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Re: THOUGHTS Re: 1962 NYHT Books Interview and gargoyles
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John Morris:"My own view is that VN meant his remarks rather simply and straightforwardly: You can tell a lot about a person by reading his work"... " 'The Waste Land' is perhaps not 'an expression of personality,' but upon reading it, you aren't going to confuse Eliot's personality with, shall we say, Charles Bukowski's."..."I don't think good readers run any serious risk of mistaking VN's personality for Humbert's, or Kinbote's, or even Van Veen's."..."VN would welcome any critical lens...to discern the personality traits that VN himself believed were relevant"...
Jansy: Even if one isn't "going to confuse Eliot's personality" with any other author's after reading "The Waste Land" or mistake "VN's personality for HH's, CK's", we should always know that H.Humbert,C Kinbote, Van Veen - or HH's Lolita, Van Veen's Ada, for that matter - are not Jane Austen's , J.D. Salinger's or Doestoevsky's characters, but clearly VN's own. They form a consistent and impressive lot of gargoyles and caryatids.
J.Morris added, at the end of his message: "As we know, though, this certainly didn't include the entire category of "unconscious" traits, a la Freud." and I agree, for I prefer the limitation of Freud's evaluation of Hanold (a character in Jensen's work "Gradiva"), to what he concluded about Leonardo or to what other invasive "applied psychoanalysts" try to write about famous artists' "cathedrals."
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Jansy: Even if one isn't "going to confuse Eliot's personality" with any other author's after reading "The Waste Land" or mistake "VN's personality for HH's, CK's", we should always know that H.Humbert,C Kinbote, Van Veen - or HH's Lolita, Van Veen's Ada, for that matter - are not Jane Austen's , J.D. Salinger's or Doestoevsky's characters, but clearly VN's own. They form a consistent and impressive lot of gargoyles and caryatids.
J.Morris added, at the end of his message: "As we know, though, this certainly didn't include the entire category of "unconscious" traits, a la Freud." and I agree, for I prefer the limitation of Freud's evaluation of Hanold (a character in Jensen's work "Gradiva"), to what he concluded about Leonardo or to what other invasive "applied psychoanalysts" try to write about famous artists' "cathedrals."
Search the archive: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/archives/nabokv-l.html
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
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View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm