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Re: TT-4 Answer to Mary Krimmel (fwd)
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You wrote:
> Sandy Drescher: 4] How is the reader to understand characters who seem to
> be entirely certain of what they think and feel? How believable is a
> human free of ambivalence?
>
> Mary Kimmel Which characters are you thinking of?
>
> Sandy D: 1] Hugh Person is presented as caring nothing for his
> father, and
> as
> totally accepting and enchanted by the icy, rather brutal Armande. [Put
> aside that: 1- harm is carefully avoided in deep, somnambulistic sleep,
> and 2- total muscular paralysis accompanies REM sleep - the reported
> dream has the clarity and associational quality of REM dreaming]. Still,
> granting the possibility of the murder, Hugh and the author forbid the
> reader to question whether, at times, Hugh may have had hateful as well
> as loving feelings towards Armande, or whether in retrospect he wondered
> about this himself. One need not be a Freudian to recognize that humans
> hold conflicting thoughts, wishes and feeling simultaneously. As noted,
> "there's the rub".
>
> 2] Armande is one among several other enchantresses whose behavior
> is completely inexplicable to the other characters and this reader
> [as in RLSK, SIF, TIAO]. Their attractions for the protagonists is also
> beyond explanation, other than the reader's projection of similar life
> experience.
>
>
> S: Is there a character in TT who seems human enough for the reader to
> like?
>
> M: It seems to me that in general unlikable characters and unlikable
> people are as human as likable ones.
>
> S: With very few exceptions, "..unlikable PEOPLE are as human as
> likable ones" and I agree that the effort to find something likable, or
> tragic, or poorly understood is a noble step towards acceptance or even
> "liking". But a fictional CHARACTER may be drawn so lacking in human
> traits as to fail to arouse affective responses. As I tend to be
> perversely fond of villains and schlimazels, my choice of the word "like"
> was poor; better said, neither Hugh nor Armande come sufficiently alive
> for me, for me to care. As Nabokov could breath life into the most
> bizarre characters and from wildly disorienting points of view, this
> deadness in TT seems remarkable. Is it a consequence of the explanatory
> omniscience of the narrators and the lack of human doubt in the
> characters?
Do you think so (that the deadness is a consequence...)?
Thank you for good answers. Now I see that since characters are not people,
it is dangerous to good reading for the reader to project his life
experience too far and too directly.
Thinking about the remarkable deadness in TT, do you find it also in R
either as the narrator or as a character in the story? (I have no opinion
on this, at least not yet.) Is it possible that embodied beings are more
lifeless in the perception of the spirits than their fellow spirits are? I
realize that Armande and Hugh's father are spirits at the time of the
narration, but they are presented in the time before they died.
---------- End Forwarded Message ----------
D. Barton Johnson
NABOKV-L
You wrote:
> Sandy Drescher: 4] How is the reader to understand characters who seem to
> be entirely certain of what they think and feel? How believable is a
> human free of ambivalence?
>
> Mary Kimmel Which characters are you thinking of?
>
> Sandy D: 1] Hugh Person is presented as caring nothing for his
> father, and
> as
> totally accepting and enchanted by the icy, rather brutal Armande. [Put
> aside that: 1- harm is carefully avoided in deep, somnambulistic sleep,
> and 2- total muscular paralysis accompanies REM sleep - the reported
> dream has the clarity and associational quality of REM dreaming]. Still,
> granting the possibility of the murder, Hugh and the author forbid the
> reader to question whether, at times, Hugh may have had hateful as well
> as loving feelings towards Armande, or whether in retrospect he wondered
> about this himself. One need not be a Freudian to recognize that humans
> hold conflicting thoughts, wishes and feeling simultaneously. As noted,
> "there's the rub".
>
> 2] Armande is one among several other enchantresses whose behavior
> is completely inexplicable to the other characters and this reader
> [as in RLSK, SIF, TIAO]. Their attractions for the protagonists is also
> beyond explanation, other than the reader's projection of similar life
> experience.
>
>
> S: Is there a character in TT who seems human enough for the reader to
> like?
>
> M: It seems to me that in general unlikable characters and unlikable
> people are as human as likable ones.
>
> S: With very few exceptions, "..unlikable PEOPLE are as human as
> likable ones" and I agree that the effort to find something likable, or
> tragic, or poorly understood is a noble step towards acceptance or even
> "liking". But a fictional CHARACTER may be drawn so lacking in human
> traits as to fail to arouse affective responses. As I tend to be
> perversely fond of villains and schlimazels, my choice of the word "like"
> was poor; better said, neither Hugh nor Armande come sufficiently alive
> for me, for me to care. As Nabokov could breath life into the most
> bizarre characters and from wildly disorienting points of view, this
> deadness in TT seems remarkable. Is it a consequence of the explanatory
> omniscience of the narrators and the lack of human doubt in the
> characters?
Do you think so (that the deadness is a consequence...)?
Thank you for good answers. Now I see that since characters are not people,
it is dangerous to good reading for the reader to project his life
experience too far and too directly.
Thinking about the remarkable deadness in TT, do you find it also in R
either as the narrator or as a character in the story? (I have no opinion
on this, at least not yet.) Is it possible that embodied beings are more
lifeless in the perception of the spirits than their fellow spirits are? I
realize that Armande and Hugh's father are spirits at the time of the
narration, but they are presented in the time before they died.
---------- End Forwarded Message ----------
D. Barton Johnson
NABOKV-L