Subject
SIGNS: Final thoughts on section 1?
From
Date
Body
[EDNOTE. Please think of the suggestion that we move through the story in sequential order merely as a guide, especially if you want to share insights that encompass the story as a whole! :) SES]
Difficult to read the paragraphs and sections in isolation from one another. Referential mania appears to be pretty natural, not to say normal, at least in the narrator's examples. (The Wordsworth of _The Prelude_ wouldn't have found it so maniacal.) Nabokov has this ability to convert even a case-study into a type of sublimity. "Everything is a cipher": that is the sly narrator's tip-off, it seems, until we take in the rest of the sentence, when pathos supervenes again. The son and his business of being (in)human will always refer us to "the incalculable amount of tenderness in the world" which is either crushed or wasted.
Piers Smith
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
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
Difficult to read the paragraphs and sections in isolation from one another. Referential mania appears to be pretty natural, not to say normal, at least in the narrator's examples. (The Wordsworth of _The Prelude_ wouldn't have found it so maniacal.) Nabokov has this ability to convert even a case-study into a type of sublimity. "Everything is a cipher": that is the sly narrator's tip-off, it seems, until we take in the rest of the sentence, when pathos supervenes again. The son and his business of being (in)human will always refer us to "the incalculable amount of tenderness in the world" which is either crushed or wasted.
Piers Smith
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
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm