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Fwd: Re: Query: Lolita and Keats-Bailey correspondence?
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Thanks for your response, Jansy, and especially for saying
"beautifully"!
Maybe in reality there is no "real thing", but in Nabokov I think
there sometimes is, for instance at the end of _Invitation to a
Beheading_. I agree that you're right to associate it with loss,
but in that book Cincinnatus gains it and we are the ones who lose
it--by glimpsing it in one sentence before it's snatched away
by the final period. I think the end of _Pale Fire_ is similar:
Shade experiences the "real thing", which we glimpse only by
supplying the last line of the poem--"...lines identical in
every syllable, but one personal and physical, and the other
metaphysical and universal" (n. 420)--supported by the mood of
the final verse paragraph.
But contrary to what you said, I don't think the red admiral is
"the" thing. I was just supporting my argument with Boyd's
contention that the butterfly is Hazel's ghost, which convinced
me. So it's not "my" butterfly (as you said in your other
post of yesterday), and I really didn't have a Chuang Tsu-like
undecidability in mind.
As long as I'm writing this, I'll add a few more pieces of
evidence against a "real story" that I left out of my previous
post. Kinbote doesn't scruple to invent scenes involving "real"
people--the encyclopedia photo (n. 894) and Gradus at Wordsmith
(end of n. 949, speaking of places where the same phrase repeated
has different meanings). And then there's "The sound of a rapid
car or a groaning truck would come..." (n. 62) compared to "I must
say I do not remember hearing very often 'big trucks' passing in
our vicinity. Loud cars, yes--but not trucks." (n. 934). So
what can we trust him on?
In the poem, it's hard to explain lines 939-940: "_Man's life as
commentary to abstruse/ Unfinished poem._ Note for further use."
Certainly after the completion of the book they apply in a way
Shade couldn't have imagined, but why did he write them?
Supernatural guidance?
With this in mind, I don't see a convincing "real story". Except
for the story of the reader's successive penetration of illusions,
of which I think the second-last is meant to be the illusion of
a real story, and the last, our illusion that there is no higher
reality than ours.
Jerry Friedman
> ----- Forwarded message from jansy@aetern.us -----
...
> RE: Lolita and Keats-Bailey correspondence?Andrew,
>
> You described what I meant and was unable to put into so many words (
> actually,
> not that many!):" memories that come unbidden" instead of "specific
> memories
> that are sought but not obtained". But your observation that these
> memories are
> "often unwelcome" adds a Freudian dimension that I didn´t find in
> Proust´s
> elaborations.
> I think that what HH sought was not a specific memory - but that he
> did seek a
> specific state of mind that could lead him into the experience of an
> "aesthetic
> bliss".
> You wrote, in the end of your note: "until the fateful day he winds up
> in
> Ramsdale. And there he finds the real thing, of which Annabel was merely
> simulacrum".
> I cannot agree with you that "Lolita was the real thing" because I
> believe,
> like Freud, that there is no such "real thing" except the "real loss"
> of a
> "some-thing" that always haunts every one of us and which Nabokov could
> render
> in such a taunting heartbreaking way in almost all his novels.
>
> Jerrie Friedman wrote beautifully about his reading of "Pale Fire" and
> shared
> his vision with us where a "red admiral" became "the" thing. But
> Friedman also
> implied a level of apprehension like Taoist Chuang Tzu´s story about
> having
> dreamt that he was a butterfly and upon awakening finding himself not as
> certain as he´d been about who he was: a Chuang Tzu person ? A butterfly
> dreaming Chuang Tzy? ( i.e: are dreams more real than our conscious
> vigil-state
> sense of "I am"? )
...
> Jansy
...
__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Small Business - Try our new resources site!
http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/resources/
----- End forwarded message -----
"beautifully"!
Maybe in reality there is no "real thing", but in Nabokov I think
there sometimes is, for instance at the end of _Invitation to a
Beheading_. I agree that you're right to associate it with loss,
but in that book Cincinnatus gains it and we are the ones who lose
it--by glimpsing it in one sentence before it's snatched away
by the final period. I think the end of _Pale Fire_ is similar:
Shade experiences the "real thing", which we glimpse only by
supplying the last line of the poem--"...lines identical in
every syllable, but one personal and physical, and the other
metaphysical and universal" (n. 420)--supported by the mood of
the final verse paragraph.
But contrary to what you said, I don't think the red admiral is
"the" thing. I was just supporting my argument with Boyd's
contention that the butterfly is Hazel's ghost, which convinced
me. So it's not "my" butterfly (as you said in your other
post of yesterday), and I really didn't have a Chuang Tsu-like
undecidability in mind.
As long as I'm writing this, I'll add a few more pieces of
evidence against a "real story" that I left out of my previous
post. Kinbote doesn't scruple to invent scenes involving "real"
people--the encyclopedia photo (n. 894) and Gradus at Wordsmith
(end of n. 949, speaking of places where the same phrase repeated
has different meanings). And then there's "The sound of a rapid
car or a groaning truck would come..." (n. 62) compared to "I must
say I do not remember hearing very often 'big trucks' passing in
our vicinity. Loud cars, yes--but not trucks." (n. 934). So
what can we trust him on?
In the poem, it's hard to explain lines 939-940: "_Man's life as
commentary to abstruse/ Unfinished poem._ Note for further use."
Certainly after the completion of the book they apply in a way
Shade couldn't have imagined, but why did he write them?
Supernatural guidance?
With this in mind, I don't see a convincing "real story". Except
for the story of the reader's successive penetration of illusions,
of which I think the second-last is meant to be the illusion of
a real story, and the last, our illusion that there is no higher
reality than ours.
Jerry Friedman
> ----- Forwarded message from jansy@aetern.us -----
...
> RE: Lolita and Keats-Bailey correspondence?Andrew,
>
> You described what I meant and was unable to put into so many words (
> actually,
> not that many!):" memories that come unbidden" instead of "specific
> memories
> that are sought but not obtained". But your observation that these
> memories are
> "often unwelcome" adds a Freudian dimension that I didn´t find in
> Proust´s
> elaborations.
> I think that what HH sought was not a specific memory - but that he
> did seek a
> specific state of mind that could lead him into the experience of an
> "aesthetic
> bliss".
> You wrote, in the end of your note: "until the fateful day he winds up
> in
> Ramsdale. And there he finds the real thing, of which Annabel was merely
> simulacrum".
> I cannot agree with you that "Lolita was the real thing" because I
> believe,
> like Freud, that there is no such "real thing" except the "real loss"
> of a
> "some-thing" that always haunts every one of us and which Nabokov could
> render
> in such a taunting heartbreaking way in almost all his novels.
>
> Jerrie Friedman wrote beautifully about his reading of "Pale Fire" and
> shared
> his vision with us where a "red admiral" became "the" thing. But
> Friedman also
> implied a level of apprehension like Taoist Chuang Tzu´s story about
> having
> dreamt that he was a butterfly and upon awakening finding himself not as
> certain as he´d been about who he was: a Chuang Tzu person ? A butterfly
> dreaming Chuang Tzy? ( i.e: are dreams more real than our conscious
> vigil-state
> sense of "I am"? )
...
> Jansy
...
__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Small Business - Try our new resources site!
http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/resources/
----- End forwarded message -----