Vladimir Nabokov

NABOKV-L post 0026063, Sat, 7 Mar 2015 18:38:12 -0300

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RES: [NABOKV-L] SIGHTING: Knausgaard on VN in NYTimes Magazine
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Karl Ove Knausgaard's recent cover story in the New York Times Magazine, "My
Saga," includes a few paragraphs on Lolita (in comparison with Kerouac's On
the Road), just past its mid-point. [ ] -SB

Jansy Mello: The link worked fine for me. For those who didn’t reach it, a
brief summary with its VN reference below ( I hope we have permission to
quote from the article?):



“Inside the terminal, I stopped at a bookstore to look at travel guides. I
still hadn’t decided where to go… One of my favorite books about the U.S. is
Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita,” which among many other things is also a kind of
road novel. It describes a journey through the small-town world of
post-World War II America, where the protagonist, Humbert Humbert, is
constantly on the lookout for distractions for his child mistress…//
“Lolita” came out in the U.S. in 1958, one year after another road novel,
Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road.” Oddly enough, the journeys that these two
books describe also begin at the same time…It would be hard to imagine two
more dissimilar fictional landscapes. This is because Kerouac describes it
from the inside, with no distance, this is the America he grew up in, and he
is so much an integrated part of it that he seems to embody its very
soul…There are no points of contact with that America in Nabokov’s novel,
aind if you read the two books simultaneously, the reason becomes obvious:
In “Lolita,” all is dissembling, there are only signs, everything stands for
something else, and the one and perhaps only thing that is authentic, the
child’s reality, is desired from an impossible distance, the breaching of
which destroys it completely. In “On the road,” nothing stands in the way of
the authentic, except the rules of formal life; when they have been
overcome, the glittering night opens to anyone who desires to enter it. The
naïveté of this is astounding, but so is the power. //Now, both Nabokov’s
book and Kerouac’s were nearly 60 years old, and themselves a part of this
country’s history. But the conflict between life and the imitation of life,
and the impossible desire for authenticity, was still being explored in
American literature, where…// I couldn’t find any travel guides…”


<http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/01/magazine/karl-ove-knausgaard-travels-thro
ugh-america.html?_r=0>
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/01/magazine/karl-ove-knausgaard-travels-throu
gh-america.html?_r=0



This is the part directly related to V.Nabokov. However, the first
paragraphs describe this Norwegian writer’s experiences with the first
European settlements in America and his description of Vinland is
particularly appealing. It brought to my mind Vinelander’s map and other
distant posts in the North American continent mentioned more than once in
“ADA,” so I’d like to quote from it, too, since it touches deeply, albeit
indirectly, onto something deeply Nabokovian. And, of course, there are
also those ancient sagas mentioned in Pale Fire with their verbal register
of travels, conquests and feats, so different from the dreamy descriptive
aspect of a scenery that floats through ADA:



“..The editor proposed that I travel to Newfoundland and visit the place
where the Vikings had settled, then rent a car and drive south…I accepted
the offer at once. I had just read and written about the Icelandic sagas,
and the chance to see the actual place where two of them were partly set, in
the area they called Vinland, was impossible to turn down [ ]When we
learned about Viking exploration in school, I never imagined that it had
actually happened [ ] After spending the night in St.John’s, Newfoundland,
I boarded the small plane for St. Anthony at dawn [ ] That the Viking would
sooner or later discover the North American continent was perfectly logical.
They came from the sweeping and rugged Atlantic coast of Norway… They
colonized Iceland toward the end of the ninth century, then discovered
Greenland a few generations later and colonized it too. The journey from the
west coast of Greenland to the North American continent was only another two
days by sea.[ ]The land they caught sight of first they named Helleland (in
all probability it was Baffin Island);the next, they named Markland (which
is probably Labrador) ; and the third, they named Vinland. [ ] A wooden
boardwalk leading down from the building toward the plain where the actual
ruins of the settlement lay was in some place covered by snowdrifts, in
others bare…I walked down the slope.. In front of me lay a world so
beautiful and so cruel that it numbed my senses….It was completely silent.
..The silence did something with the landscape. Usually something is making
a sound…here everything was still. All sounds belong to the moment, they are
part of the present, the world of change, while the soundless belongs to the
unchanging. In silence lies age…”**

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
………………………………………………………………………………………………………..



*Ardis Hall — the Ardors and Arbors of Ardis — this is the leitmotiv
rippling through Ada, an ample and delightful chronicle, whose principal
part is staged in a dream-bright America — for are not our childhood
memories comparable to Vineland-born caravelles, indolently encircled by the
white birds of dreams? (Ada,part Five)



**Ada,part Four: ‘Space is a swarming in the eyes, and Time a singing in
the ears,’ says John Shade, a modem poet, as quoted by an invented
philosopher (‘Martin Gardiner’) in The Ambidextrous Universe, page 165.
Space flutters to the ground, but Time remains between thinker and thumb,
when Monsieur Bergson uses his scissors.




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