Subject
[ NABOKOV-L] [ TRIVIA ] Nabokovian Stratagems and Palimpsest, a PS
From
Date
Body
PS: In my former posting to the VN-List I broke up the word "stratagems" into "strata" and "gems", inadvertently suggesting that there there might be one, or two, identifiable gems, inserted among the various strata or levels of VN's narrative.
Cf.:" I suppose I am especially susceptible to the magic of games. In my chess sessions with Gaston I saw the board as a square pool of limpid water with rare shells and stratagems rosily visible upon the smooth tessellated bottom, which to my confused adversary was all ooze and squid-cloud. (Nabokov,Lolita)
This image must have been induced by the work I've been pursuing and in which I compare Freud's image about archeological excavations, employed to assert his conviction about the indestructibility of memory ( "Civilization and Its Discontents", 1930, SEXXI , chapter One), to Thomas de Quincey's "The Palimpsest of the Human Brain"* ( in "Suspiria de Profundis", 1845), when he dealt with traumatic or enigmatic experiences which recurred inexorably and could not be deleted.
(BTW: I got stuck in "Lolita" simply because I was curious to compare the titles of De Quincey's earlier work, "Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1822)" and Humbert Humbert's original "Lolita, or the Confession of a White Widowed Male".)
My intention, actually, was to describe as a precious "gem" the entire erection of literary "strata-gems," by VN, and not any isolated body embedded in them, i.e. VN's narratives as including different, apparently incongruous levels of historicity, like those we also find in "Transparent Things"( for example), suggestive of a special kind of palimpsest-style or, perhaps, what in modern terms became the "hypertext" ( as those in the know already know).
Cf. "Transparent Things, Ch.One): "When we concentrate on a material object, whatever its situation, the very act of attention may lead to our involuntarily sinking into the history of that object. Novices must learn to skim over matter if they want matter to stay at the exact level of the moment. Transparent things, through which the past shines! Man-made objects, or natural ones, inert in themselves but much used by careless life (you are thinking, and quite rightly so, of a hillside stone over which a multitude of small animals have scurried in the course of incalculable seasons) are particularly difficult to keep in surface focus: novices fall through the surface, humming happily to themselves, and are soon reveling with childish abandon in the story of this stone, of that heath. I shall explain. A thin veneer of immediate reality is spread over natural and artificial matter, and whoever wishes to remain in the now, with the now, on the now, should please not break its tension film. Otherwise the inexperienced miracle-worker will find himself no longer walking on water but descending upright among staring fish.
..................................................................................................................................
*- "A palimpsest, then, is a membrane or roll cleansed of its manuscript by reiterated successions . . . What else than a natural and mighty palimpsest is the human brain? Such a palimpsest is my brain; such a palimpsest, oh reader! is yours. Everlasting layers of ideas, images, feelings, have fallen upon your brain softly as light. Each succession has seemed to bury all that went before. And yet, in reality, not one has been extinguished. And if, in the vellum palimpsest, lying amongst the other diplomata of human archives or libraries, there is anything fantastic or which moves to laughter, as oftentimes there is in the grotesque collisions of those successive themes, having no natural connection, which by pure accident have consecutively occupied the roll, yet, in our own heaven-created palimpsest, the deep memorial palimpsest of the brain, there are not and cannot be such incoherencies."
.......................................................................................................................................
Search the archive: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/archives/nabokv-l.html
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
Cf.:" I suppose I am especially susceptible to the magic of games. In my chess sessions with Gaston I saw the board as a square pool of limpid water with rare shells and stratagems rosily visible upon the smooth tessellated bottom, which to my confused adversary was all ooze and squid-cloud. (Nabokov,Lolita)
This image must have been induced by the work I've been pursuing and in which I compare Freud's image about archeological excavations, employed to assert his conviction about the indestructibility of memory ( "Civilization and Its Discontents", 1930, SEXXI , chapter One), to Thomas de Quincey's "The Palimpsest of the Human Brain"* ( in "Suspiria de Profundis", 1845), when he dealt with traumatic or enigmatic experiences which recurred inexorably and could not be deleted.
(BTW: I got stuck in "Lolita" simply because I was curious to compare the titles of De Quincey's earlier work, "Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1822)" and Humbert Humbert's original "Lolita, or the Confession of a White Widowed Male".)
My intention, actually, was to describe as a precious "gem" the entire erection of literary "strata-gems," by VN, and not any isolated body embedded in them, i.e. VN's narratives as including different, apparently incongruous levels of historicity, like those we also find in "Transparent Things"( for example), suggestive of a special kind of palimpsest-style or, perhaps, what in modern terms became the "hypertext" ( as those in the know already know).
Cf. "Transparent Things, Ch.One): "When we concentrate on a material object, whatever its situation, the very act of attention may lead to our involuntarily sinking into the history of that object. Novices must learn to skim over matter if they want matter to stay at the exact level of the moment. Transparent things, through which the past shines! Man-made objects, or natural ones, inert in themselves but much used by careless life (you are thinking, and quite rightly so, of a hillside stone over which a multitude of small animals have scurried in the course of incalculable seasons) are particularly difficult to keep in surface focus: novices fall through the surface, humming happily to themselves, and are soon reveling with childish abandon in the story of this stone, of that heath. I shall explain. A thin veneer of immediate reality is spread over natural and artificial matter, and whoever wishes to remain in the now, with the now, on the now, should please not break its tension film. Otherwise the inexperienced miracle-worker will find himself no longer walking on water but descending upright among staring fish.
..................................................................................................................................
*- "A palimpsest, then, is a membrane or roll cleansed of its manuscript by reiterated successions . . . What else than a natural and mighty palimpsest is the human brain? Such a palimpsest is my brain; such a palimpsest, oh reader! is yours. Everlasting layers of ideas, images, feelings, have fallen upon your brain softly as light. Each succession has seemed to bury all that went before. And yet, in reality, not one has been extinguished. And if, in the vellum palimpsest, lying amongst the other diplomata of human archives or libraries, there is anything fantastic or which moves to laughter, as oftentimes there is in the grotesque collisions of those successive themes, having no natural connection, which by pure accident have consecutively occupied the roll, yet, in our own heaven-created palimpsest, the deep memorial palimpsest of the brain, there are not and cannot be such incoherencies."
.......................................................................................................................................
Search the archive: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/archives/nabokv-l.html
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