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Fwd: Re: Jakobson, Pale Fire
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Nabokov has written about the "list" as poem. See _Lolita_ pages 51-53
in the Vintage Int'l edition for Humbert's critical delight in the list
of names from Dolores' Ramsdale school. The important thing about this
list, however, is that it's not composed entirely by chance, but by
Humbert, who cannot resist the temptation to exaggerate the poetic form
and organization in his confession.
Victoria Alexander
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On Mar 16, 2005, at 10:05 PM, Donald B. Johnson wrote:
>
> Dear list,
>
> In his published lecture "Co je poezie" (What is poetry?), 1934, Roman
> Jakobson, comes up with the following (tr. M.Heim):
>
> "The borderline dividing what is a work of poetry from what is not is
> less stable than the frontiers of the Chinese empire's territories.
> Novalis and Mallarmé regarded the alphabet as the greatest work of
> poetry. Russian poets have admired the poetic qualities of a wine list
> (Vjazemskij), an inventory of the tsar's clothes (Gogol'), a timetable
> (Pasternak) and even a laundry bill (Krucenyx) How many poets now claim
> that reportage is a more artistic genre than the novel or short story?
> [...]
> Do not believe the critic who rakes a poet over the coals in the name
> of
> the True and the Natural. All he has in fact done is to reject one
> poetic school, that is, one set of devices deforming material in the
> name of another poetic school, another set of deformational devices.
> The
> artist is playing no less a game when he announces that this time he is
> dealing with naked Wahrheit rather than Dichtung as when he assures his
> audience that a given work is sheer invention, that "poetry as a whole
> is one big lie, and the poet who fails to lie audaciously from the word
> go is worthless"."
>
> Have this piece in general or this passage in particular already been
> linked to Nabokov, for example Speak,Memory (the "precious" letters of
> the alphabet given to him by his mother) or Pale Fire (the tedious
> commentary form (sorry) becoming itself "poetical")?
>
> More generally speaking, why is it so hard to find bibliography on
> Jakobson and Nabokov, and why do commentators, when discussing the
> issue
> of Nabokov's "formalism", concentrate on Sklovskij and his LEF-period
> views, and not on the more subtle (if less "mediatic") formalists such
> as Tynjanov or Eichenbaum and on the Prague Circle (in my eyes, the
> true
> successor of formalism, not the LEF), who, as the above extract
> purportedly shows, are far closer to Nabokov's poetics? (If I'm being
> ignorant, please shower me with references and I'll happily shut up...)
>
> Greetings from Praha,
>
> PF
>
>
> PS: For those of you on the Joyce thread, the article contains
> interesting comments about the relation between the salacious diaries
> (in this case those of the czech romantic poet Karel Hynek Macha) and
> the lyric poetry of a given author, Jakobson implies (with explicit
> reference to Joyce) that a modern poet would publish the diary rather
> than the poems.
>
> ----- End forwarded message -----
>
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Victoria N. Alexander, Ph.D.
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