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too much verbal body and symbolists
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In a recent posting a debate concerning Nabokov and the Symbolists was encouraged.
Although we can often find references to the symbolists in novels such as "Ada, or Ardor", I thought that there was a nice link with Don´s recent subject concerning the "Englishman in Nice" - because Kinbote noted that the said gentleman had been transmuted into someone similar to the French symbolist, Verlaine...
Because the clinching example in the posting quoted VN, I´d like to bring up an apparently contrasting view, also by VN.
According to Stacey Schiff, who wrote the biography of Vera Nabokov, the author's wife shared with her husband the same passion for details and coincidences, seeking for the "substantial shadows behind the illusions of existence". "We think not in words, but in shadows of words", wrote Nabokov.
Although he was an admirer of James Joyce's Ulysses, Nabokov was acutely disturbed by the Irish writer's "association between sex and latrine" in Finnegans Wake and Nabokov maintained that the defect "in those otherwise marvelous soliloquies of his consists in that he gives too much verbal body to thoughts".
Jansy
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Although we can often find references to the symbolists in novels such as "Ada, or Ardor", I thought that there was a nice link with Don´s recent subject concerning the "Englishman in Nice" - because Kinbote noted that the said gentleman had been transmuted into someone similar to the French symbolist, Verlaine...
Because the clinching example in the posting quoted VN, I´d like to bring up an apparently contrasting view, also by VN.
According to Stacey Schiff, who wrote the biography of Vera Nabokov, the author's wife shared with her husband the same passion for details and coincidences, seeking for the "substantial shadows behind the illusions of existence". "We think not in words, but in shadows of words", wrote Nabokov.
Although he was an admirer of James Joyce's Ulysses, Nabokov was acutely disturbed by the Irish writer's "association between sex and latrine" in Finnegans Wake and Nabokov maintained that the defect "in those otherwise marvelous soliloquies of his consists in that he gives too much verbal body to thoughts".
Jansy
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