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Re: Boyd on Lolita, science, pattern
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James Twiggs link to Tallis' TLS "The Neuroscience Delusion", discusses Byatt's approach to Donne's poetry through neuroscience, now seen as "seems perverse" [...] for it results from " the habit of the uncritical application of very general ideas to works of literature, whose distinctive features, deliberate intentions and calculated virtues are consequently lost[...] for "literary art is an extreme expression of our distinctively human freedom, of our liberation from our organic, indeed material, state".
Stan K-B's comments about EO Wilson's consilience highlights that "the Science/LitCrit 'dichotomy' is huge and skewed [...&] there's little reciprocal understanding or sheer enjoyment by the latter for the vast achievements of science and mathematics." when he stresses "reciprocal understanding or sheer enjoyment" more than proposes any symmetrical or convergent "consilient" approach.
Perhaps there's a special brain pattern that stimulates the emergence of two unrelated mentions to John Donne in a sequence of postings? Anyway when, out of the blue, I picked Donne's "Death Be not Proud" to discuss VN's references to "immortality and art", I was pointing out one kind of equivocation, something that Jerry Friedman, more aptly, described as a very strange bluring that started "with someone much like VN" and ended "with someone quite different."
I see another equivocation when VN approaches art, then as a form of immortality, and Gradus (Death). Before the "seven ages of man", Kinbote had mentioned some sort of evolutionary scale while he praised the miracle of the written signs. He wrote:
"We are absurdly accustomed to the miracle of a few written signs being able to contain immortal imagery, involutions of thought, new worlds with live people, speaking, weeping, laughing. We take it for granted so simply that in a sense, by the very act of brutish routine acceptance, we undo the work of the ages, the history of the gradual [??!!] elaboration of poetical description and construction, from the treeman to Browning, from the caveman to Keats... I do not consider myself a true artist, save in one matter: I can do what only a true artist can do - pounce upon the forgotten butterfly of revelation, wean myself abruptly from the habit of things, see the web of the world, and the warp and the weft of that web.
Kinbote's position resembles HH. in Lolita in one important aspect. Let's hear him there, at the close of that novel:
Thus, neither of us is alive when the reader opens this book...do not pity C.Q. One had to choose between him and H.H., and one wanted H.H. to exist at least a couple of months longer, so as to have him make you live in the minds of later generations. I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita. Like Kinbote, HH had to live a couple of months longer than his adversary to be able to reach "the immortality" he and Lolita would share.
And yet,how often one forgets that Lolita is only HH's invention, that there never was a Lolita and next we consider her "immortality" as if she were a real living person.
Reading both novels we learn nothing about VN's own ideas but we learn that, according to Kinbote's and HH's appraisals, human beings not only cannot escape physical death but they also may not be able to evade the dissolution of their human "soul", whereas characters and their works may express "immortal imagery."
Probably the link bt.lines 710-720 of Shade's poem and a paragraph from "Father's butterflies" ( a scientific discussion about mimetism) has already been discussed but I thought it was worth bringing up again now, given the context of this discussion: .... In life, the mind
Of any man is quick to recognize
Natural shams, and then before his eyes
The reed becomes a bird, the knobby twig
An inchworm, and the cobra head, a big
Wickedly folded moth. But in the case
Of my white fountain what it did replace
Perceptually was something that, I felt,
Could be grasped only by whoever dwelt
In the strange world where I was a mere stray
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Stan K-B's comments about EO Wilson's consilience highlights that "the Science/LitCrit 'dichotomy' is huge and skewed [...&] there's little reciprocal understanding or sheer enjoyment by the latter for the vast achievements of science and mathematics." when he stresses "reciprocal understanding or sheer enjoyment" more than proposes any symmetrical or convergent "consilient" approach.
Perhaps there's a special brain pattern that stimulates the emergence of two unrelated mentions to John Donne in a sequence of postings? Anyway when, out of the blue, I picked Donne's "Death Be not Proud" to discuss VN's references to "immortality and art", I was pointing out one kind of equivocation, something that Jerry Friedman, more aptly, described as a very strange bluring that started "with someone much like VN" and ended "with someone quite different."
I see another equivocation when VN approaches art, then as a form of immortality, and Gradus (Death). Before the "seven ages of man", Kinbote had mentioned some sort of evolutionary scale while he praised the miracle of the written signs. He wrote:
"We are absurdly accustomed to the miracle of a few written signs being able to contain immortal imagery, involutions of thought, new worlds with live people, speaking, weeping, laughing. We take it for granted so simply that in a sense, by the very act of brutish routine acceptance, we undo the work of the ages, the history of the gradual [??!!] elaboration of poetical description and construction, from the treeman to Browning, from the caveman to Keats... I do not consider myself a true artist, save in one matter: I can do what only a true artist can do - pounce upon the forgotten butterfly of revelation, wean myself abruptly from the habit of things, see the web of the world, and the warp and the weft of that web.
Kinbote's position resembles HH. in Lolita in one important aspect. Let's hear him there, at the close of that novel:
Thus, neither of us is alive when the reader opens this book...do not pity C.Q. One had to choose between him and H.H., and one wanted H.H. to exist at least a couple of months longer, so as to have him make you live in the minds of later generations. I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita. Like Kinbote, HH had to live a couple of months longer than his adversary to be able to reach "the immortality" he and Lolita would share.
And yet,how often one forgets that Lolita is only HH's invention, that there never was a Lolita and next we consider her "immortality" as if she were a real living person.
Reading both novels we learn nothing about VN's own ideas but we learn that, according to Kinbote's and HH's appraisals, human beings not only cannot escape physical death but they also may not be able to evade the dissolution of their human "soul", whereas characters and their works may express "immortal imagery."
Probably the link bt.lines 710-720 of Shade's poem and a paragraph from "Father's butterflies" ( a scientific discussion about mimetism) has already been discussed but I thought it was worth bringing up again now, given the context of this discussion: .... In life, the mind
Of any man is quick to recognize
Natural shams, and then before his eyes
The reed becomes a bird, the knobby twig
An inchworm, and the cobra head, a big
Wickedly folded moth. But in the case
Of my white fountain what it did replace
Perceptually was something that, I felt,
Could be grasped only by whoever dwelt
In the strange world where I was a mere stray
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