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Re: SIGHTING: reference in new Millhauser?
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Still following the Millhauser thread initiated by SB I accidentaly reached a sighting about Philip Pullman, reported years ago at the Nab-L, only because the reviewer mentioned Millhauser.* But, going back to some of SB's points [ "Within the space of one allusively dense paragraph, we read of "the monkey cage at Beardsley Park Zoo" in Connecticut [a real place!], Pike's Peak, and Huck Finn.The paragraph also mentions "the whaling ship at Mystic Seaport" ...built in New Bedford when Herman Melville departed that city on his whaling adventure. What's more, the whole paragraph is built as a reference to Saul Steinberg's "The World as Seen From 9th Ave.", the New Yorker's cover of March 29, 1976--a humorous anticipatory reference to the hoped-for place of publication?"], I extracted a small selection of references, related to Melville, from "Bend Sinister" and "Lolita," Nabokov's first two American novels which share very subtle, but surprising, moods and indications.**
Lolita: "One group, jointly with the Canadians, established a weather station on Pierre Point in Melville Sound. Another group, equally misguided, collected plankton." (the Beardsley entries are omitted since they pop up all over the novel)
Bend Sinister (foreword): "A chance selection of iambic incidents culled from the prose of Moby Dick appears in the guise of 'a famous American poem'"
and,as indicated by VN, in the same mood as Humbert's polar-expedition report, we get to Chapter Twelve: "He looked up various odds and ends he had stored at odd moments for an essay which he had never written and would never write because by now he had forgotten its leading idea, its secret combination...A newspaper clipping mentioned that the State Entomologist had retired to become Adviser on Shade Trees, and one wondered whether this was not some dainty oriental euphemism for death. On the next slip of paper he had transcribed passages from a famous American poem:
A curious sight - these bashful bears./These timid warrior whalemen
And now the time of tide has come;/The ship casts off her cables
It is not shown on any map;True places never are
This lovely light, it lights not me;/All loveliness is anguish - "
We can expect Melville's "iambic incidents"( that tranform some of the lines from Moby Dick turn it into an "American poem") to reappear in Nabokov's other novels, but without any direct reference to Mellville's name and writings.
...............................................................................................................................
* - "Build your literary house on the borderlands, as the English writer Philip Pullman has done, and you may find that your work is recommended by booksellers, as a stopgap between installments of Harry Potter...Yet all mystery resides there, in the margins, between life and death, childhood and adulthood, Newtonian and quantum, "serious" and "genre" literature. And it is from the confrontation with mystery that the truest stories have always drawn their power. One encounters the unassuageable ache of the imagined past, for example, at a more or less implicit level, in American writers from Cooper and Hawthorne through Faulkner and Chandler, right down to Steven Millhauser and Jonathan Franzen...While Pullman alludes to Nabokov (one of the characters in The Subtle Knife voyages to Nova Zembla), his paired Oxfords stand in a very different relation from that of Ada's Terra and Antiterra, which reflect and comment only upon each other, locked in a transdimensional self-regard which in turn mirrors that of the vain Van Veen. Instead, Pullman has consciously and overtly founded the structure of his fictional universe on the widely if not universally accepted "many-worlds hypothesis," derived from quantum physics-in His Dark Materials there will eventually turn out to be (rather conservatively) "millions" of such worlds, though in the end Pullman has only guided us through half a dozen of them.Lyra's and ours are only two among the infinite number of possible Oxfords, all of which, according to the hypothesis at its most extreme, exist."
Volume 51, Number 5 · March 25, 2004 "Dust & Daemons" by Michael Chabon.
** - It's difficult to point them out when they arise from an an excess of miscellaneous items, newspaper clippings with information about pre-historic art and extinct animals, items about nostalgia, aso, which one assumes Nabokov collected in a shoe-box filled with notecards. Some of them provide doubtful links...[as Krug's perception that "he and his son and wife and everybody else are merely my whims and megrims" and Humbert's aurochs, "glacial drifts, drumlins, and gremlins, and kremlins" (ie: megrim/gremlin)].
Another flimsy whimsy link: (Bend Sinister's "...that bit about the delicious death of an Ohio honey hunter (for my humour's sake I shall preserve the style in which I once narrated it at Thula to a lounging circle of my Russian friends) and a cake from a 1950 Agatha Christie novel, one which Humbert significantly mentions by name ( "A Murder is Announced") i.e, "Mr. Patrick. He called it Delicious Death. My cake! I will not have my cake called that!" / "It was a compliment really," said Miss Blacklock. "He meant it was worth dying to eat such a cake.".
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Lolita: "One group, jointly with the Canadians, established a weather station on Pierre Point in Melville Sound. Another group, equally misguided, collected plankton." (the Beardsley entries are omitted since they pop up all over the novel)
Bend Sinister (foreword): "A chance selection of iambic incidents culled from the prose of Moby Dick appears in the guise of 'a famous American poem'"
and,as indicated by VN, in the same mood as Humbert's polar-expedition report, we get to Chapter Twelve: "He looked up various odds and ends he had stored at odd moments for an essay which he had never written and would never write because by now he had forgotten its leading idea, its secret combination...A newspaper clipping mentioned that the State Entomologist had retired to become Adviser on Shade Trees, and one wondered whether this was not some dainty oriental euphemism for death. On the next slip of paper he had transcribed passages from a famous American poem:
A curious sight - these bashful bears./These timid warrior whalemen
And now the time of tide has come;/The ship casts off her cables
It is not shown on any map;True places never are
This lovely light, it lights not me;/All loveliness is anguish - "
We can expect Melville's "iambic incidents"( that tranform some of the lines from Moby Dick turn it into an "American poem") to reappear in Nabokov's other novels, but without any direct reference to Mellville's name and writings.
...............................................................................................................................
* - "Build your literary house on the borderlands, as the English writer Philip Pullman has done, and you may find that your work is recommended by booksellers, as a stopgap between installments of Harry Potter...Yet all mystery resides there, in the margins, between life and death, childhood and adulthood, Newtonian and quantum, "serious" and "genre" literature. And it is from the confrontation with mystery that the truest stories have always drawn their power. One encounters the unassuageable ache of the imagined past, for example, at a more or less implicit level, in American writers from Cooper and Hawthorne through Faulkner and Chandler, right down to Steven Millhauser and Jonathan Franzen...While Pullman alludes to Nabokov (one of the characters in The Subtle Knife voyages to Nova Zembla), his paired Oxfords stand in a very different relation from that of Ada's Terra and Antiterra, which reflect and comment only upon each other, locked in a transdimensional self-regard which in turn mirrors that of the vain Van Veen. Instead, Pullman has consciously and overtly founded the structure of his fictional universe on the widely if not universally accepted "many-worlds hypothesis," derived from quantum physics-in His Dark Materials there will eventually turn out to be (rather conservatively) "millions" of such worlds, though in the end Pullman has only guided us through half a dozen of them.Lyra's and ours are only two among the infinite number of possible Oxfords, all of which, according to the hypothesis at its most extreme, exist."
Volume 51, Number 5 · March 25, 2004 "Dust & Daemons" by Michael Chabon.
** - It's difficult to point them out when they arise from an an excess of miscellaneous items, newspaper clippings with information about pre-historic art and extinct animals, items about nostalgia, aso, which one assumes Nabokov collected in a shoe-box filled with notecards. Some of them provide doubtful links...[as Krug's perception that "he and his son and wife and everybody else are merely my whims and megrims" and Humbert's aurochs, "glacial drifts, drumlins, and gremlins, and kremlins" (ie: megrim/gremlin)].
Another flimsy whimsy link: (Bend Sinister's "...that bit about the delicious death of an Ohio honey hunter (for my humour's sake I shall preserve the style in which I once narrated it at Thula to a lounging circle of my Russian friends) and a cake from a 1950 Agatha Christie novel, one which Humbert significantly mentions by name ( "A Murder is Announced") i.e, "Mr. Patrick. He called it Delicious Death. My cake! I will not have my cake called that!" / "It was a compliment really," said Miss Blacklock. "He meant it was worth dying to eat such a cake.".
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/