Subject
Re: Nabokov and Joyce's Finnegans Wake.
From
Date
Body
Annaliese,
I don't want to be abrupt or dismissive about anyone's notions so I have
thought about PF and FW and have come up with some ideas you might consider
as starting points for a comparison.
WAKE. Family: The family structure in Wake is meant to be universal and
timeless. The players: a father, loving, magnanimous, big, geographically
big, geologically big; a mother, lifesource, wordsource, sustaining seeker
of existence source; a daughter/girl/angel, single and singular but a
refractory spectra; spectrumlike into a rainbow of daughterchild virtues;
two sons: one a tough worldly sinful, articulate, inkspattered artistic
brother; the other a staunch, stern, disciplined, disciplining, rockhard
rulegiving brother.
FIRE. Family: Daughter, absolute opposite of Anna Livia Plurabelle. An
artserving, artmaking, lifeseeking, old artificer father. Wife/Mother,
beloved, iconic Aphrodite-like emissary of true beauty, (compare Nuvoletta
star source in Wake with Sibylline, ancient poetic Hellenic beauty even
though Wake's Nuvoletta beauty is, like daughter Hazel Shade, an image
leaning 'gainst the bars of Heaven (see barred wing images of Atalanta b'fly
that comes to succour father in last moments) But no sons here, so no
divisive warlike historicity as in Wake, but instead the sole artist's lone
struggle against our (humanity's) only real enemy, The Reaper. Though,
perhaps here better metaphorically called The Glazier since in the old days
the generations were reaped and layed away, a more enlightened Nabokov saw
fit to imagine a mirror-maker at his task of producing replicated lives. The
only Reaper is the razor that works the bristles between Shade's nose and
upper lip.
WAKE: Time. Cyclical, spiraled. Not a mousetrapped Hegelian thesis,
synthesis, antithesis, but as JJ's in-house scholar S'Beckett brilliantly
described in Vico Dante Bruno included in His Exagmination... One difference
between JJ and VN is that JJ would imagine a story first in philosophical
terms, and then cut his life and experience to fit the cloth of a
reimagining of time (Wake) or of Ontological/Phylogenic development
(Portrait) or of Ibsen (Exilis) or Classicism (OOOlyses, as the old maestro
of the Music Hall saw fit to pronounce it) or of a young scourge's view of
his home town (JJ did for Dublin what Eminem has done for Detroit, and in
much the same way)
FIRE: No linear progression. VN threw away the theory when he threw away the
practice.No more notebooks paginated numerically. No more writing chapter
One, Two Three. A more elegant internal process had grown with his
intellectual capacity to let a novel gestate completely in the mind, and
then set it down on cards image by image, "story boarding" in a far advanced
form of fledged imagination.
WAKE: Love. Love is in abundance through the ages, but sex is not so much a
part of it. Sex is sinful, perverse, exploitive, punitive, coarse, more
often than not a nightmarish secret that explodes across the whole world the
moment it is revealed. Sex can result in lovable children, but that's
practically a rarity. The truest love is the final immersion of body and
soul in the great waves, great torrents of rain to earth, rivulets to river,
river to ocean, ocean to air, condensation to clouds, cloud to rain to river
to ocean ...
FIRE: Mr. and Mrs. Shade get along like a house a'fire. Any comparision?
Beyond this, though, see the quote from Timon where sun, water, moon, all
thieve from each other ... in the enormous motion of Wake this transference
has a beneficent joining and recombination. But in Pale Fire, under the
exegesis of Charles Botkin (sp?) this is all thievery. This in a sense is
the hot cosmological love that belies the idea of "Pale Fire," where Wake is
really the cinders in the grate after the party is over.
Well, there is a lot more, but the snow outside my picture window is growing
deep, and I have miles to go before I sleep.
Andrew
----- Original Message -----
From: "Donald B. Johnson" <chtodel@gss.ucsb.edu>
To: <NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU>
Sent: Saturday, May 21, 2005 11:02 PM
Subject: Re: Fwd: Nabokov and Joyce's Finnegans Wake.
> Annaliese
>
> The quotes Donald supplies are a good start. They set the tone for most of
> what VN says about Wake. I tend to agree with VN's assessment. I consider
> myself as one who has been saved from the brink of the cult.
>
> More to the purpose, you could note that Charles Kinbote refers directly
to
> FW, but disguises the title with an apostrophe.
>
> If I were obliged to compare Fire and Wake (an amazing task -- have they
as
> much in common as the Bible and the LA phone directory?), I wouldn't lose
> the opportunity to quote the remark that Haines makes, in Ulysses, about
> Stephan Dedalus's theories on Hamlet. A remark some would consider a fair
> comment on those today who get drawn ineluctably and risibly into the
Wake.
>
> Andrew
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Donald B. Johnson" <chtodel@gss.ucsb.edu>
> To: <NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU>
> Sent: Saturday, May 21, 2005 2:46 PM
> Subject: Fwd: Nabokov and Joyce's Finnegans Wake.
>
>
> > Hello list,
> > I am working on a comparison between Nabokov's Pale Fire and Joyce's
> > Finnegans Wake. I remember that once I read Nabokov's negative opinion
on
> FW
> > (although he mentions it in Pale Fire) , while he appreciated Ulysses.
> Does
> > anybody have the precise quotation from Nabokov or at least the
> > bibliographical reference?
> >
> > Thank you,
> > Annalisa
> >
> > P.S. This is the first time I write to the Nabokov Forum, so forgive me
if
> > my request is inappropriate:)
> >
> > ----- End forwarded message -----
>
> ----- End forwarded message -----
----- End forwarded message -----
I don't want to be abrupt or dismissive about anyone's notions so I have
thought about PF and FW and have come up with some ideas you might consider
as starting points for a comparison.
WAKE. Family: The family structure in Wake is meant to be universal and
timeless. The players: a father, loving, magnanimous, big, geographically
big, geologically big; a mother, lifesource, wordsource, sustaining seeker
of existence source; a daughter/girl/angel, single and singular but a
refractory spectra; spectrumlike into a rainbow of daughterchild virtues;
two sons: one a tough worldly sinful, articulate, inkspattered artistic
brother; the other a staunch, stern, disciplined, disciplining, rockhard
rulegiving brother.
FIRE. Family: Daughter, absolute opposite of Anna Livia Plurabelle. An
artserving, artmaking, lifeseeking, old artificer father. Wife/Mother,
beloved, iconic Aphrodite-like emissary of true beauty, (compare Nuvoletta
star source in Wake with Sibylline, ancient poetic Hellenic beauty even
though Wake's Nuvoletta beauty is, like daughter Hazel Shade, an image
leaning 'gainst the bars of Heaven (see barred wing images of Atalanta b'fly
that comes to succour father in last moments) But no sons here, so no
divisive warlike historicity as in Wake, but instead the sole artist's lone
struggle against our (humanity's) only real enemy, The Reaper. Though,
perhaps here better metaphorically called The Glazier since in the old days
the generations were reaped and layed away, a more enlightened Nabokov saw
fit to imagine a mirror-maker at his task of producing replicated lives. The
only Reaper is the razor that works the bristles between Shade's nose and
upper lip.
WAKE: Time. Cyclical, spiraled. Not a mousetrapped Hegelian thesis,
synthesis, antithesis, but as JJ's in-house scholar S'Beckett brilliantly
described in Vico Dante Bruno included in His Exagmination... One difference
between JJ and VN is that JJ would imagine a story first in philosophical
terms, and then cut his life and experience to fit the cloth of a
reimagining of time (Wake) or of Ontological/Phylogenic development
(Portrait) or of Ibsen (Exilis) or Classicism (OOOlyses, as the old maestro
of the Music Hall saw fit to pronounce it) or of a young scourge's view of
his home town (JJ did for Dublin what Eminem has done for Detroit, and in
much the same way)
FIRE: No linear progression. VN threw away the theory when he threw away the
practice.No more notebooks paginated numerically. No more writing chapter
One, Two Three. A more elegant internal process had grown with his
intellectual capacity to let a novel gestate completely in the mind, and
then set it down on cards image by image, "story boarding" in a far advanced
form of fledged imagination.
WAKE: Love. Love is in abundance through the ages, but sex is not so much a
part of it. Sex is sinful, perverse, exploitive, punitive, coarse, more
often than not a nightmarish secret that explodes across the whole world the
moment it is revealed. Sex can result in lovable children, but that's
practically a rarity. The truest love is the final immersion of body and
soul in the great waves, great torrents of rain to earth, rivulets to river,
river to ocean, ocean to air, condensation to clouds, cloud to rain to river
to ocean ...
FIRE: Mr. and Mrs. Shade get along like a house a'fire. Any comparision?
Beyond this, though, see the quote from Timon where sun, water, moon, all
thieve from each other ... in the enormous motion of Wake this transference
has a beneficent joining and recombination. But in Pale Fire, under the
exegesis of Charles Botkin (sp?) this is all thievery. This in a sense is
the hot cosmological love that belies the idea of "Pale Fire," where Wake is
really the cinders in the grate after the party is over.
Well, there is a lot more, but the snow outside my picture window is growing
deep, and I have miles to go before I sleep.
Andrew
----- Original Message -----
From: "Donald B. Johnson" <chtodel@gss.ucsb.edu>
To: <NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU>
Sent: Saturday, May 21, 2005 11:02 PM
Subject: Re: Fwd: Nabokov and Joyce's Finnegans Wake.
> Annaliese
>
> The quotes Donald supplies are a good start. They set the tone for most of
> what VN says about Wake. I tend to agree with VN's assessment. I consider
> myself as one who has been saved from the brink of the cult.
>
> More to the purpose, you could note that Charles Kinbote refers directly
to
> FW, but disguises the title with an apostrophe.
>
> If I were obliged to compare Fire and Wake (an amazing task -- have they
as
> much in common as the Bible and the LA phone directory?), I wouldn't lose
> the opportunity to quote the remark that Haines makes, in Ulysses, about
> Stephan Dedalus's theories on Hamlet. A remark some would consider a fair
> comment on those today who get drawn ineluctably and risibly into the
Wake.
>
> Andrew
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Donald B. Johnson" <chtodel@gss.ucsb.edu>
> To: <NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU>
> Sent: Saturday, May 21, 2005 2:46 PM
> Subject: Fwd: Nabokov and Joyce's Finnegans Wake.
>
>
> > Hello list,
> > I am working on a comparison between Nabokov's Pale Fire and Joyce's
> > Finnegans Wake. I remember that once I read Nabokov's negative opinion
on
> FW
> > (although he mentions it in Pale Fire) , while he appreciated Ulysses.
> Does
> > anybody have the precise quotation from Nabokov or at least the
> > bibliographical reference?
> >
> > Thank you,
> > Annalisa
> >
> > P.S. This is the first time I write to the Nabokov Forum, so forgive me
if
> > my request is inappropriate:)
> >
> > ----- End forwarded message -----
>
> ----- End forwarded message -----
----- End forwarded message -----