Vladimir Nabokov

NABOKV-L post 0021245, Thu, 27 Jan 2011 16:40:57 -0200

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Re: Baron von Wien
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Every Freudian knows that one lapsus often attracts a number of others. That's what happened to me, after the exchange of a vowel in "Freiberg," when I tried to connect, without using a long sentence, Nabokov's discovery about Asian butterflies migrating to the Americas and his novel ADA [where a lot of geography is outlined, concerning navigators ( like West/East Vasco da Gama and North/South African trains), Arctic fur-traders, the Magellan and Bering straits, Ada's Patagonian references to Verne, aso) ]. So, I made a quip using Demon's sentence ('If I could write,' mused Demon, 'I would describe, in too many words no doubt, how passionately, how incandescently, how incestuously - c'est le mot - art and science meet in an insect, in a thrush, in a thistle of that ducal bosquet'.") , together with his pathetic brother's travels in a counter-Fogg direction.
However, Uncle Dan cannot be considered as a true representative of "Art" (but perhaps of greedy marchands and indiscriminating collectors), nor do Nabokov's migratory butterflies spread out in a counter-fogg direction. My disoriented sentence should read: "Do Art and Science meet with Uncle Dan's counter-Fogg travels?" (the implicit query being: Did Nabokov's emphasis about the direction chosen by Daniel Veen indicate anything in particular or was it a simple variation in his references to Verne?)
Mere intuition ( as in my case) isn't enough to warrant the assumption that somewhere in ADA lurks a description of Nabokov's butterflies migratory developments.

Please, accept my most humble apologies...*

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* - "Lucy: Well, look here! A big yellow butterfly! It's unusual to see one this time of year unless, of course, he flew up from Brazil... I'll bet that's it! They do that sometimes, you know... They fly up from Brazil, and they...
Linus: This is no butterfly... This is a potato chip!
Lucy: Well, I'll be! So it is! I wonder how a potato chip got all the way up here from Brazil? " (this item has been posted in the Nab-L once)

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