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[NABOKOV-L] [THOUGHTS] Cages and Words
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After I read a countless number of essays about Nabokov, I lost track of the times in which the "bars of a cage" were interpreted only in relation to prisoners, like Humbert Humbert. In my mind, Shade speaks for Nabokov and mankind when he concludes that "we are most artistically caged" - but not until today, while re-reading his verses, did I realize how fully he'd identified himself with a waxwing. His artistic cage is not a monkey's like Humbert's but a bird's, since it's lined with paper (no sand, no concrete):"My picture book was at an early age/The painted parchment papering our cage." Most surprising still is that Shade's parchment holds no words, only images! (It would be fun to check how the waxwings get along, if at all, with swallows ie"irondelles").
Before Shade's free waxwing (soon to become an ashen fluff) there's been a caged bird image - but it was as fake as Gradus: "a painted bird with a clockwork arrangement for mechanical song. His cage is an imitation, just as his childishness is an imitation." * Animals and people in prison are kept off the ordinary course of life in an unnatural way but, for Nabokov, as Steve Blackwell informs us, "Nabokov began thinking about the prison-like qualities of an individual's phenomenal reality," very early in his work in the sense of "imprisonment, including solipsistic imprisonment, " as in Despair, Camera Obscura, Invitation and The Gift . However, only in the late thirties did Nabokov refer to "human conscious life as itself a kind of prison- or zoo-like enclosure." **
SB's additional reference to the "zoo cage" is significant, not only as one of the sparks for "Lolita". In Speak, Memory Nabokov feels that he inhabits a"zoo of words" (SM 233)as if, instead of words being liberating agents of awareness, they serve Time, the zoo keeper. Nevertheless, it's possible that Nabokov meant something altogether distinct by "zoo of words" ( I'm thinking of Ada's "verbal circuses, 'performing words,' 'poodle-doodles'..."). In Brian Boyd's view, it seems that crashing against verbal zoo-bars is preferrable to dashing into reflections on a windowpane***
In "Ada" Van Veen examines "the essence of Time, not its lapse" to conclude that his "greatest discovery is his perception of Time as the dim hollow between two rythmic beats, not the beats themselves, which only embar Time. In this sense human life is not a pulsating heart but the missed heartbeat" (SO,ch.19). Perhaps he means that the essence of time is a "dim hollow" like life, imprisoned between the two bars of non-being, but what about the soul after it leaves the bodily cage?
Kinbote once visited Nabokov's tomb in a cemetery in Saint Martin( "Silvery Nights", Jeff Edmunds) and found a place "bordered on three sides by a tall wrought-iron fence (whose black bars are spaced widely enough to permit the passage of a small child) and on the fourth by a pine and birch forest .." but in this case, at least a child can pass through its limiting bars, should the kid forget to exit through the "fourth wall" of the woods or to escape from Kinbote's words. Should I entertain a line of doubts in some way similar to John Shade's concerning IPH, I'd be led to imagine if Nabokov's ghost would escape as a grown-up's or a child's, but bars cannot hold out ghosts, not even a writer's, particularly one whose "writing governed his life. Writing was his mask and his definition...The simple inscription on his blue gravestone in Switzerland tells more of the story than many such markers can manage: VLADIMIR NABOKOV ÉCRIVAIN 1899-1977." However, his "style wasn't all he had...as if he were Humbert Humbert, who in Lolita said he had only words to play with." (Cf. BBoyd, AY).
Anyway, here in the Nab-List, that's only what we got: words.
.....................................................................................................................................................................................................................
* In his lecture on Charles Dickens at Cornell Nabokov describes bleak Harold Skimpole as a "a painted bird with a clockwork arrangement for mechanical song. His cage is an imitation, just as his childishness is an imitation." Pnin, playing "Cage or Mousetrap," (quoted by Ellen Pifer in Nabokov Studies, Volume 8, 2004, pp. 23-41) is equally busy, in this case with "a farcical counterpart to the stage upon the stage in Hamlet." Hallucinatory chessboards and the shadows of window-bars dominate Luzhin in "The Defense," particularly through the reference to Harvey Loyd's movie-still that he encounters amid the clutter of his torturer's office, perhaps suggesting the initial stage of "time as a prison."
** - As SB points out, key "passages in Ultima Thule, in the lecture The Tragedy of Tragedy, and in Bend Sinister demonstrate a broader way that Nabokov may have felt that the bars of an ape's cage represent the human epistemological pickle." In "The Tragedy of Tragedy," (1942) the reference is to the "iron bars of determinism" and tragedy is a "clockwork toy." According to SB, "as a figure of the limitations of the human mind, this determinism is connected to one of Francis Bacon's "idols of the tribe," in this case causality" (Cf.Man from the USSR 326): "ancient playwrights ...create dramas that replicated their own mental habits rather than the world around them." In "Ultima Thule," Falter tries to modify Sineusov's misconceptions derived from using chiefly logic or deduction for, as SB notes"Such quests after truth become elaborate and self-deluding autoportraiture" In "Bend Sinister" (ch 14) Krug tries to resiste "the search for the True Substance, the One, the Absolute, the Diamond suspended from the Christmas Tree of the Cosmos," for he "had always felt the faint ridicule of a finite mind peering at the iridescence of the invisible through the prison bars of integers" (171). From his analysis of the three examples quoted above, SB sees that what "differentiates Krug from an ordinary human being is his awareness that the far limits of what he can perceive are still nothing more than the cage bars imposed by human consciousness (bars which come to symbolize the entirety of Paduk's dystopia in that novel)." Cf. ".The Quill and the Scalpel: Nabokov's Art and the Worlds of Science" Stephen H. Blackwell
** "Captivity is the recurring, dominant experience, even for the beast that has the run of several zoos. Teaching Russian at Wellesley, Nabokov would invite his students to watch the tongue as it throws itself at the 'squashed vowels': 'It rushes and crushes itself against your lower teeth - a prisoner dashing himself at the bars of his cell.' And of course words and pronunciation are themselves only one (or two) of the zoos that constitute our mental and material life, and they can stand for many others. There is a little fable in Ada that brilliantly focuses this sense of the world's cages and what we do about them, Nabokov's hope against hope: Certain caged birds, say Chinese amateurs shaking with fatman mirth, knock themselves out against the bars (and lie unconscious for a few minutes)every blessed morning, right upon awakening, in an automatic, dream-continuing, dream-lined dash - although they arc, those iridescent prisoners, quite perky and docile and talkative." Cf. Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years
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Before Shade's free waxwing (soon to become an ashen fluff) there's been a caged bird image - but it was as fake as Gradus: "a painted bird with a clockwork arrangement for mechanical song. His cage is an imitation, just as his childishness is an imitation." * Animals and people in prison are kept off the ordinary course of life in an unnatural way but, for Nabokov, as Steve Blackwell informs us, "Nabokov began thinking about the prison-like qualities of an individual's phenomenal reality," very early in his work in the sense of "imprisonment, including solipsistic imprisonment, " as in Despair, Camera Obscura, Invitation and The Gift . However, only in the late thirties did Nabokov refer to "human conscious life as itself a kind of prison- or zoo-like enclosure." **
SB's additional reference to the "zoo cage" is significant, not only as one of the sparks for "Lolita". In Speak, Memory Nabokov feels that he inhabits a"zoo of words" (SM 233)as if, instead of words being liberating agents of awareness, they serve Time, the zoo keeper. Nevertheless, it's possible that Nabokov meant something altogether distinct by "zoo of words" ( I'm thinking of Ada's "verbal circuses, 'performing words,' 'poodle-doodles'..."). In Brian Boyd's view, it seems that crashing against verbal zoo-bars is preferrable to dashing into reflections on a windowpane***
In "Ada" Van Veen examines "the essence of Time, not its lapse" to conclude that his "greatest discovery is his perception of Time as the dim hollow between two rythmic beats, not the beats themselves, which only embar Time. In this sense human life is not a pulsating heart but the missed heartbeat" (SO,ch.19). Perhaps he means that the essence of time is a "dim hollow" like life, imprisoned between the two bars of non-being, but what about the soul after it leaves the bodily cage?
Kinbote once visited Nabokov's tomb in a cemetery in Saint Martin( "Silvery Nights", Jeff Edmunds) and found a place "bordered on three sides by a tall wrought-iron fence (whose black bars are spaced widely enough to permit the passage of a small child) and on the fourth by a pine and birch forest .." but in this case, at least a child can pass through its limiting bars, should the kid forget to exit through the "fourth wall" of the woods or to escape from Kinbote's words. Should I entertain a line of doubts in some way similar to John Shade's concerning IPH, I'd be led to imagine if Nabokov's ghost would escape as a grown-up's or a child's, but bars cannot hold out ghosts, not even a writer's, particularly one whose "writing governed his life. Writing was his mask and his definition...The simple inscription on his blue gravestone in Switzerland tells more of the story than many such markers can manage: VLADIMIR NABOKOV ÉCRIVAIN 1899-1977." However, his "style wasn't all he had...as if he were Humbert Humbert, who in Lolita said he had only words to play with." (Cf. BBoyd, AY).
Anyway, here in the Nab-List, that's only what we got: words.
.....................................................................................................................................................................................................................
* In his lecture on Charles Dickens at Cornell Nabokov describes bleak Harold Skimpole as a "a painted bird with a clockwork arrangement for mechanical song. His cage is an imitation, just as his childishness is an imitation." Pnin, playing "Cage or Mousetrap," (quoted by Ellen Pifer in Nabokov Studies, Volume 8, 2004, pp. 23-41) is equally busy, in this case with "a farcical counterpart to the stage upon the stage in Hamlet." Hallucinatory chessboards and the shadows of window-bars dominate Luzhin in "The Defense," particularly through the reference to Harvey Loyd's movie-still that he encounters amid the clutter of his torturer's office, perhaps suggesting the initial stage of "time as a prison."
** - As SB points out, key "passages in Ultima Thule, in the lecture The Tragedy of Tragedy, and in Bend Sinister demonstrate a broader way that Nabokov may have felt that the bars of an ape's cage represent the human epistemological pickle." In "The Tragedy of Tragedy," (1942) the reference is to the "iron bars of determinism" and tragedy is a "clockwork toy." According to SB, "as a figure of the limitations of the human mind, this determinism is connected to one of Francis Bacon's "idols of the tribe," in this case causality" (Cf.Man from the USSR 326): "ancient playwrights ...create dramas that replicated their own mental habits rather than the world around them." In "Ultima Thule," Falter tries to modify Sineusov's misconceptions derived from using chiefly logic or deduction for, as SB notes"Such quests after truth become elaborate and self-deluding autoportraiture" In "Bend Sinister" (ch 14) Krug tries to resiste "the search for the True Substance, the One, the Absolute, the Diamond suspended from the Christmas Tree of the Cosmos," for he "had always felt the faint ridicule of a finite mind peering at the iridescence of the invisible through the prison bars of integers" (171). From his analysis of the three examples quoted above, SB sees that what "differentiates Krug from an ordinary human being is his awareness that the far limits of what he can perceive are still nothing more than the cage bars imposed by human consciousness (bars which come to symbolize the entirety of Paduk's dystopia in that novel)." Cf. ".The Quill and the Scalpel: Nabokov's Art and the Worlds of Science" Stephen H. Blackwell
** "Captivity is the recurring, dominant experience, even for the beast that has the run of several zoos. Teaching Russian at Wellesley, Nabokov would invite his students to watch the tongue as it throws itself at the 'squashed vowels': 'It rushes and crushes itself against your lower teeth - a prisoner dashing himself at the bars of his cell.' And of course words and pronunciation are themselves only one (or two) of the zoos that constitute our mental and material life, and they can stand for many others. There is a little fable in Ada that brilliantly focuses this sense of the world's cages and what we do about them, Nabokov's hope against hope: Certain caged birds, say Chinese amateurs shaking with fatman mirth, knock themselves out against the bars (and lie unconscious for a few minutes)every blessed morning, right upon awakening, in an automatic, dream-continuing, dream-lined dash - although they arc, those iridescent prisoners, quite perky and docile and talkative." Cf. Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years
Search archive with Google:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
Visit "Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
Manage subscription options: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/