Subject
From Brian Boyd
From
Date
Body
From: Brian Boyd <b.boyd@auckland.ac.nz>
Many Nabokovians like to follow writers who bounce off Nabokov, from Bolt
to Bitov. But in the spirit of Borges's "Kafka and His Precursors," may I
draw to your attention the anonymous sixteenth-century Chinese novel _The
Plum in the Golden Vase, or Chin P'ing Mei_, lovingly translated by David
Tod Roy of the University of Chicago and published (Volume One: The
Gathering) by Princeton University Press, 1993. In his introduction, Roy
repeatedly compares the novel to Joyce and Nabokov, and even to some of the
things that we consider most singularly and unprecedentedly Nabokovian. For
example:
p. xxxviii: As Alfred Appel says of _Lolita_, another novel of innovative
technique and problematic subject matter, "Nabokov is able to have it both
ways, involving the reader on the one hand in a deeply moving yet
outrageously comic story, rich in verisimilitude, and on the other engaging
him in a game made possible by the interlacings of verbal figurations which
undermine the novel's realistic base and distance the reader from its
dappled surface, which then assumes the aspect of a gameboard." [AnLo 1991
lvi-lvii]
p. xlvii: Like _Ulysses_ and _Lolita_, the _Chin P'ing Mei_ contains
thousands of unidentified allusions to, and quotations from, earlier works
of literature. . . . . [It] is characterized by an amazingly dense network
of internal, as well as external, allusions, verbal repetitions,
resonances, cross-references, and patterns of internal repetition and
replication. What Brian Boyd says of Vladimir Nabokov's practice in this
regard is equally true of the Chin P'ing Mei: "He transmutes a recurrent
element sufficiently for the repetition to be overlooked, he casually
discloses one piece of partial information and leaves it up to us to
connect it with another apparently offhand fact, or he groups together
stray details and repeats the random cluster much later in what appears to
be a remote context. . . . In a book swarming with detail and abounding in
obvious patterns these details are so slight and their repetition subjected
to such transformation that no reader could even notice these matching
clusters until a careful re-reading." [VNRY 300]
Since there are five volumes of _The Plum in a Golden Vase_, and the first
is 600 pages, I haven't had time to read it, but would welcome reactions -
although the full Nabokovian orchestration would be visible only within a
complete text and a rich knowledge of the cultural context.
Cheers,
Brian
Professor Brian Boyd
English Department
University of Auckland
Private Bag 92019
Auckland, New Zealand
fax + 64 9 373 7429
tel + 64 9 377 7599 x 7480
e-mail: b.boyd@auckland.ac.nz
Many Nabokovians like to follow writers who bounce off Nabokov, from Bolt
to Bitov. But in the spirit of Borges's "Kafka and His Precursors," may I
draw to your attention the anonymous sixteenth-century Chinese novel _The
Plum in the Golden Vase, or Chin P'ing Mei_, lovingly translated by David
Tod Roy of the University of Chicago and published (Volume One: The
Gathering) by Princeton University Press, 1993. In his introduction, Roy
repeatedly compares the novel to Joyce and Nabokov, and even to some of the
things that we consider most singularly and unprecedentedly Nabokovian. For
example:
p. xxxviii: As Alfred Appel says of _Lolita_, another novel of innovative
technique and problematic subject matter, "Nabokov is able to have it both
ways, involving the reader on the one hand in a deeply moving yet
outrageously comic story, rich in verisimilitude, and on the other engaging
him in a game made possible by the interlacings of verbal figurations which
undermine the novel's realistic base and distance the reader from its
dappled surface, which then assumes the aspect of a gameboard." [AnLo 1991
lvi-lvii]
p. xlvii: Like _Ulysses_ and _Lolita_, the _Chin P'ing Mei_ contains
thousands of unidentified allusions to, and quotations from, earlier works
of literature. . . . . [It] is characterized by an amazingly dense network
of internal, as well as external, allusions, verbal repetitions,
resonances, cross-references, and patterns of internal repetition and
replication. What Brian Boyd says of Vladimir Nabokov's practice in this
regard is equally true of the Chin P'ing Mei: "He transmutes a recurrent
element sufficiently for the repetition to be overlooked, he casually
discloses one piece of partial information and leaves it up to us to
connect it with another apparently offhand fact, or he groups together
stray details and repeats the random cluster much later in what appears to
be a remote context. . . . In a book swarming with detail and abounding in
obvious patterns these details are so slight and their repetition subjected
to such transformation that no reader could even notice these matching
clusters until a careful re-reading." [VNRY 300]
Since there are five volumes of _The Plum in a Golden Vase_, and the first
is 600 pages, I haven't had time to read it, but would welcome reactions -
although the full Nabokovian orchestration would be visible only within a
complete text and a rich knowledge of the cultural context.
Cheers,
Brian
Professor Brian Boyd
English Department
University of Auckland
Private Bag 92019
Auckland, New Zealand
fax + 64 9 373 7429
tel + 64 9 377 7599 x 7480
e-mail: b.boyd@auckland.ac.nz