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Re: Fwd: The Eye/I
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----- Forwarded message from jansy@aetern.us -----
Date: Mon, 21 Feb 2005 17:18:40 -0300
From: Jansy Berndt de Souza Mello <jansy@aetern.us>
The flattened couple in the book lying like dried plants is a striking image
about the book Van is writing in ADA, but it creates a self-referential model
and closed circularity that is in opposition to VN´s ideal of an open
"spiral".
There have been indirect pointers to the Liar´s paradox which I can summarize
in a statement such as: " This shall be my last lie".
Those paradoxes arise from the self-referential closed circularity which
initially made me start on "the I of the book that cannot die".
But I think that the image VN worked over in ADA - and in which we find an
insect resembling a flower that looks like a bug - which comes closer to VN´s
flattened couple can be heard in a poem by W.B.Yeats ( I selected the part ):
For every nerve: lover tests lover
With cruelties of Choice and Chance;
And when at last the murder's over
Maybe the bride-bed brings despair,
For each an imagined image brings
And finds a real image there;
Yet the world ends when these two things,
Though several, are a single light,
When oil and wick are burned in one;
( W.B. Yeats, Salomon and the Witch)
NB: My constant references to leaves in relation to an "infolio" arose from the
link between "infolio" and, for example, "foliage" and, of course, book leaves
( in French "feuilles" or, in Portuguese, "folhas" ). Also to loss ( "leavings"
and, in another key, "fallen leaves")
Jansy
----- Original Message -----
From: Donald B. Johnson
To: NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU
Sent: Monday, February 21, 2005 1:44 PM
Subject: Fwd: The Eye/I
----- Forwarded message from jansy@aetern.us -----
Date: Mon, 21 Feb 2005 12:08:20 -0000
From: Jansy Berndt de Souza Mello <jansy@aetern.us>
Dear Don and List,
After Lolita´s impossible immortalization through Humbert´s tale of her life ,
while discussing certain passages in ADA we arrived at a curious infolium, a
Gingko/Adafolium and the herbarium where there is a couple flattened inside
the
pages of a book. This closes the circle in the narrative ( it begins and ends
with the leaves/pages of that infolio...) and leaves the spiraling leaves
somwhere else.
Today I came acros Boyd´s quotation in "Nabokov´s ADa", Beyond Consciousness
chapter, page 89:
" The I of the book/ Cannot die in the book" and referred to LATH 239 )
We return to the mystery of all the various " I " of VN´s books and his
unreliable narrators. But the point I want to raise today is the contrast
between this "I" that cannot die in the book and another "Eye" ( a novel that
seems to be almost absent in our list: The Story of the EYE ) that speaks
from the other side of the tomb ( like the title of one of Chateaubriand´s
works, never mentioned explicitly by VN: Mèmoires d´Autre Tombe or TT´s
writing
ghosts ).
Like an "arrow shooting from one darkness into another" , what can Mr. R or
Van
or HH say about this scrap of light or light breeze escaping from "Another
Scene" of the after-death?
Jansy
----- End forwarded message -----
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Dear Don and List,
After Lolita´s impossible immortalization through Humbert´s tale of her life ,
while discussing certain passages in ADA we arrived at a curious infolium, a
Gingko/Adafolium and the herbarium where there is a couple flattened inside the
pages of a book. This closes the circle in the narrative ( it begins and ends
with the leaves/pages of that infolio...) and leaves the spiraling leaves
somwhere else.
Today I came acros Boyd´s quotation in "Nabokov´s ADa", Beyond Consciousness
chapter, page 89:
" The I of the book/ Cannot die in the book" and referred to LATH 239 )
We return to the mistery of all the various " I " of VN´s books and his
unreliable narrators. But the point I want to raise today is the contrast
between this "I" that cannot die in the book and another "Eye" ( a novel that
seems to be almost absent in our list: The Story of the EYE ) that speaks
from the other side of the tomb ( like the title of one of Chateaubriand´s
works, never mentioned explicitly by VN: Mèmoires d´Autre Tombe or TT´s writing
ghosts ).
Like an "arrow shooting from one darkness into another" , what can Mr. R or
Van or HH say about this scrap of light or light breeze escaping from "Another
Scene" of the after-death?
Jansy
----- End forwarded message -----