Subject: [NABOKV-L] Nabokov shares with Chekhov a fanatical eye for detail ...
From: "jansymello" <[email-masked]>
To: "Vladimir Nabokov Forum" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 04 Oct 2008 19:19:08 -0400

Re: [NABOKV-L] Nabokov shares with Chekhov a fanatical eye for detail ...S K-Bootle :[...]As I mentioned, the same word is being used for different entities: coincidences in fact; coincidences in fiction. An author of fiction makes definite decisions when he/she invents a narrative [...] VN's own novels, each in a distinct way, create their own mix of internal and external  "reality" to which he is uniquely and teasingly honest.

JM: I doubt it that VN could always be "uniquely and teasingly honest" in his internal and external 'reality", in life and in his novels, except at the conscious level. Besides every coincidence, and also any lapsus, demand a witness to give them this name. 
Perhaps this is what CM Carnot is referring to [I have found that the Terra/Antiterra doubling works similar to the unreliable narrator which is used throughout VN's work. This works through the form of the novel [...]. Back on Earth we are accessing a document that reports information from Antiterra.  The final document (Ada) is just as flawed through a similar method of access and, as it were, translation.] 
Actually, already in the first part of Ada, or Ardor, we are informed about split time and space "because a gap of up to a hundred years one way or another existed between the two earths" and, two paragraphs later, we read that "two chess games with identical openings and identical end moves might ramify in an infinite number of variations, on one board and in two brains, at any middle stage of their irrevocably converging development" (A,18). To bring these two sentences closer may be fruitful. The assertion about the "sliver of light" of infinite variations that lie between the "darknesses"  of a definite ending and end might be as true for chess matches as for the convergence of the parallel spaces of Terra and Antiterra  ( and a pair of incestuous siblings?), should we accept that these two chess games, or characters, represent a single one, now doubled because it is apprehended by the two different brains that are exercising themselves on only one board. 

Is it possible that here, too, when the book is closed, the players depart and the game is over, planets and siblings disappear along with pawns and kings.  In ADA, it's clear that the reader is expected to discover or see what Van could not to "translate" and interpret it.

Joseph Aisenberg: Appel interview: "Ideally, how should a reader experience or react to 'the end' of one of your novels, that moment when the vectors are removed and the fact of the ficition is underscored, the cast dismissed? What common assumptions about literature are you assaulting?" Nabokov's response [...] I think that what I would welcome at the close of a book of mine is a sensation of its world receding in the distance and stopping somewhere there, suspended afar like a picture in a picture:  The Artist's Studio by Van Bock." [...]Appel [...]was so stuck on the idea of Self-reflexivity in Nabokov's work that he tended to see everything N. wrote in terms of parodying the "realism" of the illusionary in fiction, which is undeniable on one level [...]--the characters and narrators of the novels seem to lose a sense of themselves as discrete beings and feel themselves dissolving[...] to be right on the verge of recognizing that they are projections of Nabokov, but don't quite..."

JM: Thank you, in particular, for bringing up that interview about dismissed vectors and cast and VN's "receding world...a picture in a picture". When he wrote about "happy novels" Nabokov joined "Glory" and "Ada", but I think that only in the latter did he achieve the effect he'd been originally striving for, already hinted by an optimistic moment in PF (lines 849-852) The pen ...physically guides the phrase...toward faint daylight through the inky maze.  
  
S.E.Sweeney referred us to her "The V-Shaped Paradigm: Nabokov and Pynchon" where she points out from the start "that the novel's structure, as Nabokov's narrator describes it - 'two lines which have finally tapered to the point of meeting' - is shaped like a letter V" .
While also noting that VN's relations with students were distant and magisterial ("precluded genuine contact") she examines if "fate brought them together", as in SK's novel and, in particular, in S's novel mentioned in the novel: "Success". 
Since The V-shaped paradigm exemplifies "the detective story's formal design" Sweeney concludes, by applying her paradigm to these works, that "the metaphysical detective story may be the quintessential postmodernist text."  
Although both Pynchon and VN "deviate from the expected detective-story ending", they shared  "affinity for epistemology, self-reflexivity, experimental form, and generic parody" which locate these novels "precisely where two other lines  - modernism and postmodernism - also taper 'to the point of meeting' " . Her scholarly "detection" offers lots of precious information, surprises and contrasting perspectives that sometimes con-verge and sometimes, deliberately, di-verge to create a new and unexpected pattern.

obs: In relation to former posting on "Vanishing Point", Catherine Texier's review of David Markson's "The Last Novel" can be found at: www.nytimes.com/2007/07/08/books/review/Texier.html?ref=review -
Vanishing point in German is "Fluchtpunkt". In French, "point de fuite". I wonder what Russian terms in VN's 1932 "Podvig" were rendered "fugal theme", as I harbor other doubts about the original meaning of a couple of sentences, as on p.24: " Martin was faced with two alternatives"  (?) and, p.33, "not conducive to viatic excitement" (the word "viatic" reappears in "Lolita").

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