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Re: Commonsense quote
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SES: In addition to Roy, who was first to respond with the source, and Barbara, who gave the page number, both Victor Fet and Didier Machu swiftly followed although I didn't forward their replies. Good work!
JM: Following their lead I checked the entire paragraph from The Art of Literature and Commonsense. "The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words all being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible. You might choose to develop any part of the picture, for the idea of sequence does not really exist as far as the author is concerned. Sequence arises only because words have to be written one after the other on consecutive pages, just as the reader's mind must have time to go through the book, at least the first time he reads it. Time and sequence cannot exist in the author's mind because no time element and no space element has ruled the initial vision. If the mind were constructed on option lines and if a book could be read in the same way as a paiting is taken in by the eye, that is without the bother of working from left to right and without the absurdity of beginnings and ends, this would be the ideal way of appreciating a novel..." (379/380)
It's the same conception about inspiration, words and images, now lying behind his words in the 1964 Toffler interview: "I feel a kind of gentle development, an uncurling inside, and I know the details are there already, that in fact I would see them plainly if I looked closer, if I stopped the machine and opened its inner compartment...Since this entire structure, dimly illumined in one's mind, can be compared to a painting, and since you do not have to work gradually from left to right for its proper perceptionm I may direct my flashlight at any part or particle of the picture when setting it down in writing...."(p.31/32)
It's emphatically not a platonic vision but...( 1967)"Since I always have at the very start a curiously clear preview of the entire novel before me or above me, I find cards especially convenient...I am afraid to get mixed up with Plato, whom I do not care for, but I do think tht in my case it is strue that the entire book, before it is written, seems to be ready ideally in some other, now transparent, now dimming, dimension, and my job is to take down as much of it as I can make out..."(69)
"Inspiration" (1972) "One can distinguish several types of inspiration, which intergrade, as all things do in this fluid and interesting world of ours, while yielding gracefully to a semblance of classification. A prefatory glow, not unlike some benign variety of the aura before an epileptic attack, is something the artist learns to perceive very early in life... it has neither source nor object. It expands, glows, and subsides without revealing its secret. In the meantime, however, a window has opened... The next stage of inspiration is something ardently anticipated- and no longer anonymous. The shape of the new impact is indeed so definite that I am forced to relinquish metaphors and resort to specific terms. The narrator forefeels what he is going to tell. The forefeeling can be defined as an instant vision turning into rapid speech. If some instrument were to render this rare and delightful phenomenon, the image would come as a shimmer of exact details, and the verbal part as a tumble of merging words. The experienced writer immediately takes it down and, in the process of doing so, transforms what is little more than a running blur into gradually dawning sense, with epithets and sentence construction growing as clear and trim as they would be on the printed page..." (309)
Even when lying sick in hospital, Nabokov maintained his theory about an artist's inspiration, now in relation to a "finished" novel, TOoL, which he seems not to have had time to take down in its entirety from where it ideally lay in a shimmer.
Nabokov's ideas seem to me to be as puzzling now as before when discussing Joyce's excessive verbal body to his images and "shadows of words".
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JM: Following their lead I checked the entire paragraph from The Art of Literature and Commonsense. "The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words all being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible. You might choose to develop any part of the picture, for the idea of sequence does not really exist as far as the author is concerned. Sequence arises only because words have to be written one after the other on consecutive pages, just as the reader's mind must have time to go through the book, at least the first time he reads it. Time and sequence cannot exist in the author's mind because no time element and no space element has ruled the initial vision. If the mind were constructed on option lines and if a book could be read in the same way as a paiting is taken in by the eye, that is without the bother of working from left to right and without the absurdity of beginnings and ends, this would be the ideal way of appreciating a novel..." (379/380)
It's the same conception about inspiration, words and images, now lying behind his words in the 1964 Toffler interview: "I feel a kind of gentle development, an uncurling inside, and I know the details are there already, that in fact I would see them plainly if I looked closer, if I stopped the machine and opened its inner compartment...Since this entire structure, dimly illumined in one's mind, can be compared to a painting, and since you do not have to work gradually from left to right for its proper perceptionm I may direct my flashlight at any part or particle of the picture when setting it down in writing...."(p.31/32)
It's emphatically not a platonic vision but...( 1967)"Since I always have at the very start a curiously clear preview of the entire novel before me or above me, I find cards especially convenient...I am afraid to get mixed up with Plato, whom I do not care for, but I do think tht in my case it is strue that the entire book, before it is written, seems to be ready ideally in some other, now transparent, now dimming, dimension, and my job is to take down as much of it as I can make out..."(69)
"Inspiration" (1972) "One can distinguish several types of inspiration, which intergrade, as all things do in this fluid and interesting world of ours, while yielding gracefully to a semblance of classification. A prefatory glow, not unlike some benign variety of the aura before an epileptic attack, is something the artist learns to perceive very early in life... it has neither source nor object. It expands, glows, and subsides without revealing its secret. In the meantime, however, a window has opened... The next stage of inspiration is something ardently anticipated- and no longer anonymous. The shape of the new impact is indeed so definite that I am forced to relinquish metaphors and resort to specific terms. The narrator forefeels what he is going to tell. The forefeeling can be defined as an instant vision turning into rapid speech. If some instrument were to render this rare and delightful phenomenon, the image would come as a shimmer of exact details, and the verbal part as a tumble of merging words. The experienced writer immediately takes it down and, in the process of doing so, transforms what is little more than a running blur into gradually dawning sense, with epithets and sentence construction growing as clear and trim as they would be on the printed page..." (309)
Even when lying sick in hospital, Nabokov maintained his theory about an artist's inspiration, now in relation to a "finished" novel, TOoL, which he seems not to have had time to take down in its entirety from where it ideally lay in a shimmer.
Nabokov's ideas seem to me to be as puzzling now as before when discussing Joyce's excessive verbal body to his images and "shadows of words".
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/