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Fw: [NABOKV-L] Otto Rank on disputed authorship: Caveat"
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Steve Blackwell found in "some sections of Otto Rank's Art and Artist (in English; Knopf, 1932)...fascinating consonances and dissonances vis-a-vis Nabokov, and stumbled upon a passage that I think gives a potent context for the present discussion: ". . .it can hardly be chance that the greatest creations of the human spirit, such as the New Testament, the Homeric poems, and Shakspere's [sic] plays, should, on the one hand, have been centres of academic disputes as to authorship and, on the other, should have inspired the imagination of whole centuries in favour of one author."
Victoria Alexander wrote to S. Blackwell: Thanks for the observation, Stephen. I took the point of your note to be that interesting works are those that seem multi-vocal. Whether or not a particular work was in fact written by multiple authors seems besides that point.
Sergei Soloviev remarked " first of all, I think it would be useful if in our discussion we would more clearly distinguish (as the mathematicians do) the "metatheory" and the "theory". The "metatheory" in this case being our reconstruction of the ideas and intentions and sources of Nabokov, and the "theory" - the analysis of the PF as if it were a description of real world,some of the personages were real persons, with possible (impossible) medical conditions, delusions etc."
Quite!
SB's remark calls our attention to the risks of using, indiscrimintately, "theory" and "meta-theory" or following an Escherian or Borgian twist ( among his "dictionary" ennumeration of mammals Borges included the pencil that drew a camel ) while discussing "Pale Fire". And yet, after V. Alexander wrote about "multi-vocal" works I was reminded of an old posting on Bakhtin and dialogism where this issue was raised concerning Nabokov's "voices". Could she, or Stephen elaborate on that?
Unfortunately I could not find the work in which Borges included his "dictionary", but I came across another "Inquisition" that might be of interest to the List and that is linked to Shade's brown shoe lying in the lawn after his dream about a stroll in the garden ( and, to Kinbote's Cedarn Caves by devious ways).
After Borges wrote about "The Flower of Coleridge" he mentioned its sequel in two other works: H.Well's "The Time Machine" and Henry James' "The Sense of the Past" ( following Borges's second-hand description the latter deals with a painting and its painter in a way that has a torsion similar to VN's in "La Veneziana" ). Borges follows a pantheistic argument about the fundamental unity of the "Word" according to which "the plurality of authors is an illusion".
I only have Borges quote of Coleridge in Spanish and a rough treacherous rendering reads: " If after man in his dream reached Paradise and was given a flower as proof of his visit, and when he wakes up and finds himself holding this flower in his hand...what then?" ( "Otras Inquisitiones", Alianza Editorial,1997,page 20)
Thanks to "Google" I reached the following information: "At the end of the eighteenth century, Samuel Coleridge posed the fanciful question that Borges reminds us of 200 years later: "If a man could pass through Paradise and have a flower presented to him as a pledge that his soul had really been there, and if he found that flower in his hand when he awoke-Ay!-and what then?" H. G. Wells quoted Coleridge in the epigraph to his novel The Time Machine in the year that Wanamaker's was building its New York store, and Wells gave his time traveller, far in the future, precisely the flower postulated by Coleridge: he has it still in his hand when he recovers consciousness after crash-landing in the present at the end of the novel. What would Coleridge's flower have been? We recall that Coleridge had himself already experienced a dream such as he proposed in his fanciful question, a dream induced by opium, in which "Kubla Khan," his great unfinished poem, was given to him in its entirety: when he awoke, he had the whole work of some three hundred lines in his head...".
Well, then... aren't we back now to Kubla Khan and Kinbote's "cedarn caves" and "Zembla"?
Jansy
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Victoria Alexander wrote to S. Blackwell: Thanks for the observation, Stephen. I took the point of your note to be that interesting works are those that seem multi-vocal. Whether or not a particular work was in fact written by multiple authors seems besides that point.
Sergei Soloviev remarked " first of all, I think it would be useful if in our discussion we would more clearly distinguish (as the mathematicians do) the "metatheory" and the "theory". The "metatheory" in this case being our reconstruction of the ideas and intentions and sources of Nabokov, and the "theory" - the analysis of the PF as if it were a description of real world,some of the personages were real persons, with possible (impossible) medical conditions, delusions etc."
Quite!
SB's remark calls our attention to the risks of using, indiscrimintately, "theory" and "meta-theory" or following an Escherian or Borgian twist ( among his "dictionary" ennumeration of mammals Borges included the pencil that drew a camel ) while discussing "Pale Fire". And yet, after V. Alexander wrote about "multi-vocal" works I was reminded of an old posting on Bakhtin and dialogism where this issue was raised concerning Nabokov's "voices". Could she, or Stephen elaborate on that?
Unfortunately I could not find the work in which Borges included his "dictionary", but I came across another "Inquisition" that might be of interest to the List and that is linked to Shade's brown shoe lying in the lawn after his dream about a stroll in the garden ( and, to Kinbote's Cedarn Caves by devious ways).
After Borges wrote about "The Flower of Coleridge" he mentioned its sequel in two other works: H.Well's "The Time Machine" and Henry James' "The Sense of the Past" ( following Borges's second-hand description the latter deals with a painting and its painter in a way that has a torsion similar to VN's in "La Veneziana" ). Borges follows a pantheistic argument about the fundamental unity of the "Word" according to which "the plurality of authors is an illusion".
I only have Borges quote of Coleridge in Spanish and a rough treacherous rendering reads: " If after man in his dream reached Paradise and was given a flower as proof of his visit, and when he wakes up and finds himself holding this flower in his hand...what then?" ( "Otras Inquisitiones", Alianza Editorial,1997,page 20)
Thanks to "Google" I reached the following information: "At the end of the eighteenth century, Samuel Coleridge posed the fanciful question that Borges reminds us of 200 years later: "If a man could pass through Paradise and have a flower presented to him as a pledge that his soul had really been there, and if he found that flower in his hand when he awoke-Ay!-and what then?" H. G. Wells quoted Coleridge in the epigraph to his novel The Time Machine in the year that Wanamaker's was building its New York store, and Wells gave his time traveller, far in the future, precisely the flower postulated by Coleridge: he has it still in his hand when he recovers consciousness after crash-landing in the present at the end of the novel. What would Coleridge's flower have been? We recall that Coleridge had himself already experienced a dream such as he proposed in his fanciful question, a dream induced by opium, in which "Kubla Khan," his great unfinished poem, was given to him in its entirety: when he awoke, he had the whole work of some three hundred lines in his head...".
Well, then... aren't we back now to Kubla Khan and Kinbote's "cedarn caves" and "Zembla"?
Jansy
Search the archive: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/archives/nabokv-l.html
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