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[ References, Allusions,Similarities] Clouded hypermnesia in VN,
Borges and Luria - Correction
Borges and Luria - Correction
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Dear List,
I recently explored true/false similarities between novelistic ideas and verbal usages by different authors, related to chance sentences that describe a same episode (the case in question was connected to "screen-memories.")
The present posting deals with one such experience. It happened after I heard a person express her wish to individualize the shape of a host of grey clouds that were floating by. I was immediately reminded of a short-story written by J.L.Borges ("Funes, the memorious") and, departing from it, I reached another recollection, this time linked to Nabokov's text about Pushkin ( "Pouchkine ou le Vrai et le Vraisemblable"), published for the first time in 1937 in the NRF.
In both episodes we find a character that has fallen from a horse and suffered a cerebral damage which affected their mnemonic functions. The hypermnesia that follows the fate of Borges's Ireneo Funes blends sensorial impressions in a synesthetic way as, for eg., by turning every passing cloud into something unique. Nabokov's young peasant was differently affected. He acquired memories that extended into the long past, up to "immemorial times," just like it happens in one of VN's short-stories, dealing with a half-delusional/half-true states engendered by an eternal unmoving cloud ("Cloud,Castle,Lake")#.
Nabokov begins his lecture, delivered in French, by affirming that life often gives one a present whose worth one may discover only a long time afterwards. He then proceeds to describe a person who, on a first meeting, seems to border on lunacy. His madness, provoked after his fall from a horse in his youth, added an abyssal quality to his brain that led him to feel as if he were an old man who thought he'd taken part in various happenings that took place a century before. For example, he told Nabokov that he held his (the narrator's) grandfather on his lap and at every new encounter Nabokov discovered that the madman's recollections had receded even further in time. Unfortunately, since he was an uneducated man, his imagined recollections were gross generalizations of historical facts and heroes.* (Nabokov's story is used as an introductory remark about biographies (and a lot more), before he embarks in his report about Pushkin's life and works. )Borges' Ireneo Funes, on the contrary, seemed to suffer no such delusions. His recollections were accurate to the dot and, instead of inhabiting a world of ancient generalities, with picture-book quality such as VN's Russian peasant (as I surmise he was), his world allowed him to name every trifle individually making it unnecessary to generalize and form abstractions. His memory was capable to hold everything in place, including a flying swift.**
It's my impression that Nabokov fictionalized and enlarged a true story as a metaphor for his lecture. Although Nabokov often mentioned his experience of reading Borges (he found... big portals opening into nothing, a host of minute minotaurs, etc), often with Véra and, at times, with enjoyment, I don't think that his fiction was influenced by Borges (and vice-versa). Fully-armed Athena may have jumped from VN's extraordinary head, or he may have been inspired by the same source that might have let an impress on Borges, namely, the Russian Alexander Luria's book "The Mind of a Mnemonist."
.....................................................................................................................................................................................................................
# - "...after another hour of marching, that very happiness of which he had once half dreamt was suddenly discovered.It was a pure, blue lake, with an unusual expression of its water. In the middle, a large cloud was reflected in its entirety. On the other side, on a hill thickly covered with verdure (and the darker the verdure, the more poetic it is), towered, arising from dactyl to dactyl, an ancient black castle. Of course, there are plenty of such views in Central Europe, but just this one-in the inexpressible and unique harmoniousness of its three principal parts, in its smile, in some mysterious innocence it had, my love! my obedient one!-was something so unique, and so familiar, and so long-promised, and it so understood the beholder that Vasiliy Ivanovich even pressed his hand to his heart, as if to see whether his heart was there in order to give it away."
"...a most ordinary room, with a red floor, daisies daubed on the white walls...-but from the window one could clearly see the lake with its cloud and its castle, in a motionless and perfect correlation of happiness. Without reasoning, without considering, only entirely surrendering to an attraction the truth of which consisted in its own strength, a strength which he had never experienced before, Vasiliy Ivanovich in one radiant second realized that here in this little room with that view, beautiful to the verge of tears, life would at last be what he had always wished it to be."
* - "La vie nous offre parfois des invitations a des fetes qui n'auront jamais lieu, des images pour des [...] elle nous fait cadeau d'une chose dont nous ne decouvrons que bien plus tard l'usage inattendu. J'ai connu naguere un drole d'homme. S'il existe encore, ce dont je doute, il doit etre la perle d'une maison d'alienes. Lorsque je le rencontrai il cotoyait la folie de bien pres. Sa demence, declenchee, disait-on, par une chute de cheval qu'il avait faite dans sa prime jeunesse, etait de celles qui, tout en abimant le cerveau, lui suggerent une fausse vieillesse. Mon malade se croyait non seulement plus age qu'il n'etait reellement, mais illui semblait avoir pris part a des evenements d'un autre siec1e. eet homme, frisant la quarantaine, robuste et rouge, a l'oeil vitreux, me contait, avec le petit hochement de tete des vieillards reveurs, que mon grand-pere tout enfant venait grimper sur ses genoux. Le rapide calcul que je fis en l'ecoutant me força a lui donner un age fabuleux. Ce qui etait vraiment d'une bizarrerie charmante, c'est qu'avec chaque annee, a mesure que son mal progressait, i1 descendait a reculon vers un passe de plus en plus lointain. Quand je le revis, il y a une dizaine d'annees, il me parla de la prise de Sebastopol. Un mois plus tard, c'etait deja du general Bonaparte qu'il m'entretenait. Une semaine encore - et nous voila en pleine Vendee. S'il vit toujours, mon maniaque, il doit etre bien loin, parmi les Normands, peut-etre, ou meme, qui sait, dans les bras de Cleopatre. Pauvre lime ambulante qui s'en va roulant toujours plus vite sur la pente du temps. Et avec quelle abondance de paroles, quel entrain, quels sourires rogues ou sagaces. Il se souvenait d'ailleurs parfaitement des faits reels de son existence, seulement illes deplaçait etrangement. Ainsi, lorsqu'il parlait de son accident, il repoussait toujours plus arriere dans le temps, en changeant a mesure le decor, comme ces drames du theatre c1assique dont les costumes changent betement avec l'epoque. On ne pouvait evoquer en sa presence nulle celebrite du passe qu'il n'y vint ajouter, avec une generosite terrible de vieux bavard, quelque souvenir personnel. Cependant ne dans un milieu pauvre et provincial, il avait servi dans un vague regiment et l'education qu'il avait plutot ramassee que reçue etait restee fort miserable. Ah, l'eblouissant spectacle, le festin intellectuel que l'eut peut-etre [...] si chez lui une culture subtile, des connaissances profondes en histoire et un minimum de talent naturel avaient tenu compagnie sa demence voyageuse! Figurez-vous ce qu'un Carlyle eut tire d'une telle folie! Malheureusement, mon homme etait foncierement incu1te et fort mal equipe pour jouir d'une psychose rare, en sorte qu'il etait reduit nourrir son imagination d'un fatras de banalites et d'idees generales, plus ou moins fausses. Les bras croises de Napoleon, les trois cheveux du Chancelier de Fer ou la melancolie de Byron, et un certain nombre de ces petites anecdotes dites historiques dont les grammairiens edulcorent leurs manuels, lui suffisaient, helas, pour le detail et la couleur, et tous les grands hommes qu'il avait connus de presse ressemblaient comme des freres. Je ne sais rien de plus etrange que le spectacle d'une manie qui par sa nature meme semble exiger tout un monde de savoir, d'inspiration, de finesse, mais se trouve forcee de tourner dans une tete vide. Le souvenir de ce pauvre malade vient me hanter chaque fois que j'ouvre un de ces curieux ouvrages qu'on est convenu d'appeler «biographies romancees ».". L 'Arc, 1964. (the transcribed text has various imprecisions due to faulty formatting)
** - Wikipedia (excerpts): "Funes the Memorious" (original Spanish title: "Funes el memorioso") is a fantasy short story by Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges. First published in La Nación in June 1942, it appeared in the 1944 anthology Ficciones, part two (Artifices). The first English translation appeared in 1954 in Avon Modern Writing No. 2. The title has also been translated as "Funes, His Memory." (The Spanish "memorioso" means "having a vast memory," and is a fairly common word in both Spanish and Portuguese languages. Because "memorious" is a rare word in modern English, some translators opt for this alternate translation.)"
"Funes the Memorious tells the story of a fictional version of Borges himself, as he meets Ireneo Funes...He learns that this person has ...suffered a horseback riding accident and is now hopelessly crippled...[He] goes to Funes's house...As he enters, Borges is greeted by Funes's voice speaking perfect Latin, reciting "the first paragraph of the twenty-fourth chapter of the seventh book of the Historia Naturalis" (by Pliny the Elder). Funes ...reveals that, since his fall from the horse, he perceives everything in full detail and remembers it all...for example, the shape of clouds at all given moments, as well as the associated perceptions (muscular, thermal, etc.) of each moment... He finds it very difficult to sleep, since he recalls "every crevice and every moulding of the various houses which [surround] him"...Borges sees him "as monumental as bronze, more ancient than Egypt, anterior to the prophecies and the pyramids"..
A direct quote from Borges's short story: "We, in a glance, perceive three wine glasses on the table; Funes saw all the shoots, clusters, and grapes of the vine. He remembered the shapes of the clouds in the south at dawn on the 30th of April of 1882, and he could compare them in his recollection with the marbled grain in the design of a leather-bound book which he had seen only once, and with the lines in the spray which an oar raised in the Rio Negro on the eve of the battle of the Quebracho. These recollections were not simple; each visual image was linked to muscular sensations, thermal sensations, etc. He could reconstruct all his dreams, all his fancies...He told me: I have more memories in myself alone than all men have had since the world was a world..." The narrator mentions that Locke postulated then rejected an impossible idiom "in which each individual thing, each stone, each bird and each branch would have its own name; Funes once projected an analogous language, but discarded it because it seemed too general to him, too ambiguous" since it did not take time into account : given that physical objects are constantly changing in subtle ways, Funes insisted that in order to refer to an object unambiguously one must specify a time. "To think is to forget a difference, to generalize, to abstract. In the overly replete world of Funes, there were nothing but details."
Wikipedia also informas that "The real-life case of Daniel Tammet (b. 1979), an autistic British savant, bears a certain similitude to fictional Ireneo Funes: he had epileptic seizures that may have a part in his unusual talents; his memory for numbers is prodigious (on March 14, 2004 - 'pi day', Tammet correctly recited 22,514 digits of the irrational number), and finally, he has explained that he has synesthesia, which allows him to "see" numbers as shapes, some of which are more pleasant than others.
Solomon Shereshevskii, a stage memory-artist (mnemonist) with a condition known as "hypermnesia", is described by the Russian neuropsychologist Alexander Luria in his book, The Mind of a Mnemonist', which some speculate was the inspiration for Borges's story...American neuropsychologist Oliver Sacks cites Luria's book as the inspiration for his own book,Awakenings, which is dedicated to Luria...Jill Price, along with 10 others, can remember with great accuracy most days of their lives starting from the average age of 11. The scientific term for their unique condition is "hyperthymestic syndrome" now more recently known as Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory (HSAM). Price has stated that she, like Funes, views her memory as a curse."
Borges's entire text is to be found at websites such as this one.
Search archive with Google:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
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Visit "Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
Manage subscription options: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/
I recently explored true/false similarities between novelistic ideas and verbal usages by different authors, related to chance sentences that describe a same episode (the case in question was connected to "screen-memories.")
The present posting deals with one such experience. It happened after I heard a person express her wish to individualize the shape of a host of grey clouds that were floating by. I was immediately reminded of a short-story written by J.L.Borges ("Funes, the memorious") and, departing from it, I reached another recollection, this time linked to Nabokov's text about Pushkin ( "Pouchkine ou le Vrai et le Vraisemblable"), published for the first time in 1937 in the NRF.
In both episodes we find a character that has fallen from a horse and suffered a cerebral damage which affected their mnemonic functions. The hypermnesia that follows the fate of Borges's Ireneo Funes blends sensorial impressions in a synesthetic way as, for eg., by turning every passing cloud into something unique. Nabokov's young peasant was differently affected. He acquired memories that extended into the long past, up to "immemorial times," just like it happens in one of VN's short-stories, dealing with a half-delusional/half-true states engendered by an eternal unmoving cloud ("Cloud,Castle,Lake")#.
Nabokov begins his lecture, delivered in French, by affirming that life often gives one a present whose worth one may discover only a long time afterwards. He then proceeds to describe a person who, on a first meeting, seems to border on lunacy. His madness, provoked after his fall from a horse in his youth, added an abyssal quality to his brain that led him to feel as if he were an old man who thought he'd taken part in various happenings that took place a century before. For example, he told Nabokov that he held his (the narrator's) grandfather on his lap and at every new encounter Nabokov discovered that the madman's recollections had receded even further in time. Unfortunately, since he was an uneducated man, his imagined recollections were gross generalizations of historical facts and heroes.* (Nabokov's story is used as an introductory remark about biographies (and a lot more), before he embarks in his report about Pushkin's life and works. )Borges' Ireneo Funes, on the contrary, seemed to suffer no such delusions. His recollections were accurate to the dot and, instead of inhabiting a world of ancient generalities, with picture-book quality such as VN's Russian peasant (as I surmise he was), his world allowed him to name every trifle individually making it unnecessary to generalize and form abstractions. His memory was capable to hold everything in place, including a flying swift.**
It's my impression that Nabokov fictionalized and enlarged a true story as a metaphor for his lecture. Although Nabokov often mentioned his experience of reading Borges (he found... big portals opening into nothing, a host of minute minotaurs, etc), often with Véra and, at times, with enjoyment, I don't think that his fiction was influenced by Borges (and vice-versa). Fully-armed Athena may have jumped from VN's extraordinary head, or he may have been inspired by the same source that might have let an impress on Borges, namely, the Russian Alexander Luria's book "The Mind of a Mnemonist."
.....................................................................................................................................................................................................................
# - "...after another hour of marching, that very happiness of which he had once half dreamt was suddenly discovered.It was a pure, blue lake, with an unusual expression of its water. In the middle, a large cloud was reflected in its entirety. On the other side, on a hill thickly covered with verdure (and the darker the verdure, the more poetic it is), towered, arising from dactyl to dactyl, an ancient black castle. Of course, there are plenty of such views in Central Europe, but just this one-in the inexpressible and unique harmoniousness of its three principal parts, in its smile, in some mysterious innocence it had, my love! my obedient one!-was something so unique, and so familiar, and so long-promised, and it so understood the beholder that Vasiliy Ivanovich even pressed his hand to his heart, as if to see whether his heart was there in order to give it away."
"...a most ordinary room, with a red floor, daisies daubed on the white walls...-but from the window one could clearly see the lake with its cloud and its castle, in a motionless and perfect correlation of happiness. Without reasoning, without considering, only entirely surrendering to an attraction the truth of which consisted in its own strength, a strength which he had never experienced before, Vasiliy Ivanovich in one radiant second realized that here in this little room with that view, beautiful to the verge of tears, life would at last be what he had always wished it to be."
* - "La vie nous offre parfois des invitations a des fetes qui n'auront jamais lieu, des images pour des [...] elle nous fait cadeau d'une chose dont nous ne decouvrons que bien plus tard l'usage inattendu. J'ai connu naguere un drole d'homme. S'il existe encore, ce dont je doute, il doit etre la perle d'une maison d'alienes. Lorsque je le rencontrai il cotoyait la folie de bien pres. Sa demence, declenchee, disait-on, par une chute de cheval qu'il avait faite dans sa prime jeunesse, etait de celles qui, tout en abimant le cerveau, lui suggerent une fausse vieillesse. Mon malade se croyait non seulement plus age qu'il n'etait reellement, mais illui semblait avoir pris part a des evenements d'un autre siec1e. eet homme, frisant la quarantaine, robuste et rouge, a l'oeil vitreux, me contait, avec le petit hochement de tete des vieillards reveurs, que mon grand-pere tout enfant venait grimper sur ses genoux. Le rapide calcul que je fis en l'ecoutant me força a lui donner un age fabuleux. Ce qui etait vraiment d'une bizarrerie charmante, c'est qu'avec chaque annee, a mesure que son mal progressait, i1 descendait a reculon vers un passe de plus en plus lointain. Quand je le revis, il y a une dizaine d'annees, il me parla de la prise de Sebastopol. Un mois plus tard, c'etait deja du general Bonaparte qu'il m'entretenait. Une semaine encore - et nous voila en pleine Vendee. S'il vit toujours, mon maniaque, il doit etre bien loin, parmi les Normands, peut-etre, ou meme, qui sait, dans les bras de Cleopatre. Pauvre lime ambulante qui s'en va roulant toujours plus vite sur la pente du temps. Et avec quelle abondance de paroles, quel entrain, quels sourires rogues ou sagaces. Il se souvenait d'ailleurs parfaitement des faits reels de son existence, seulement illes deplaçait etrangement. Ainsi, lorsqu'il parlait de son accident, il repoussait toujours plus arriere dans le temps, en changeant a mesure le decor, comme ces drames du theatre c1assique dont les costumes changent betement avec l'epoque. On ne pouvait evoquer en sa presence nulle celebrite du passe qu'il n'y vint ajouter, avec une generosite terrible de vieux bavard, quelque souvenir personnel. Cependant ne dans un milieu pauvre et provincial, il avait servi dans un vague regiment et l'education qu'il avait plutot ramassee que reçue etait restee fort miserable. Ah, l'eblouissant spectacle, le festin intellectuel que l'eut peut-etre [...] si chez lui une culture subtile, des connaissances profondes en histoire et un minimum de talent naturel avaient tenu compagnie sa demence voyageuse! Figurez-vous ce qu'un Carlyle eut tire d'une telle folie! Malheureusement, mon homme etait foncierement incu1te et fort mal equipe pour jouir d'une psychose rare, en sorte qu'il etait reduit nourrir son imagination d'un fatras de banalites et d'idees generales, plus ou moins fausses. Les bras croises de Napoleon, les trois cheveux du Chancelier de Fer ou la melancolie de Byron, et un certain nombre de ces petites anecdotes dites historiques dont les grammairiens edulcorent leurs manuels, lui suffisaient, helas, pour le detail et la couleur, et tous les grands hommes qu'il avait connus de presse ressemblaient comme des freres. Je ne sais rien de plus etrange que le spectacle d'une manie qui par sa nature meme semble exiger tout un monde de savoir, d'inspiration, de finesse, mais se trouve forcee de tourner dans une tete vide. Le souvenir de ce pauvre malade vient me hanter chaque fois que j'ouvre un de ces curieux ouvrages qu'on est convenu d'appeler «biographies romancees ».". L 'Arc, 1964. (the transcribed text has various imprecisions due to faulty formatting)
** - Wikipedia (excerpts): "Funes the Memorious" (original Spanish title: "Funes el memorioso") is a fantasy short story by Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges. First published in La Nación in June 1942, it appeared in the 1944 anthology Ficciones, part two (Artifices). The first English translation appeared in 1954 in Avon Modern Writing No. 2. The title has also been translated as "Funes, His Memory." (The Spanish "memorioso" means "having a vast memory," and is a fairly common word in both Spanish and Portuguese languages. Because "memorious" is a rare word in modern English, some translators opt for this alternate translation.)"
"Funes the Memorious tells the story of a fictional version of Borges himself, as he meets Ireneo Funes...He learns that this person has ...suffered a horseback riding accident and is now hopelessly crippled...[He] goes to Funes's house...As he enters, Borges is greeted by Funes's voice speaking perfect Latin, reciting "the first paragraph of the twenty-fourth chapter of the seventh book of the Historia Naturalis" (by Pliny the Elder). Funes ...reveals that, since his fall from the horse, he perceives everything in full detail and remembers it all...for example, the shape of clouds at all given moments, as well as the associated perceptions (muscular, thermal, etc.) of each moment... He finds it very difficult to sleep, since he recalls "every crevice and every moulding of the various houses which [surround] him"...Borges sees him "as monumental as bronze, more ancient than Egypt, anterior to the prophecies and the pyramids"..
A direct quote from Borges's short story: "We, in a glance, perceive three wine glasses on the table; Funes saw all the shoots, clusters, and grapes of the vine. He remembered the shapes of the clouds in the south at dawn on the 30th of April of 1882, and he could compare them in his recollection with the marbled grain in the design of a leather-bound book which he had seen only once, and with the lines in the spray which an oar raised in the Rio Negro on the eve of the battle of the Quebracho. These recollections were not simple; each visual image was linked to muscular sensations, thermal sensations, etc. He could reconstruct all his dreams, all his fancies...He told me: I have more memories in myself alone than all men have had since the world was a world..." The narrator mentions that Locke postulated then rejected an impossible idiom "in which each individual thing, each stone, each bird and each branch would have its own name; Funes once projected an analogous language, but discarded it because it seemed too general to him, too ambiguous" since it did not take time into account : given that physical objects are constantly changing in subtle ways, Funes insisted that in order to refer to an object unambiguously one must specify a time. "To think is to forget a difference, to generalize, to abstract. In the overly replete world of Funes, there were nothing but details."
Wikipedia also informas that "The real-life case of Daniel Tammet (b. 1979), an autistic British savant, bears a certain similitude to fictional Ireneo Funes: he had epileptic seizures that may have a part in his unusual talents; his memory for numbers is prodigious (on March 14, 2004 - 'pi day', Tammet correctly recited 22,514 digits of the irrational number), and finally, he has explained that he has synesthesia, which allows him to "see" numbers as shapes, some of which are more pleasant than others.
Solomon Shereshevskii, a stage memory-artist (mnemonist) with a condition known as "hypermnesia", is described by the Russian neuropsychologist Alexander Luria in his book, The Mind of a Mnemonist', which some speculate was the inspiration for Borges's story...American neuropsychologist Oliver Sacks cites Luria's book as the inspiration for his own book,Awakenings, which is dedicated to Luria...Jill Price, along with 10 others, can remember with great accuracy most days of their lives starting from the average age of 11. The scientific term for their unique condition is "hyperthymestic syndrome" now more recently known as Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory (HSAM). Price has stated that she, like Funes, views her memory as a curse."
Borges's entire text is to be found at websites such as this one.
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
Visit "Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
Manage subscription options: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/