Vladimir Nabokov

NABOKV-L post 0017091, Tue, 23 Sep 2008 13:43:30 -0300

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[NABOKOV-L] Frills, roast chicken and maniambulatory acts
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Quotes I wanted to have added to Andrea Pitzers interesting remarks on "frills":

TRLSK,New Directions ed.:
page 19: "An old man naked as far down as I could see peered at me from a balcony, otherwise there was no one about. I sat down on a blue bench under a great eucalyptus, its bark half stripped away, as seems to be always the case with this sort of tree. Then I tried to see the pink house and the tree and the whole complexion of the place as my mother had seen it. I regretted not knowing the exact window of her room."
page 41: Then, as I let my eyes roam around the room, I caught sight of a couple of framed photographs in the dim shadows above the bookshelves./ I got up and examined them. One was an enlarged snapshot of a Chinese stripped to the waist, in the act of being vigorously beheaded, the other was a banal photographic study of a curly child playing with a pup. The taste of their juxtaposition seemed to me questionable, but probably Sebastian had his own reasons for keeping and hanging them so.

By coincidence,a friend just sent me images of hermaphrodites and someone else, his comments on a movie ("FUR: AN IMAGINARY PORTRAIT OF DIANE ARBUS). We don't need to be Freudians to associate images about beheadings, shaving, unpeeling and stripping as being (sometimes) references to castration anxiety. In ADA, Van's "Mascodagama act" with maniambulation and reversals "terrified children" and had something devilish in it (a woman's head and attire on top, after reversions of can-can frills, allows a man to appear in her stead)

Anthony Stadlen: Saussure's key notion, accepted uncritically by so many, seems to me itself arbitrary. One doesn't have to postulate supernatural players of games above or beyond our world to notice profound links between words, and between words and things, in a given language, and also between languages. Why should these links have been devised above and beyond our world rather than by generations of men and women living in our world?
JM: Words as signifiers retain a mysterious core which corresponds, perhaps, to an equally mysterious kernel of unfathomable signalled "reality" . Language, syntax, discourse adds another dimension, still. But I agree with A.S when he inquires why such echoes should not be considered here in their dependence of the "generations of men and women living in our world."
J.


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