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Re: S-K-B
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Dear Don,
Like you, I enjoy VN's creation of one protagonist with two discrete ( or indiscrete) personalities, specially in "The Eye" ( which you didn't think had any relation to the idea that inspired Machado de Assis's "Pothumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas" , where the division, like in "The Eye", has something to do with "before and after death" ).
Even more discretly still, we may discover this kind of "split" permeating almost every VN novel like the sometimes ghostly maid Blanche and sister Rose, or Lucette as "a mermaid in Atlantis" bubbling inside a crystal glass in Terra (approximate references). I'm sure RLS's kind of "split" is not the only option to understand these doublings in VN - as most readers will certainly agree without blinking an eye ( or two).
I've been reading Dennis Lehane's "Shutter Island", whose plot develops in an insane asyllum built like a fortress in an island. Cawley, one of the superintentends of the asyllum observed to a detective who was investigating one of the inmates, said: " here we approach the frightening beauty of a fully developed paranoid structure. If you believed yourself to be the only possessor of the truth, then probably everyone else would be lying and therefore, if everyone were lying any other truth would probably be also a lie ..." ( I'm reading in Portuguese so I don't have the exact wording in English).
VN would probably have enjoyed and applied self-referential traps similar to those of the "liar's paradox" ( the paradox of Epimenides) which, in a way, demand such a "split" perception to be "meta-psychologically" and metalinguistically apprehensible - sometehing taken up by Pulitzer winning Douglas Hoffstadter in "Goedel, Escher, Bach,the Art of the Fugue": All discrete Cretans lie, I am a Cretan, therefore, I'm lying...
And so am I...like everyone else.
Jansy
----- Original Message -----
From: D. Barton Johnson
To: NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU
Sent: Wednesday, October 18, 2006 8:58 PM
Subject: [NABOKV-L] S-K-B
While not being convinced by CK's Jeckel & Hyde thesis, I might mention that both THE EYE and LATH! certainly feature one protagaonist with two discrete personalities Don Johnson
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Like you, I enjoy VN's creation of one protagonist with two discrete ( or indiscrete) personalities, specially in "The Eye" ( which you didn't think had any relation to the idea that inspired Machado de Assis's "Pothumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas" , where the division, like in "The Eye", has something to do with "before and after death" ).
Even more discretly still, we may discover this kind of "split" permeating almost every VN novel like the sometimes ghostly maid Blanche and sister Rose, or Lucette as "a mermaid in Atlantis" bubbling inside a crystal glass in Terra (approximate references). I'm sure RLS's kind of "split" is not the only option to understand these doublings in VN - as most readers will certainly agree without blinking an eye ( or two).
I've been reading Dennis Lehane's "Shutter Island", whose plot develops in an insane asyllum built like a fortress in an island. Cawley, one of the superintentends of the asyllum observed to a detective who was investigating one of the inmates, said: " here we approach the frightening beauty of a fully developed paranoid structure. If you believed yourself to be the only possessor of the truth, then probably everyone else would be lying and therefore, if everyone were lying any other truth would probably be also a lie ..." ( I'm reading in Portuguese so I don't have the exact wording in English).
VN would probably have enjoyed and applied self-referential traps similar to those of the "liar's paradox" ( the paradox of Epimenides) which, in a way, demand such a "split" perception to be "meta-psychologically" and metalinguistically apprehensible - sometehing taken up by Pulitzer winning Douglas Hoffstadter in "Goedel, Escher, Bach,the Art of the Fugue": All discrete Cretans lie, I am a Cretan, therefore, I'm lying...
And so am I...like everyone else.
Jansy
----- Original Message -----
From: D. Barton Johnson
To: NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU
Sent: Wednesday, October 18, 2006 8:58 PM
Subject: [NABOKV-L] S-K-B
While not being convinced by CK's Jeckel & Hyde thesis, I might mention that both THE EYE and LATH! certainly feature one protagaonist with two discrete personalities Don Johnson
Search the Nabokv-L archive at UCSB
Contact the Editors
All private editorial communications, without exception, are read by both co-editors.
Visit Zembla
View Nabokv-L Policies
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