest masters of prose rendered so incomparably on the page".
Interviewed by Suellen
Stringer-Hye(www.libraries.psu.edu/iasweb/nabokov/schiffl.htm)
What is "really" Ada? Where is the "real Lolita"?
Jansy
----- Forwarded message from as-brown@comcast.net -----
Date: Wed, 16 Mar 2005 19:57:34 -0500
From: Andrew Brown <as-brown@comcast.net>
Reply-To: Andrew Brown <as-brown@comcast.net>
Query: Lolita and Keats-Bailey correspondence?Jansey,
It seems to me more that Proust's involuntary memory meant memories that
come
unbidden, often unwelcome, more so than specific memories that are sought
but
not obtained. Proust's characters are more often engulfed in memories,
overpowered by them. The involuntary action is memory's abundance. But from
the
moment Humbert reports Annabel's death in Corfu, he can fairly easily, and
coldbloodedly, proceed without much of a backward glance for her. The
passage
in which HH writes his ironic essay is in the period when he also writes his
fleshless (and stillborn) pastiche, and hangs out at the Deux Magot, and
basically lives as a banal left bank cliche. He admits to being an artiste
manque which also supports my idea about the idleness of his essay. The
nympholeptic contact has him in thrall, and he is less pining for the past
than
he is muddling toward a future, through a string of desultory adventures,
until
the fateful day he winds up in Ramsdale. And there he finds the real thing,
of
which Annabel was merely simulacrum.
Andrew Brown
----- End forwarded message -----