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Re: [NABOKV-Ll] from the caveman to Keats... remember and
dismember...
dismember...
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PS (partially related to "Pale Fire's multiple entries related to "caves."...and the special: ."..we undo the work of the ages, the history of the gradual elaboration of poetical description and construction, from the treeman to Browning, from the caveman to Keats. What if we awake one day, all of us, and find ourselves utterly unable to read?")
Jansy Mello:
Refering to Lolita's chapter 25, about "Dolores Disparue," Alfred Appel writes (note 253/2):
" In the first French edition of Proust's great novel [ "À la Recherche du Temps Perdu"], Albertine disparue is the next-to-last volume. The definitive Pléiade edition (1954) has restored Proust's own title for it, La Fugitive... " He also indicates (note 254/3)that the "auctioneered Viennese bric-à -brac¨ indicates "Freudian trappings, secondhand symbols." He refers us to his notes 32/2 and 16/4.
In (16/4) Alfred Appel mentions, in relation to HH's "Proustian theme." the letters of John Keats to B.Bailey. He adds
"In Pale Fire, Kinbote measures the progress of poetry "from the caveman to Keats" and HH's Proustian theme is, no doubt, on the nature of time and memory. AA's note covers various references to Proust in VN's novels (besides Lolita and PF- from which he quotes Shade's lines on eternity in "talks/With Socrates and Proust...", RLSK and ADA).
A peripheric reading led me to special quotes from Proust ("Sobretudo de Proust, História de uma obsessão literária" by Lorenza Foschini, 2010) and these enabled me to question if HH's lines, about "auctioneered Viennese bric-à -brac," means means exclusively "secondhand symbols" as suggested by AA, and, to wonder if HH's "Proustian theme" is, indeed, "on the nature of time and memory."
In my opinion, HH and John Shade might have been indicating their preoccupations with the "hereafter," re-incarnation in animals and objects and the fate of personal memory.
The particular quotes selected by L.Foschini from the Recherche explains the narrator's opinion about how reasonable is "the Celtic belief about the soul of the dead being captured by an inferior being, an animal, a vegetable, an inanimate object... and that, one day one may happen to pass by a tree, or possess the object that is their prison. Now the souls tremble and call us and, as soon as we have recognized them, the enchantment is broken. Having been set free by us, they will have vanquished death and start to live among us, again." (the next lines describe the famous epiphany related to a madeleine¨
(NB:Alfred Appel explains HH's reference to the "Madeleine" without linking it to Proust's famous "madeleine" shell-shaped cakes and "involuntary memory". The auctioned and sold objects pertaining, in fiction, to Aut Léonie - which inspired Proust's lines about "re-incarnation" - are retaken by the L.Foschini when she works over the destinies of Proust's own furniture, manuscripts and overcoat, before they were saved and collected by Jacques Guérin).
« Je trouve très raisonnable la croyance celtique que les âmes de ceux que nous avons perdus sont captives dans quelque être inférieur, dans une bête, un végétal, une chose inanimée, perdues en effet pour nous jusqu'au jour, qui pour beaucoup ne vient jamais, où nous nous trouvons passer près de l'arbre, entrer en possession de l'objet qui est leur prison. Alors elles tressaillent, nous appellent, et sitôt que nous les avons reconnues, l'enchantement est brisé. Délivrées par nous, elles ont vaincu la mort et reviennent vivre avec nous.//Il en est ainsi de notre passé. C'est peine perdue que nous cherchions à l'évoquer, tous les efforts de notre intelligence sont inutiles. [.] un jour d'hiver, comme je rentrais à la maison, ma mère, voyant que j'avais froid, me proposa de me faire prendre, contre mon habitude, un peu de thé. Je refusai d'abord et, je ne sais pourquoi, me ravisai. Elle envoya chercher un de ces gâteaux courts et dodus appelés Petites Madeleines qui semblent avoir été moulés dans la valve rainurée d'une coquille de Saint-Jacques. Et bientôt, machinalement, accablé par la morne journée et la perspective d'un triste lendemain, je portai à mes lèvres une cuillerée de thé où j'avais laissé s'amollir un morceau de madeleine [.]. » Du Côté de chez Swann
After the narrator donated some of the furniture he'd inherited from his aunt LĂ©onie to the owner of a brothel, he began to feel that he'd violated the vertues that surrounded the aunt's room in Combray. Her furniture seemed, then, to live on like the apparently inanimate objects of a Persian story, begging for their liberation. At this moment, when he mentions the re-encarnation of the soul , the idea of "being emprisoned in objects" was already entertained. However, the illusion of a rebirth was retained. In contrast, in the later "Albertine Disparue," as pointed out by Mariolina Bongiovanni Bertini**, "the same belief will arise with an inverted signal, subdued by the context that eliminates any hope in a ressurrection, bringing out the terror and the anxiety that is associated to a definite shape of survival that will be excluded from redemption."
"Mais - et la suite le montrera davantage, comme bien des épisodes ont pu déjà l'indiquer - de ce que l'intelligence n'est pas l'instrument le plus subtil, le plus puissant, le plus approprié pour saisir le vrai, ce n'est qu'une raison de plus pour commencer par l'intelligence et non par un intuitivisme de l'inconscient, par une foi aux pressentiments toute faite. C'est la vie qui peu à peu, cas par cas, nous permet de remarquer que ce qui est le plus important pour notre cour, ou pour notre esprit, ne nous est pas appris par le raisonnement mais par des puissances autres. Et alors, c'est l'intelligence elle-même qui, se rendant compte de leur supériorité, abdique par raisonnement devant elles et accepte de devenir leur collaboratrice et leur servante."
Proust's own furniture, manuscripts, overcoat suffered a similar destiny as aunt LĂ©onie's, begging deliverance.. How things are solved will be expressed elsewhere, when the narrator develops the idea that it's living, as an experience, that teaches about the superiority of "other powers" when intelligence begins to accept her role as a collaborator or servant.
Compare to quotes from
PALE FIRE:
Keeping the ephemeral in suspension between the first lines and the conclusion of his ideas, from lines 520 to 535, John Shade passes from "foul piles of crumpled names, phone numbers and foxed files" to a chance reincarnation as flowerlet or fat fly (he'll later return to defenseless mites, toads and a bear by a burning pine * ). He intends to refuse this new state if it makes him forget... :"And I'll turn down eternity unless/ The melancholy and the tenderness/ Of mortal life; the passion and the pain;/..../this good ink, this rhyme,/this inex card.../ Are found in Heaven by the newlydead/ Stored in its strongholds through the years...The IPH, however, "assumed it might be wise/ Not to expect too much of paradise:."(540)
LOLITA:
Humbert makes a direct reference to Proust ["A paper of mine entitled "The Proustian theme in a letter from Keats to Benjamin Bailey..."] and there's another paragraph, in Ch. 25, where he suggests Proust's "Albertine Disparue": "This book is about Lolita; and now that I have reached the part which (had I not been forestalled by another internal combustion martyr) might be called "Dolorès Disparue," there would be little sense in analyzing the three empty years that followed.... I would bind myself, dentures fractured or hopelessly mislaid, in horrible chambres garnies ...that generally ended with Charlotte or Valeria weeping in my bleeding arms ...in a dream disorder of auctioneered Viennese bric-à -brac...One day I removed from the car and destroyed an accumulation of teen-magazines...Et moi qui t'offrais mon génie... Other things of hers were harder to relinquish. Up to the end of 1949, I cherished and adored, and stained with my kisses and merman tears, a pair of old sneakers, a boy's shirt she had worn, some ancient blue jeans ..., a crumpled school cap, suchlike wanton treasures. Then, when I understood my mind was cracking, I collected those sundry belongings, added to them what had been stored in Beardsley - a box of books, her bicycle, old coats, galoshes - and on her fifteenth birthday mailed everything as an anonymous gift to a home for orphaned girls on a windy lake, on the Canadian border." .
...........................................................................................................................
* - 559-567 " How to keep sane in spiral types of space./ Precautions to be taken in the case/ Of freak reincarnation: what to do/On suddenly discovering that you/Are now a young and vulnerable toad/ Plump in the middle of a busy road,/Or a bear cub beneath a burning pine,/ Or a book mite in a revived divine."
Although the Institute refuses paradise, we learned in lines 550-556) how it borrows "peripheral debris/ From mystic visions; and it offered tips/.../ How not to panic when you're made a ghost:/.../ Meet solid bodies and glissade right through,/Or let a person circulate through you." (this theme shall be picked up again in TT)
**- in "Sobretudo de Proust.." by Lorenza Faschini (extracted from p.46 and 67-68).
I found the words in French using the internet (I read Italian Faschini, in Portuguese...) and I may have quoted incorrect words and references because I haven't checked them against Proust's originals (a must in an academic article).
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Jansy Mello:
Refering to Lolita's chapter 25, about "Dolores Disparue," Alfred Appel writes (note 253/2):
" In the first French edition of Proust's great novel [ "À la Recherche du Temps Perdu"], Albertine disparue is the next-to-last volume. The definitive Pléiade edition (1954) has restored Proust's own title for it, La Fugitive... " He also indicates (note 254/3)that the "auctioneered Viennese bric-à -brac¨ indicates "Freudian trappings, secondhand symbols." He refers us to his notes 32/2 and 16/4.
In (16/4) Alfred Appel mentions, in relation to HH's "Proustian theme." the letters of John Keats to B.Bailey. He adds
"In Pale Fire, Kinbote measures the progress of poetry "from the caveman to Keats" and HH's Proustian theme is, no doubt, on the nature of time and memory. AA's note covers various references to Proust in VN's novels (besides Lolita and PF- from which he quotes Shade's lines on eternity in "talks/With Socrates and Proust...", RLSK and ADA).
A peripheric reading led me to special quotes from Proust ("Sobretudo de Proust, História de uma obsessão literária" by Lorenza Foschini, 2010) and these enabled me to question if HH's lines, about "auctioneered Viennese bric-à -brac," means means exclusively "secondhand symbols" as suggested by AA, and, to wonder if HH's "Proustian theme" is, indeed, "on the nature of time and memory."
In my opinion, HH and John Shade might have been indicating their preoccupations with the "hereafter," re-incarnation in animals and objects and the fate of personal memory.
The particular quotes selected by L.Foschini from the Recherche explains the narrator's opinion about how reasonable is "the Celtic belief about the soul of the dead being captured by an inferior being, an animal, a vegetable, an inanimate object... and that, one day one may happen to pass by a tree, or possess the object that is their prison. Now the souls tremble and call us and, as soon as we have recognized them, the enchantment is broken. Having been set free by us, they will have vanquished death and start to live among us, again." (the next lines describe the famous epiphany related to a madeleine¨
(NB:Alfred Appel explains HH's reference to the "Madeleine" without linking it to Proust's famous "madeleine" shell-shaped cakes and "involuntary memory". The auctioned and sold objects pertaining, in fiction, to Aut Léonie - which inspired Proust's lines about "re-incarnation" - are retaken by the L.Foschini when she works over the destinies of Proust's own furniture, manuscripts and overcoat, before they were saved and collected by Jacques Guérin).
« Je trouve très raisonnable la croyance celtique que les âmes de ceux que nous avons perdus sont captives dans quelque être inférieur, dans une bête, un végétal, une chose inanimée, perdues en effet pour nous jusqu'au jour, qui pour beaucoup ne vient jamais, où nous nous trouvons passer près de l'arbre, entrer en possession de l'objet qui est leur prison. Alors elles tressaillent, nous appellent, et sitôt que nous les avons reconnues, l'enchantement est brisé. Délivrées par nous, elles ont vaincu la mort et reviennent vivre avec nous.//Il en est ainsi de notre passé. C'est peine perdue que nous cherchions à l'évoquer, tous les efforts de notre intelligence sont inutiles. [.] un jour d'hiver, comme je rentrais à la maison, ma mère, voyant que j'avais froid, me proposa de me faire prendre, contre mon habitude, un peu de thé. Je refusai d'abord et, je ne sais pourquoi, me ravisai. Elle envoya chercher un de ces gâteaux courts et dodus appelés Petites Madeleines qui semblent avoir été moulés dans la valve rainurée d'une coquille de Saint-Jacques. Et bientôt, machinalement, accablé par la morne journée et la perspective d'un triste lendemain, je portai à mes lèvres une cuillerée de thé où j'avais laissé s'amollir un morceau de madeleine [.]. » Du Côté de chez Swann
After the narrator donated some of the furniture he'd inherited from his aunt LĂ©onie to the owner of a brothel, he began to feel that he'd violated the vertues that surrounded the aunt's room in Combray. Her furniture seemed, then, to live on like the apparently inanimate objects of a Persian story, begging for their liberation. At this moment, when he mentions the re-encarnation of the soul , the idea of "being emprisoned in objects" was already entertained. However, the illusion of a rebirth was retained. In contrast, in the later "Albertine Disparue," as pointed out by Mariolina Bongiovanni Bertini**, "the same belief will arise with an inverted signal, subdued by the context that eliminates any hope in a ressurrection, bringing out the terror and the anxiety that is associated to a definite shape of survival that will be excluded from redemption."
"Mais - et la suite le montrera davantage, comme bien des épisodes ont pu déjà l'indiquer - de ce que l'intelligence n'est pas l'instrument le plus subtil, le plus puissant, le plus approprié pour saisir le vrai, ce n'est qu'une raison de plus pour commencer par l'intelligence et non par un intuitivisme de l'inconscient, par une foi aux pressentiments toute faite. C'est la vie qui peu à peu, cas par cas, nous permet de remarquer que ce qui est le plus important pour notre cour, ou pour notre esprit, ne nous est pas appris par le raisonnement mais par des puissances autres. Et alors, c'est l'intelligence elle-même qui, se rendant compte de leur supériorité, abdique par raisonnement devant elles et accepte de devenir leur collaboratrice et leur servante."
Proust's own furniture, manuscripts, overcoat suffered a similar destiny as aunt LĂ©onie's, begging deliverance.. How things are solved will be expressed elsewhere, when the narrator develops the idea that it's living, as an experience, that teaches about the superiority of "other powers" when intelligence begins to accept her role as a collaborator or servant.
Compare to quotes from
PALE FIRE:
Keeping the ephemeral in suspension between the first lines and the conclusion of his ideas, from lines 520 to 535, John Shade passes from "foul piles of crumpled names, phone numbers and foxed files" to a chance reincarnation as flowerlet or fat fly (he'll later return to defenseless mites, toads and a bear by a burning pine * ). He intends to refuse this new state if it makes him forget... :"And I'll turn down eternity unless/ The melancholy and the tenderness/ Of mortal life; the passion and the pain;/..../this good ink, this rhyme,/this inex card.../ Are found in Heaven by the newlydead/ Stored in its strongholds through the years...The IPH, however, "assumed it might be wise/ Not to expect too much of paradise:."(540)
LOLITA:
Humbert makes a direct reference to Proust ["A paper of mine entitled "The Proustian theme in a letter from Keats to Benjamin Bailey..."] and there's another paragraph, in Ch. 25, where he suggests Proust's "Albertine Disparue": "This book is about Lolita; and now that I have reached the part which (had I not been forestalled by another internal combustion martyr) might be called "Dolorès Disparue," there would be little sense in analyzing the three empty years that followed.... I would bind myself, dentures fractured or hopelessly mislaid, in horrible chambres garnies ...that generally ended with Charlotte or Valeria weeping in my bleeding arms ...in a dream disorder of auctioneered Viennese bric-à -brac...One day I removed from the car and destroyed an accumulation of teen-magazines...Et moi qui t'offrais mon génie... Other things of hers were harder to relinquish. Up to the end of 1949, I cherished and adored, and stained with my kisses and merman tears, a pair of old sneakers, a boy's shirt she had worn, some ancient blue jeans ..., a crumpled school cap, suchlike wanton treasures. Then, when I understood my mind was cracking, I collected those sundry belongings, added to them what had been stored in Beardsley - a box of books, her bicycle, old coats, galoshes - and on her fifteenth birthday mailed everything as an anonymous gift to a home for orphaned girls on a windy lake, on the Canadian border." .
...........................................................................................................................
* - 559-567 " How to keep sane in spiral types of space./ Precautions to be taken in the case/ Of freak reincarnation: what to do/On suddenly discovering that you/Are now a young and vulnerable toad/ Plump in the middle of a busy road,/Or a bear cub beneath a burning pine,/ Or a book mite in a revived divine."
Although the Institute refuses paradise, we learned in lines 550-556) how it borrows "peripheral debris/ From mystic visions; and it offered tips/.../ How not to panic when you're made a ghost:/.../ Meet solid bodies and glissade right through,/Or let a person circulate through you." (this theme shall be picked up again in TT)
**- in "Sobretudo de Proust.." by Lorenza Faschini (extracted from p.46 and 67-68).
I found the words in French using the internet (I read Italian Faschini, in Portuguese...) and I may have quoted incorrect words and references because I haven't checked them against Proust's originals (a must in an academic article).
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/