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[NABOKOV-L] A muderder's fancy prose
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Laurence Hochard on "Eichmann's moral indignation", wrote: "You can always count on a murderer for self-righteous moral indignation."and we know he is alluding to "Lolita" and HH's words : Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, a certain initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea. Oh when? About as many years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer. You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns.
Some time ago I received a translation with an afterword by "L.V" of Nabokov's The Word, a mystical short-story published in the "Rul'" ( 7 January 1923). "L.V" wrote that the " theme of angels, too, is an important one in the early poetry of Nabokov, including the very early cycle "Angels" (written between 1918 and 1920) and the poem "On Angels" in 1924. [...] and in the end he added, concerning VN's narrator in " The Word": "The overwrought ornateness of the language belongs to the narrator, in much the same way as "Lolita's" fancy prose style belongs to a murderer, not the author. Narrator and author alike have begun to realise the limits of language in breaking through to that world[...]
Recently, Sandy Klein sent us a review of Joseph O'Neill, by Benjamin Kunkel (Complete review at following URL: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n14/kunk01 .html ) where the latter writes:"Does the blank prose of L'Etranger summon the affectless Meursault, or is it the other way around? Does Humbert Humbert's nympholepsy naturally produce such a fancy prose style, or is it instead that his lust for Lolita furnishes Nabokov's only means of rendering psychologically plausible and important the mood of sinister exquisitism that he, Nabokov, prefers to adopt? In these happy instances, the question is undecidably chicken-and-egg. The question of priority - style or man? - is moot."
I was reading today one of Ruth Rendell's short-stories, Shreds and Slivers, that begins with " I love my love with a ps because she is psychic; I hate her with a ps because she is psilotic. I feed her on psalliota and psilotaceae[...] Forgive me. I am carried away by words sometimes, especially those of Greek etymology that begin with a combination of unlikely consonants." Her narrator watched the estranged wife he intended to poison from a "sartorial hideaway" and the first thing that came to my mind was VN's sentence, in Lolita. And yet what we may discern is not exactly a "fancy prose style", but a peculiar fascination with fancy words hold the prose in thrall and establish a "murderer's style".
While writing to Matt on "Housman in PF" I set down a non-sequitur, since there is no link bt. eighteenth-century writers and the great invented twentieth-century poet, John Shade. It might have happened because I'd been busy with VN's particularly religious Russian short-stories and his preoccupation with death while puzzling over Kinbote's religiousness and "Zemblan style". A week before I found an article in which Nabokov had been situated side by side to Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and Henry Miller, as a representative of the beat generation with his sexy road-novel "Lolita".
I was wondering how to place John Shade's style or the man's oscillating mood...
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Some time ago I received a translation with an afterword by "L.V" of Nabokov's The Word, a mystical short-story published in the "Rul'" ( 7 January 1923). "L.V" wrote that the " theme of angels, too, is an important one in the early poetry of Nabokov, including the very early cycle "Angels" (written between 1918 and 1920) and the poem "On Angels" in 1924. [...] and in the end he added, concerning VN's narrator in " The Word": "The overwrought ornateness of the language belongs to the narrator, in much the same way as "Lolita's" fancy prose style belongs to a murderer, not the author. Narrator and author alike have begun to realise the limits of language in breaking through to that world[...]
Recently, Sandy Klein sent us a review of Joseph O'Neill, by Benjamin Kunkel (Complete review at following URL: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n14/kunk01 .html ) where the latter writes:"Does the blank prose of L'Etranger summon the affectless Meursault, or is it the other way around? Does Humbert Humbert's nympholepsy naturally produce such a fancy prose style, or is it instead that his lust for Lolita furnishes Nabokov's only means of rendering psychologically plausible and important the mood of sinister exquisitism that he, Nabokov, prefers to adopt? In these happy instances, the question is undecidably chicken-and-egg. The question of priority - style or man? - is moot."
I was reading today one of Ruth Rendell's short-stories, Shreds and Slivers, that begins with " I love my love with a ps because she is psychic; I hate her with a ps because she is psilotic. I feed her on psalliota and psilotaceae[...] Forgive me. I am carried away by words sometimes, especially those of Greek etymology that begin with a combination of unlikely consonants." Her narrator watched the estranged wife he intended to poison from a "sartorial hideaway" and the first thing that came to my mind was VN's sentence, in Lolita. And yet what we may discern is not exactly a "fancy prose style", but a peculiar fascination with fancy words hold the prose in thrall and establish a "murderer's style".
While writing to Matt on "Housman in PF" I set down a non-sequitur, since there is no link bt. eighteenth-century writers and the great invented twentieth-century poet, John Shade. It might have happened because I'd been busy with VN's particularly religious Russian short-stories and his preoccupation with death while puzzling over Kinbote's religiousness and "Zemblan style". A week before I found an article in which Nabokov had been situated side by side to Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and Henry Miller, as a representative of the beat generation with his sexy road-novel "Lolita".
I was wondering how to place John Shade's style or the man's oscillating mood...
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/