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[THOUGHTS] Writers and Readers: sources of three quotes
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1. A non-heraclitean stand-point? Nabokov writes* (Good Readers and Good Writers): "That mist is a mountain-and that mountain must be conquered. Up a trackless slope climbs the master artist, and at the top, on a windy ridge, whom do you think he meets? The panting and happy reader, and there they spontaneously embrace and are linked forever if the book lasts forever."
2. Alfred Appel Jr. in "The Annotated Lolita", writing about "involution, among which there's a chapter on"The Work-Within-The-Work, with a rich set of examples (Carrol's "Through the Looking Glass"; R. Queneau's "Le Chiendent"; Joyce's "Ulysses") For him " 'Pale Fire' realizes the ultimate possibilities of works within works, already present twenty-four years earlier in the literary biography that serves as the fourth chapter in 'The Gift'." It is when he adds: "It is disturbing to discover that the characters in The Gift are also the readers of Chapter Four, this is because it suggests, as Jorge Luis Borges says of the play within 'Hamlet,' 'that if the characters of a fictional work can be readers or spectators, we, its readers or spectators, can be fictitious." (p.xxx)
A. Appel quotes J.L.Borges in "Partial Magic in the Quixote" - Labytinths, New York, 1964,p.196, published in the same year as the more complete collection "Other Inquisitions." translated by Ruth Simms.
3. V.Nabokov's foreword to the presence of "someone in the know," in "Bend Sinister": "But among the producers or stagehands responsible for the setting there has been one...[...] a nameless, mysterious genius who took advantage of the dream to convey his own peculiar code message [...] which links him up somehow with an unfathomable mode of being, perhaps terrible, perhaps blissful, perhaps neither, a kind of transcendental madness which lurks behind the corner of consciousness and which cannot be defined more accurately than this, no matter how Krug strains his brain [ ] but a closer inspection (made when the dream-self is dead for the ten thousandth time, and the day-self inherits for the ten thousandth time those dusty trifles, those debts, those bundles of illegible letters**) reveals the presence of someone in the know. Some intruder has been there, tiptoed upstairs, has opened closets and very slightly disarranged the order of things.Then the [...] incredibly light and dry sponge imbibes water [and] ... sweeps away the dead white symbols; and we start afresh now combining dim dreams with the scholarly precision of memory //.You entered a tunnel of sorts...The yawn of the tunnel and the door of the school...became football goals much in the same fashion as the commonplace organ of one species of animal is dramatically modified by a new function in another."
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* There's a convention that stimulates one to apply the present tense in a quote ("Nabokov writes"), instead of the past ("Nabokov wrote"). It seems to be heraclitean as well because in this way Nabokov is always writing anew and, if there's no writer-reader link that can last forever, the same embracing link is always renewed by every re-reading.
** Here Nabokov describes, but totally transmutes it in order to deny any whiff of any unexpected "latent content", Freud's description of the distortions promoted by the "dream work," which comprise their "manifest content." He isolates the "dream-self" from the "day-self" so as he can maintain his conscious-self always in the place of "someone in the know."
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2. Alfred Appel Jr. in "The Annotated Lolita", writing about "involution, among which there's a chapter on"The Work-Within-The-Work, with a rich set of examples (Carrol's "Through the Looking Glass"; R. Queneau's "Le Chiendent"; Joyce's "Ulysses") For him " 'Pale Fire' realizes the ultimate possibilities of works within works, already present twenty-four years earlier in the literary biography that serves as the fourth chapter in 'The Gift'." It is when he adds: "It is disturbing to discover that the characters in The Gift are also the readers of Chapter Four, this is because it suggests, as Jorge Luis Borges says of the play within 'Hamlet,' 'that if the characters of a fictional work can be readers or spectators, we, its readers or spectators, can be fictitious." (p.xxx)
A. Appel quotes J.L.Borges in "Partial Magic in the Quixote" - Labytinths, New York, 1964,p.196, published in the same year as the more complete collection "Other Inquisitions." translated by Ruth Simms.
3. V.Nabokov's foreword to the presence of "someone in the know," in "Bend Sinister": "But among the producers or stagehands responsible for the setting there has been one...[...] a nameless, mysterious genius who took advantage of the dream to convey his own peculiar code message [...] which links him up somehow with an unfathomable mode of being, perhaps terrible, perhaps blissful, perhaps neither, a kind of transcendental madness which lurks behind the corner of consciousness and which cannot be defined more accurately than this, no matter how Krug strains his brain [ ] but a closer inspection (made when the dream-self is dead for the ten thousandth time, and the day-self inherits for the ten thousandth time those dusty trifles, those debts, those bundles of illegible letters**) reveals the presence of someone in the know. Some intruder has been there, tiptoed upstairs, has opened closets and very slightly disarranged the order of things.Then the [...] incredibly light and dry sponge imbibes water [and] ... sweeps away the dead white symbols; and we start afresh now combining dim dreams with the scholarly precision of memory //.You entered a tunnel of sorts...The yawn of the tunnel and the door of the school...became football goals much in the same fashion as the commonplace organ of one species of animal is dramatically modified by a new function in another."
..............................................
* There's a convention that stimulates one to apply the present tense in a quote ("Nabokov writes"), instead of the past ("Nabokov wrote"). It seems to be heraclitean as well because in this way Nabokov is always writing anew and, if there's no writer-reader link that can last forever, the same embracing link is always renewed by every re-reading.
** Here Nabokov describes, but totally transmutes it in order to deny any whiff of any unexpected "latent content", Freud's description of the distortions promoted by the "dream work," which comprise their "manifest content." He isolates the "dream-self" from the "day-self" so as he can maintain his conscious-self always in the place of "someone in the know."
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/