Subject
Help with otherworldly logic
From
Date
Body
Carolyn
"I know more than I can express in words, and the little I can express
would not have been expressed, had I not known more."
What I know (of the transcendental world) exceeds my discursive powers. I
would never have written of the little I can express, but for the fact that
I know much more than I can manage to say. (It is the sureness of this
knowledge that gives me the confidence to say what little I do say of a
subject words cannot otherwise properly broach. Were this mere conjecture,
then I would not even endeavour to hint at the matter).
The ethical fastidiousness parallels Freud's own tentativeness regarding
the paranormal, of which he had, via analysis, various intriguing
intimations, but about which he preferred to withhold substantive comment
because the subject defied his conception of science, and would have
imperilled, by opening it up to ridicule, his larger aspiration to define an
empirical science of the mind/soul).
Nabokov is therefore saying that the discrepancy between words and ultimate
reality is virtually or technically unbridgeable. And therefore words are
no sure guide to what is beyond them. Words describe the world and our
experience of it. The other- or anti-world, almost by definition, would
require another or
anti-language proper to its ineludible difference, to be described
adequately. The covert dilemma here resembles, exactly, the problem of,
indeed impossibility of, translating precisely from one language into
another. To translate the realm of a transcendental alterity into mundane
language(s) involves the same intrinsic distortions as translating from,
say, Russian into English, for example, only more problematical, because the
operation of conceptual transfer is no longer a rough one between vaguely
equivalent sets of corresponding terms, but rather between the unutterable
and the discursive. In theology the crux was worked round by the doctrine of
a via negativa.
The traditional mystical solution is to make silence, or the
stilling of discursive habits, the primrose path towards this inexpressible
otherness of ultimate Being ('Elected silence, sing to me' as Hopkins puts
it in 'The Habit of Perfection'). Yet since Nabokov is wholly assured that
he possesses a knowledge beyond words of the transcendental, this gives him
the confidence to venture to say what little the mere human, sublunary
instruments of speech can manage to say, if only by elusive hints, of that
supranatural reality.
The sentence embodies therefore a tension between the exquisitely filigreed
sensibility of empirically-driven consciousness that dominates Nabokov's
aesthetic practice and his reconditely intimate sense of awareness of some
reality indefinably other, which eludes the comprehensive grasp of casting
of his close-meshed verbal nets in the waters of the visibly existent,
experienced world.
(The idea is in Auden:
'Poet, oracle and wit,
like unsuccessful anglers by
the ponds of apperception sit,
baiting with the wrong request
The vectors of their interest,
At nighttime tell the angler's lie. The Quest XIX)
. It sounds indeed to me as if he wrote his justification with
Wittgenstein's frequently cited remark, at the conclusion of the Tractatus
Logico-Philosophicus, in mind. I.e. it reads like a a timidly bold rejoinder
to the idea that: "Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man
schweigen". That final affirmation by the way reprises the central thesis
outlined in Wittgenstein's Preface (1918) where he asserts 'Man könnte den
ganzen Sinn des Buches etwa in die Worte fassen: Was sich überhaupt sagen
läßt, läßt sich klar sagen; und wovon man nicht reden kann, darüber muß man
schweigen.'
Peter Dale
Search the archive: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/archives/nabokv-l.html
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
"I know more than I can express in words, and the little I can express
would not have been expressed, had I not known more."
What I know (of the transcendental world) exceeds my discursive powers. I
would never have written of the little I can express, but for the fact that
I know much more than I can manage to say. (It is the sureness of this
knowledge that gives me the confidence to say what little I do say of a
subject words cannot otherwise properly broach. Were this mere conjecture,
then I would not even endeavour to hint at the matter).
The ethical fastidiousness parallels Freud's own tentativeness regarding
the paranormal, of which he had, via analysis, various intriguing
intimations, but about which he preferred to withhold substantive comment
because the subject defied his conception of science, and would have
imperilled, by opening it up to ridicule, his larger aspiration to define an
empirical science of the mind/soul).
Nabokov is therefore saying that the discrepancy between words and ultimate
reality is virtually or technically unbridgeable. And therefore words are
no sure guide to what is beyond them. Words describe the world and our
experience of it. The other- or anti-world, almost by definition, would
require another or
anti-language proper to its ineludible difference, to be described
adequately. The covert dilemma here resembles, exactly, the problem of,
indeed impossibility of, translating precisely from one language into
another. To translate the realm of a transcendental alterity into mundane
language(s) involves the same intrinsic distortions as translating from,
say, Russian into English, for example, only more problematical, because the
operation of conceptual transfer is no longer a rough one between vaguely
equivalent sets of corresponding terms, but rather between the unutterable
and the discursive. In theology the crux was worked round by the doctrine of
a via negativa.
The traditional mystical solution is to make silence, or the
stilling of discursive habits, the primrose path towards this inexpressible
otherness of ultimate Being ('Elected silence, sing to me' as Hopkins puts
it in 'The Habit of Perfection'). Yet since Nabokov is wholly assured that
he possesses a knowledge beyond words of the transcendental, this gives him
the confidence to venture to say what little the mere human, sublunary
instruments of speech can manage to say, if only by elusive hints, of that
supranatural reality.
The sentence embodies therefore a tension between the exquisitely filigreed
sensibility of empirically-driven consciousness that dominates Nabokov's
aesthetic practice and his reconditely intimate sense of awareness of some
reality indefinably other, which eludes the comprehensive grasp of casting
of his close-meshed verbal nets in the waters of the visibly existent,
experienced world.
(The idea is in Auden:
'Poet, oracle and wit,
like unsuccessful anglers by
the ponds of apperception sit,
baiting with the wrong request
The vectors of their interest,
At nighttime tell the angler's lie. The Quest XIX)
. It sounds indeed to me as if he wrote his justification with
Wittgenstein's frequently cited remark, at the conclusion of the Tractatus
Logico-Philosophicus, in mind. I.e. it reads like a a timidly bold rejoinder
to the idea that: "Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man
schweigen". That final affirmation by the way reprises the central thesis
outlined in Wittgenstein's Preface (1918) where he asserts 'Man könnte den
ganzen Sinn des Buches etwa in die Worte fassen: Was sich überhaupt sagen
läßt, läßt sich klar sagen; und wovon man nicht reden kann, darüber muß man
schweigen.'
Peter Dale
Search the archive: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/archives/nabokv-l.html
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