Vladimir Nabokov

NABOKV-L post 0017410, Mon, 1 Dec 2008 13:29:41 -0200

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Fw: [NABOKOV-L] [Thoughts] Borges and Nabokov: allegories and TOOL
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The short-story "The Secret Miracle" was written by J.L.Borges during WWII and set in Kafka's Prague during the Nazi invasion. Its epigraph comes from a couple of lines from the Koran (II,261), roughly translatable as: "God caused him to die for a hundred years but brought him back to life afterwards. God asked:'How long did you stay here?' - and he answered "A day or part of a day."

Unlike Cincinnatus, in Nabokov's "Invitation to a Beheading" *, Borges' character, Hladik, needs more than three minutes to complete his unfinished work, "The Enemies". On the eve of his execution he learns that God had granted him the year he'd asked for and, after a restless night, while he was already facing the firing squad, at the exact moment when shooting began, the physical universe stopped.
Was God's respite only one of Hadlik's fantasies, or a perfect miracle?
Anyway, Hadlik finished his entire oeuvre in that "mental" year before any shot reached him.

A previous short-story might have influenced Borges: Ambrose Bierce's 1890 "Incident at Owl Creek Bridge". It isn't probable that Borges had been familiar with Nabokov's Russian novel, nor that VN had been familiar with A.Bierce at that time ( didn't Bierce mysteriously disappear years later to become a legend, like Sebastian Knight's loves in the eyes of V.?).

In "Corriente Alterna" Octavio Paz (quoted by D.Arrigucci Jr) described the Argentinian author as having created a "unique work, built on the vertiginous theme concerning the absence of a work." In his stories Borges often departed from undiscovered manuscripts, mislaid or lost short-stories, unwritten books - but
O. Paz was probably referring to borgian self-referential labyrinths and special allegories ( according to VN at least Osberg, if not Borges, was a "Spanish writer of pretentious fairy tales and mystico-allegoric anecdotes", as we've been refering to and fro in the VN-List)
One of these, the story of the Simurgh from Persian Farid Ud-Din Attar's, "The Conference of the Birds", was explicitly mentioned in his "Nine dantesque essays" when B. wrote about Beatrice and a crown. As allegories, Dante's and Attar's, are extreme instances of a particular connection that, in our days, we describe as existing between a writer and his work: after death his body remains as a corpus of writing, although as elusive as the person who "took them down" in words. In contrast to Borges, Nabokov's words tug and strain at author and reader alike, pressioning for a material, literal birth. They never dissolve and make place for a fixed image that'll haunt a reader's dreams. I often enjoy Borges' stories when they act on my dreaming, when his words are substituted for images and have no real presence. Curiously, VN's words in "Invitation" also tend to dissolve in my recollection and, unlike what happens through his other novels, "Transparent Things" for example, the allegory and its form=content prevails over the wording.

In Strong Opinions VN stated (1964) that "All I know is that at the very early stage of the novel's development I get this urge to garner bits of straw and fluff, and eat pebbles. Nobody will ever discover how clearly a bird visualizes, or if it visualizes at all, the future nest and the eggs in it [...] After the first shock of recognition [...]the novel starts to breed by itself; the process goes on solely in the mind, not on paper " (p.31)
or (1967):"I am afraid to get mixed up with Plato, whom I do not care for, but I do think that in my case it is true that the entire book, before it is written, seems to be ready ideally in some other, now transparent, now dimming, dimension, and my job is to take down as much of it as I can make out..."(p.69)
VN's entire TOOL must have been ready in his mind and, although his time expired before he could take down what he still needed, we'll soon have the unique opportunity to read his posthumous novel or, at least, most of its words and letters which he registered on index-cards...

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* Brian Boyd ("The American Years",p.663) pointedly ended his biography with a quote from "Invitation to a Beheading"(Priglashenie na kazn, 1935): "But we still have to decide about the damned last wish. Well, what have you selected?"/ "To finish writing something", whispered Cincinnatus half-questioningly, but then he frowned, straining his thoughts, and suddenly understood that everything had in fact been written already."

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