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Fwd: RE: Re: Nabokov and Joyce's Finnegans Wake.
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----- Forwarded message from Andrew.Brown@bbdodetroit.com -----
Date: Tue, 24 May 2005 11:29:53 -0400
From: "Brown, Andrew" <Andrew.Brown@bbdodetroit.com>
Reply-To: "Brown, Andrew" <Andrew.Brown@bbdodetroit.com>
Subject: RE: Re: Nabokov and Joyce's Finnegans Wake.
To: Vladimir Nabokov Forum
The quote Mr. Stadlen uses is indeed in reference to Ulysses, a book as
different from Wake as day is from night. I take the quote to mean that VN
feels Joyce sometimes slipped and fell into the stream of consciousness he
employed to irradiate the souls of Daedalus and the Blooms.
Other readers than VN believe the stream of Stephen Daedalus's consciousness is
carrying a lot more philosophical reflection, not to mention sheer visual
detail, than could reasonably be the case in a "naturalist" novel, even
considering Daedalus's troubled Hamlet-like brilliance.
(I consider Uly a naturalist novel in spite of its forays into different levels
of consciousness. Joyce faithfully and correctly expanded the naturalist vision
to the workings of the bowels and the rioting of the brothel: why not the
unconscious as well?).
Similarly, the stream of Leopold Bloom's lucubrations is found by many, perhaps
including VN, to be glutted with highbrow literary, theological, and
philosophical erudition beyond the reach of the humble fellow with whom we've
sat in the fragrant jakes, mulling a magazine story (Matchem's Masterstroke).
Bloom's hallucinations, later, in Nighttown, come from a greater mind. Possibly
the many-voiced nocturnal intelligence that later floods the Wake.
I've always enjoyed VN's description of JJ's novels as "great machines." It's a
telling observation, true in a number of ways. But I've never bought VN's
rating his own English as "patball" compared to JJ's "championship game." The
prose of the Dubliners stories and Portrait of an Artist is, with the exception
of a number of achingly beautiful, transcendent passages, not imbued line by
line with any special luster. JJ's choice of the mot juste and the perfect
image owes more to a journalistic-like savvy than to a throbbing vein of
poetry. Reread "Grace," "Two Gallants," "The Boarding House."
Andrew Stuart Brown
> ----------
> From: Vladimir Nabokov Forum on behalf of Donald B. Johnson
> Reply To: Vladimir Nabokov Forum
> Sent: Monday, May 23, 2005 10:30 PM
> To: NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU
> Subject: Fwd: Re: Nabokov and Joyce's Finnegans Wake.
>
> <<File: ATT489888.htm>>
>
>
> ----- Forwarded message from STADLEN@aol.com -----
> Date: Mon, 23 May 2005 20:13:56 EDT
> From: STADLEN@aol.com
> Reply-To: STADLEN@aol.com
> Subject: Re: Nabokov and Joyce's Finnegans Wake.
> To:
>
> In a message dated 21/05/2005 21:36:09 GMT Standard Time,
> chtodel@gss.ucsb.edu writes:
>
> > This scrap ot a sentence almost certainly applies to FW (SO, 30): "We think
> > not in words but in shadows of words. James Joyce´s mistake in those
> > otherwise marvelous mental soliloquies of his consists in tht he gives too
> > much verbal body to his thoughts"
> >
>
> I suppose this might apply by extension to FW, but surely VN here means
> primarily, and quite possibly exclusively, the "stream of consciousness"
> passages
> in "Ulysses". After all, FW is supposed to consist of dream, not "mental
> soliloquies".
>
> Anthony Stadlen
>
> ----- End forwarded message -----
>
>
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