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Re: VN and Freud--reply to Friedman
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Date
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I always admire the thought and care that go into Jerry Friedman’s contributions
to the List. This latest one does not disappoint.
I agree with much of what JF says. The differences between us may finally come
down mainly to matters of taste (I don’t generally like ghost stories, SF, or
fantasy) and of attitude (I’m a glass-half-empty guy; JF, apparently, often sees
the glass as half full).
As for the connection between “not text, but texture” and Shade’s final embrace
of personal immortality, I see a logical gap where JF sees a (logical?)
development. At the end of the poem, Shade’s feeling is one of “all’s right with
the world”--a feeling consistent with having just finished an intense and
difficult labor which has involved in part his coming to terms with grief (or at
least thinking he has). It is in this mood that he produces both the
conceit--surely it is no more than a bit of poetic fancy--that the universe
throbs to an iambic meter and also his conviction that Hazel “somewhere is
alive.”
It’s also worth pointing out that the words “faint hope” are tricky. At the very
least, as JF agrees, they represent a marked deflation of mood. But they could
also mean something even more abrupt. They could mean the fainting away of hope.
They could also be an expression of self-sarcasm on the level of “yeah, right.”
JF: “I'd add that at the ends of both Invitation to a Beheading and Bend
Sinister, the connection between the author's higher world and a character's
afterlife is visible (‘a good night for mothing’).”
JT: But the fact that one can do something in words (create metafictions, for
example) is no evidence for the actual existence of a Great Writer in the Sky,
let alone a whole series of them. The ontological argument has been dead for a
long time. You can’t light your pipe with the word “match.” Outside of fiction,
faith, mysticism, and more or less unfounded belief, death is a great deal more
than a wrinkle in language. When writers fall into such confusions, I’m reminded
of what Kierkegaard said about Hegel et al.: “In relation to their systems most
systematizers are like a man who builds an enormous castle and lives in a shack
close by; they do not live in their own enormous systematic buildings.”
I agree with all four of JF’s numbered comments at the end of his message,
except that I would go farther than JF on the question of the originality of
VN’s alleged metaphysical beliefs. Consider this quote:
Time, space, and natural law hold for me suggestions of intolerable bondage, and
I can form no picture of emotional satisfaction which does not involve their
defeat--especially the defeat of time, so that one may merge oneself with the
whole historic stream and be wholly emancipated from the transient and the
ephemeral.
Nabokov? No, it was H. P. Lovecraft, a writer whose fiction I can't bear to
read. The few serious metaphysicians (and scientists) who have held that time
doesn’t exist have produced elaborate arguments for their conclusions. They have
not settled for clever metafictions, feelings of “intolerable bondage,” or
outlandish mythologies.
One last point. Earlier I wrote that Pale Fire could be read either as a
statement of skepticism or as a profession of faith. But of course there’s a
third possibility, namely that the novel dramatizes the uncertainty between
skepticism and faith (and a good many other things as well). This reading, which
goes back a long way, is the one that in fact I endorse.
Jim Twiggs
________________________________
From: Jerry Friedman <jerryfriedman1@GMAIL.COM>
To: NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU
Sent: Fri, February 25, 2011 1:09:42 PM
Subject: Re: [NABOKV-L] VN and Freud
On Thu, Feb 24, 2011 at 11:42 AM, James Twiggs <jtwigzz@yahoo.com> wrote:
...
JT: One thing I’m especially curious about is how TK, and also JF and anyone
else who cares to comment, might connect Shade’s “text not texture” insight with
his stated belief at the end of the poem that Hazel “somewhere is alive.” In
most of the examples given of the game players in action (ll. 820-829), these
“gods” don’t seem much different from the wanton boys in King Lear. And anyhow,
what started off as thoughts about “life everlasting” has turned into thoughts
about design (and the possibility of poetry). Unless I’ve missed or forgotten
something, it’s not till the end of the poem that immortality re-enters the
picture. Once again, what’s the connection?
...
JF: The connection I see isn't very explicit in the book. But I suspect Shade
tacitly assumes that in the scientific worldview that might have been the
default or the "least hypothesis" for educated people in the 1950s (and might
still be), no afterlife is possible. The soul, whatever you mean by that,
appears to be something that the brain does, so when the brain stops working,
the soul can't live on. Aristotle, as I understand him, made a form of this
argument. A hint of it might appear in the hint that Kinbote's insanity was
caused by cerebral sclerosis (and maybe even in the will-o-the-wisp's aphasia).
Thus I take it Shade thinks that to believe in an afterlife, one must believe
that the scientific worldview is incomplete, that there's a supernatural way for
something else to continue what the brain did. When he finds what he considers
to be evidence for the supernatural, he can have a faint hope that Hazel
survives.
Most of this isn't in the text; it just makes sense of the connection Shade
apparently sees between the game-players' higher world and an
afterlife. Kinbote suggests a related idea when he says that without
Providence, there can't be any afterlife worth hoping for. And Shade's
description of those players "promoting pawns / To ebon unicorns and ivory
fauns" could refer to them merely causing unexpected good things happening in
people's lives, but as it's a transformation of the pawns and even the rules at
the destined end of their journey, it could refer to an afterlife. Brian Boyd
found "i8"s in Kinbote's escape and saw that as the nonexistest square next to
the chessboard square h8; one could compare that to Shade's image of promotion,
which could also happen at h8. (I'm away from my books and Amazon's search
isn't working, so I can't see what Brian said.) In keeping with my prejudices,
I think Shade is on the right track and Kinbote gives a distorted and mundane
reflection.
I'd add that at the ends of both Invitation to a Beheading and Bend Sinister,
the connection between the author's higher world and a character's afterlife is
visible ("a good night for mothing").
On the comparison to "wanton boys", I can see that in Shade's speculative list,
only the promotion of the pawns and the kindling of long lives are welcome. But
the game-players also gave him that "faint hope" and inspired his poem.
>JT: As for Yeats and VN, the question of VN’s own beliefs is of some importance
>because Brian Boyd has made it so:
>
>
>[D. Barton Johnson] asks if it would make any difference whether Nabokov’s
>otherworldly philosophy were shopworn. To me it certainly would. Eliot’s craving
>for the authority of tradition, Yeats’s refuge in the irrational, to me
>seriously diminish their art. Nabokov is of such interest partly because he is
>such a clear and independent thinker, and his style is the way it is because he
>has such clarity and independence of thought. --Johnson and Boyd, “Prologue: The
>Otherworld,” in Nabokov’s World, Vol. 1: The Shape of Nabokov’s World
>(Palgrave-Macmillan, 2002), p. 23.
JF: I'm going to take it for granted that suggestions of otherworldly philosophy
show up in Nabokov's fiction and non-fiction, even if he didn't believe it. I
can see four questions: 1) whether that philosophy is "shopworn" or
"independent", 2) whether he believed it or not, 3) whether it's
"irrational", and 4) if so, whether that irrationality diminishes his art.
1) I don't feel Nabokov's otherworldliness was very original, though I can't
support that feeling (certainly not right now).
2) I'm still skipping that.
3) By not being "overexplicit", a word Jansy reminded us of, Nabokov avoids a
judgement on rationality. What little we can see doesn't strike me as any more
rational than Yeats, though.
4) To my taste, it doesn't diminish Nabokov's art, Yeats's, Dante's (thanks
again to Jansy) at all. This is a matter of taste, and I'm a longtime reader of
fantasy and science fiction who likes the fantasy in Gulliver's Travels better
than the satire. I get along fine without objective correlatives (not a phrase
Brian Boyd used), and the way I enjoy good ghost stories is not as kitsch.
Incidentally, I care that Bach believed in the religion of his Passions but not
that of his Masses, or that Gene Wolfe worships the God who appears briefly in
his Sun books and believes that the Greek gods he depicts in his Soldier books
were something real, but it doesn't matter to how good I think these works are.
Jerry Friedman
wouldn't want to give the impression that he appreciates the genius of Bach or
many others.
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to the List. This latest one does not disappoint.
I agree with much of what JF says. The differences between us may finally come
down mainly to matters of taste (I don’t generally like ghost stories, SF, or
fantasy) and of attitude (I’m a glass-half-empty guy; JF, apparently, often sees
the glass as half full).
As for the connection between “not text, but texture” and Shade’s final embrace
of personal immortality, I see a logical gap where JF sees a (logical?)
development. At the end of the poem, Shade’s feeling is one of “all’s right with
the world”--a feeling consistent with having just finished an intense and
difficult labor which has involved in part his coming to terms with grief (or at
least thinking he has). It is in this mood that he produces both the
conceit--surely it is no more than a bit of poetic fancy--that the universe
throbs to an iambic meter and also his conviction that Hazel “somewhere is
alive.”
It’s also worth pointing out that the words “faint hope” are tricky. At the very
least, as JF agrees, they represent a marked deflation of mood. But they could
also mean something even more abrupt. They could mean the fainting away of hope.
They could also be an expression of self-sarcasm on the level of “yeah, right.”
JF: “I'd add that at the ends of both Invitation to a Beheading and Bend
Sinister, the connection between the author's higher world and a character's
afterlife is visible (‘a good night for mothing’).”
JT: But the fact that one can do something in words (create metafictions, for
example) is no evidence for the actual existence of a Great Writer in the Sky,
let alone a whole series of them. The ontological argument has been dead for a
long time. You can’t light your pipe with the word “match.” Outside of fiction,
faith, mysticism, and more or less unfounded belief, death is a great deal more
than a wrinkle in language. When writers fall into such confusions, I’m reminded
of what Kierkegaard said about Hegel et al.: “In relation to their systems most
systematizers are like a man who builds an enormous castle and lives in a shack
close by; they do not live in their own enormous systematic buildings.”
I agree with all four of JF’s numbered comments at the end of his message,
except that I would go farther than JF on the question of the originality of
VN’s alleged metaphysical beliefs. Consider this quote:
Time, space, and natural law hold for me suggestions of intolerable bondage, and
I can form no picture of emotional satisfaction which does not involve their
defeat--especially the defeat of time, so that one may merge oneself with the
whole historic stream and be wholly emancipated from the transient and the
ephemeral.
Nabokov? No, it was H. P. Lovecraft, a writer whose fiction I can't bear to
read. The few serious metaphysicians (and scientists) who have held that time
doesn’t exist have produced elaborate arguments for their conclusions. They have
not settled for clever metafictions, feelings of “intolerable bondage,” or
outlandish mythologies.
One last point. Earlier I wrote that Pale Fire could be read either as a
statement of skepticism or as a profession of faith. But of course there’s a
third possibility, namely that the novel dramatizes the uncertainty between
skepticism and faith (and a good many other things as well). This reading, which
goes back a long way, is the one that in fact I endorse.
Jim Twiggs
________________________________
From: Jerry Friedman <jerryfriedman1@GMAIL.COM>
To: NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU
Sent: Fri, February 25, 2011 1:09:42 PM
Subject: Re: [NABOKV-L] VN and Freud
On Thu, Feb 24, 2011 at 11:42 AM, James Twiggs <jtwigzz@yahoo.com> wrote:
...
JT: One thing I’m especially curious about is how TK, and also JF and anyone
else who cares to comment, might connect Shade’s “text not texture” insight with
his stated belief at the end of the poem that Hazel “somewhere is alive.” In
most of the examples given of the game players in action (ll. 820-829), these
“gods” don’t seem much different from the wanton boys in King Lear. And anyhow,
what started off as thoughts about “life everlasting” has turned into thoughts
about design (and the possibility of poetry). Unless I’ve missed or forgotten
something, it’s not till the end of the poem that immortality re-enters the
picture. Once again, what’s the connection?
...
JF: The connection I see isn't very explicit in the book. But I suspect Shade
tacitly assumes that in the scientific worldview that might have been the
default or the "least hypothesis" for educated people in the 1950s (and might
still be), no afterlife is possible. The soul, whatever you mean by that,
appears to be something that the brain does, so when the brain stops working,
the soul can't live on. Aristotle, as I understand him, made a form of this
argument. A hint of it might appear in the hint that Kinbote's insanity was
caused by cerebral sclerosis (and maybe even in the will-o-the-wisp's aphasia).
Thus I take it Shade thinks that to believe in an afterlife, one must believe
that the scientific worldview is incomplete, that there's a supernatural way for
something else to continue what the brain did. When he finds what he considers
to be evidence for the supernatural, he can have a faint hope that Hazel
survives.
Most of this isn't in the text; it just makes sense of the connection Shade
apparently sees between the game-players' higher world and an
afterlife. Kinbote suggests a related idea when he says that without
Providence, there can't be any afterlife worth hoping for. And Shade's
description of those players "promoting pawns / To ebon unicorns and ivory
fauns" could refer to them merely causing unexpected good things happening in
people's lives, but as it's a transformation of the pawns and even the rules at
the destined end of their journey, it could refer to an afterlife. Brian Boyd
found "i8"s in Kinbote's escape and saw that as the nonexistest square next to
the chessboard square h8; one could compare that to Shade's image of promotion,
which could also happen at h8. (I'm away from my books and Amazon's search
isn't working, so I can't see what Brian said.) In keeping with my prejudices,
I think Shade is on the right track and Kinbote gives a distorted and mundane
reflection.
I'd add that at the ends of both Invitation to a Beheading and Bend Sinister,
the connection between the author's higher world and a character's afterlife is
visible ("a good night for mothing").
On the comparison to "wanton boys", I can see that in Shade's speculative list,
only the promotion of the pawns and the kindling of long lives are welcome. But
the game-players also gave him that "faint hope" and inspired his poem.
>JT: As for Yeats and VN, the question of VN’s own beliefs is of some importance
>because Brian Boyd has made it so:
>
>
>[D. Barton Johnson] asks if it would make any difference whether Nabokov’s
>otherworldly philosophy were shopworn. To me it certainly would. Eliot’s craving
>for the authority of tradition, Yeats’s refuge in the irrational, to me
>seriously diminish their art. Nabokov is of such interest partly because he is
>such a clear and independent thinker, and his style is the way it is because he
>has such clarity and independence of thought. --Johnson and Boyd, “Prologue: The
>Otherworld,” in Nabokov’s World, Vol. 1: The Shape of Nabokov’s World
>(Palgrave-Macmillan, 2002), p. 23.
JF: I'm going to take it for granted that suggestions of otherworldly philosophy
show up in Nabokov's fiction and non-fiction, even if he didn't believe it. I
can see four questions: 1) whether that philosophy is "shopworn" or
"independent", 2) whether he believed it or not, 3) whether it's
"irrational", and 4) if so, whether that irrationality diminishes his art.
1) I don't feel Nabokov's otherworldliness was very original, though I can't
support that feeling (certainly not right now).
2) I'm still skipping that.
3) By not being "overexplicit", a word Jansy reminded us of, Nabokov avoids a
judgement on rationality. What little we can see doesn't strike me as any more
rational than Yeats, though.
4) To my taste, it doesn't diminish Nabokov's art, Yeats's, Dante's (thanks
again to Jansy) at all. This is a matter of taste, and I'm a longtime reader of
fantasy and science fiction who likes the fantasy in Gulliver's Travels better
than the satire. I get along fine without objective correlatives (not a phrase
Brian Boyd used), and the way I enjoy good ghost stories is not as kitsch.
Incidentally, I care that Bach believed in the religion of his Passions but not
that of his Masses, or that Gene Wolfe worships the God who appears briefly in
his Sun books and believes that the Greek gods he depicts in his Soldier books
were something real, but it doesn't matter to how good I think these works are.
Jerry Friedman
wouldn't want to give the impression that he appreciates the genius of Bach or
many others.
Search the archive Contact the Editors Visit "Nabokov Online Journal"
Visit Zembla View Nabokv-L Policies Manage subscription options
All private editorial communications, without exception, are read by both
co-editors.
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/