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Re: Nabokov "writealikes"
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Charles Nicol: "Ah, fleeting fame! The "writealike" winner was me, Chaz Nicol...The contest had two steps: first, the judges narrowed down the entries and mixed them with some actual unpublished VN prose, and then the rest of the Society voted for the "real" Nabokov. Since everybody who voted, voted for me, I beat out the Original of Vladimir. If you would like to read 200 more words adding to the adventures of Timofey Pnin, please turn to, um, I think, the June 1999 or 2000 issue of the Nabokovian; the winner was announced in the following December issue. ...ps: My episode is about Pnin learning to drive (which puts him up one on his original author). What I didn't say there was that I believe he ended up driving a 1948 Studebaker, a car that resembed an Easter egg equipped with the nose of a B-29."
JM: ..."What's in a name?" - if your victorious story beat out the original and is indelibly registered on paper and on Kindle-like visions? There are various short-stories about pacts with the Devil (Nabokov's "Nursery Tale" is one) and today I found a cleverly twisted one, by Max Beerbohm ( in "Seven Men": "Enoch Soames"), related to an author's wish to find his name mentioned in the archives of the British Museum a hundred-years in the future, even if this costs him his immortal soul. Beerbohm plans a revenge on the scholar (named Nupton) who forgot to include the name of Soames, with the conviction that he'll not have read the present report he's then working upon, so that his "words will meet the eye of some contemporary rival to Nupton and be the undoing of Nupton." Perhaps there's a sixth arc in Paradise? ( I think Tom Rymour described it once).
Jim Twiggs sends ("For those who can tolerate the jargon and heavy-handedness"): Presumed Innocent: The Paradox of 'Coming of Age' and
the Problem of Youth Sexuality in Lolita and Thirteen /Fleur Gabriel. Monash University, Australia at http://www.culture-communication.unimelb.edu.au/platform/v1_gabriel.html
JM: There may be a reward for those who can tolerate the jargon which endows literary articles with the glow of a scientific report. I, for one, am now glad that I persevered through Helen Deutsch's "Loving Dr.Johnson", at a relative distance from her initial anatomical reports and unnamed lungs in a jar, to reach the marvellous centrifugal Coda (chapter five), dealing with Hawthorne, Nabokov and Beckett. She mentions a letter written by Beckett: "They can put me wherever they want, but it's Johnson, always Johnson, who is with me. And if I follow any tradition, it is his."(234).]
(HD,220) "The consummate 'link-and-bobolink,' the 'correlated pattern in the game' (812-13) that reassures John Shade about life's overarching design, connects the ends of art to the endless refractions of art within individual imaginations [Cf. Chaz Nicol!]. Art becomes an encounter fraught with desire: whether it be Kinbote's fantasy that he has 'impregnated Shade' with the true inspiration for his poem or Boswell's claim that he alone is uniquely 'impregnated with Johnsonian aether," art remains unfinished; it does not end - rather it wounds, and in wounding it comes to life."
(221-222): "John Shade and Vladimir Nabokov were not the only authors to search for a weak spot in the armor of the confident order of Pope's "Essay on Man,"...Samuel Johnson's passionately satiric response to these sentiments (in his review of Soame Jenyns's "A Free Enquiry into the Nature and Origin of Evil") is reminiscent in its destructive energy of Kinbote's transgressive reopening of Shade's neatly finished couplets. The vanity of such couplet art in Johnson's account expands by analogy, emptying out the divinely ordered world."*
(234) "While it's difficult to think of two writers more different in style than Nabokov and Johnson [Samuel], it's interesting to contemplate how coincident Lawrence Lipking's claim that 'we wake from a book like "Rasselas" to discover we are in it' is with Brian Boyd's description of "Pale Fire" as a book from which we wake to call it life."
..................................................................................................................................
*-In his introduction to Max Beerbohm, John Updike writes, on "Savonarola's Brown": "The model tragedy, concerning the Florentine monk Savonarola, upon which Brown has been portentously laboring, turns out, when he dies, to be one act short of five, and in its maladroit blank verse and mob of Renaissance characters a travesty of Shakespeare. Max was a versifier of dainty skill, and the comic effects, to be savored line by line, hinge on fine points, such as contractions run riot to fit the meter, unhappy coinages like 'friskfulness,' clanging iambs, and drooping enjambements. Yet there is something wild and disheveled about the piece overall, especially the last three pages, where Beerbohm asserts his own presence; Bardolatry is possibly so big and well-armored that is has splayed his pen."
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JM: ..."What's in a name?" - if your victorious story beat out the original and is indelibly registered on paper and on Kindle-like visions? There are various short-stories about pacts with the Devil (Nabokov's "Nursery Tale" is one) and today I found a cleverly twisted one, by Max Beerbohm ( in "Seven Men": "Enoch Soames"), related to an author's wish to find his name mentioned in the archives of the British Museum a hundred-years in the future, even if this costs him his immortal soul. Beerbohm plans a revenge on the scholar (named Nupton) who forgot to include the name of Soames, with the conviction that he'll not have read the present report he's then working upon, so that his "words will meet the eye of some contemporary rival to Nupton and be the undoing of Nupton." Perhaps there's a sixth arc in Paradise? ( I think Tom Rymour described it once).
Jim Twiggs sends ("For those who can tolerate the jargon and heavy-handedness"): Presumed Innocent: The Paradox of 'Coming of Age' and
the Problem of Youth Sexuality in Lolita and Thirteen /Fleur Gabriel. Monash University, Australia at http://www.culture-communication.unimelb.edu.au/platform/v1_gabriel.html
JM: There may be a reward for those who can tolerate the jargon which endows literary articles with the glow of a scientific report. I, for one, am now glad that I persevered through Helen Deutsch's "Loving Dr.Johnson", at a relative distance from her initial anatomical reports and unnamed lungs in a jar, to reach the marvellous centrifugal Coda (chapter five), dealing with Hawthorne, Nabokov and Beckett. She mentions a letter written by Beckett: "They can put me wherever they want, but it's Johnson, always Johnson, who is with me. And if I follow any tradition, it is his."(234).]
(HD,220) "The consummate 'link-and-bobolink,' the 'correlated pattern in the game' (812-13) that reassures John Shade about life's overarching design, connects the ends of art to the endless refractions of art within individual imaginations [Cf. Chaz Nicol!]. Art becomes an encounter fraught with desire: whether it be Kinbote's fantasy that he has 'impregnated Shade' with the true inspiration for his poem or Boswell's claim that he alone is uniquely 'impregnated with Johnsonian aether," art remains unfinished; it does not end - rather it wounds, and in wounding it comes to life."
(221-222): "John Shade and Vladimir Nabokov were not the only authors to search for a weak spot in the armor of the confident order of Pope's "Essay on Man,"...Samuel Johnson's passionately satiric response to these sentiments (in his review of Soame Jenyns's "A Free Enquiry into the Nature and Origin of Evil") is reminiscent in its destructive energy of Kinbote's transgressive reopening of Shade's neatly finished couplets. The vanity of such couplet art in Johnson's account expands by analogy, emptying out the divinely ordered world."*
(234) "While it's difficult to think of two writers more different in style than Nabokov and Johnson [Samuel], it's interesting to contemplate how coincident Lawrence Lipking's claim that 'we wake from a book like "Rasselas" to discover we are in it' is with Brian Boyd's description of "Pale Fire" as a book from which we wake to call it life."
..................................................................................................................................
*-In his introduction to Max Beerbohm, John Updike writes, on "Savonarola's Brown": "The model tragedy, concerning the Florentine monk Savonarola, upon which Brown has been portentously laboring, turns out, when he dies, to be one act short of five, and in its maladroit blank verse and mob of Renaissance characters a travesty of Shakespeare. Max was a versifier of dainty skill, and the comic effects, to be savored line by line, hinge on fine points, such as contractions run riot to fit the meter, unhappy coinages like 'friskfulness,' clanging iambs, and drooping enjambements. Yet there is something wild and disheveled about the piece overall, especially the last three pages, where Beerbohm asserts his own presence; Bardolatry is possibly so big and well-armored that is has splayed his pen."
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/