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Re: Two from SKB
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Re: [NABOKV-L] Two from SKBSKB argues logically with Jansy ["you still miss the point that there's no evidence that VN (or VN via HH) was making any connection between the two Charlottes via phonetic wordplay on Haze/Hayes"] and notes on typical LitCrit illogic, an assertion like: "Of course VN knew about Madame C Hayes, or why else would he have named Lo's mum C Haze?". For SKB, "This is the sort of false "proof by assertion"[...] Until we have more evidence, it's fruitlessly premature to strongly opinionate on whether the mooted Hayes/Haze wordplay is childish/cruel/demeaning, brilliantly justified, or so damned cunningly Nabokovian/Humbertian, or whatever."
He concedes that "Jansy may have inadvertently offered an alternative theory for Lo's mum's name". By mispelling Hayes as Hays "wonderful and convincing allusions to the HAYS Hollywood movie-morality "production" code" were opened. "What could be more relevant to Charlotte Haze's persona than this stifling, conventional list of puritanical dos and don'ts (mainly don'ts)? [...] We can have NO DOUBT that VN was familiar with this Code! But the CLINCHERs for wannabe allusionists are (i) the early campaigns for film censorship were led by a Martin J QUIGLEY (the link with Guilty/Quilty is too obvious to be worth mentioning) (ii) Hays himself sported the initials WHH (William Harrison HAYS). The HH cannot be mere coincidence. This plausible link retains some of the "HH contempt for his wife" that Tim and Jansy find in the Haze/Hayes hypothesis, but is surely less cruel and childish!"
JM: Using my characteristic (but not LitCrit) illogic, I must reassert that I didn't say that there was any evidence for any phonetic connection bt. the two Charlottes, mainly because it clashes with my irrational response to Nabokov's writing (check: "it strikes me as false or gross, as not being typical of Nabokov...").But, Stan, at the time VN was writing "Lolita", he had no idea that his novel would become a best-seller and made into movies, to boot: why ascribe such a critical, but important, role to Hays and Quigley?
I wish you and other mathematically inclined participants would help me along a different kind of reasoning.
I recently repeated Zimmer's quote from VN:"... It is the pathetic sight of an iridiscent future transpiring through the shell of the past, something of the kind I experience when dipping into my books written in the twenties." I couldn't find the exact date when VN described his vision of the future through its shell of the past, but he often toiled with this idea ( in a Berlin beer-house, when watching a child look at him, or while looking at the ship to America through an imagined future recollection by his son Dmitri, are the two examples that come to my mind).
It was announced to lay-people (cf. news in Time magazine,June 25, 2001) that science had started to decode the agony of dying stars and identify a mysterious "dark matter". It was when we learned that the distant past had become actually observable in the present - and the future of our cosmos as well.
An intuition about "seeing the past, or the future" needs no astronomical confirmation to arise and, besides, since the early sixties at least, we've learned that the rays of the sun, as we see them, reach us with a delay of six or eight minutes. Nevertheless, from the ways by which Nabokov applied his own perceptions and reasonings to literature, there are many other similar deductions in his novels, poems and stories.
Cf. Walker's return to "Slava" (The Nabokovian,61,2008) from where I'll only extract VN's lines:"but my word, curved to form an aerial viaduct/ spans the world, and across in a strobe-effect spin/ of spokes I keep endlessly passing incognito/ into the flame-licked night of my native land."
Isn't VN almost describing a "quantum leap" and how consciousness/words may affect matter?
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He concedes that "Jansy may have inadvertently offered an alternative theory for Lo's mum's name". By mispelling Hayes as Hays "wonderful and convincing allusions to the HAYS Hollywood movie-morality "production" code" were opened. "What could be more relevant to Charlotte Haze's persona than this stifling, conventional list of puritanical dos and don'ts (mainly don'ts)? [...] We can have NO DOUBT that VN was familiar with this Code! But the CLINCHERs for wannabe allusionists are (i) the early campaigns for film censorship were led by a Martin J QUIGLEY (the link with Guilty/Quilty is too obvious to be worth mentioning) (ii) Hays himself sported the initials WHH (William Harrison HAYS). The HH cannot be mere coincidence. This plausible link retains some of the "HH contempt for his wife" that Tim and Jansy find in the Haze/Hayes hypothesis, but is surely less cruel and childish!"
JM: Using my characteristic (but not LitCrit) illogic, I must reassert that I didn't say that there was any evidence for any phonetic connection bt. the two Charlottes, mainly because it clashes with my irrational response to Nabokov's writing (check: "it strikes me as false or gross, as not being typical of Nabokov...").But, Stan, at the time VN was writing "Lolita", he had no idea that his novel would become a best-seller and made into movies, to boot: why ascribe such a critical, but important, role to Hays and Quigley?
I wish you and other mathematically inclined participants would help me along a different kind of reasoning.
I recently repeated Zimmer's quote from VN:"... It is the pathetic sight of an iridiscent future transpiring through the shell of the past, something of the kind I experience when dipping into my books written in the twenties." I couldn't find the exact date when VN described his vision of the future through its shell of the past, but he often toiled with this idea ( in a Berlin beer-house, when watching a child look at him, or while looking at the ship to America through an imagined future recollection by his son Dmitri, are the two examples that come to my mind).
It was announced to lay-people (cf. news in Time magazine,June 25, 2001) that science had started to decode the agony of dying stars and identify a mysterious "dark matter". It was when we learned that the distant past had become actually observable in the present - and the future of our cosmos as well.
An intuition about "seeing the past, or the future" needs no astronomical confirmation to arise and, besides, since the early sixties at least, we've learned that the rays of the sun, as we see them, reach us with a delay of six or eight minutes. Nevertheless, from the ways by which Nabokov applied his own perceptions and reasonings to literature, there are many other similar deductions in his novels, poems and stories.
Cf. Walker's return to "Slava" (The Nabokovian,61,2008) from where I'll only extract VN's lines:"but my word, curved to form an aerial viaduct/ spans the world, and across in a strobe-effect spin/ of spokes I keep endlessly passing incognito/ into the flame-licked night of my native land."
Isn't VN almost describing a "quantum leap" and how consciousness/words may affect matter?
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/