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Re: Cunning Stunts, "Oh, Calcutta" and other stuff (fwd) (fwd)
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------------------ Joking apart, why is there "a shuffling from the anal to
the genital" in avant-gGarde VN with "cunning stunts" and "cul" (ass?) .
The erotization of women´s shapely bottoms is not necessarily "anal", nor
would the enticement by their full breasts be something "oral".
----- Original Message -----
From: "D. Barton Johnson" <chtodel@gss.ucsb.edu>
To: <NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU>
Sent: Wednesday, August 11, 2004 12:44 PM
Subject: Cunning Stunts, "Oh, Calcutta" and other stuff (fwd)
> ------------------
> > ===== Original Message From naiman <naiman@socrates.Berkeley.EDU> =====
> The Oh! Calcutta! gloss is wonderful -- with its explanation of
"Edenic" --
> but we should not neglect Nabokov's transformation of the play's title --
a
> shuttling from the anal to the genital. (Is this what is meant by AVANT
> garde?) The play's title announces a theme that will be picked up again
in
> the next chapter, with the explicit pictures of Armande, her impuberal
> softness and its middle line, and the shot of her spreading wide "the
lovely
> legs of a giantess." Later we learn about her "crack lovers" who have
> enjoyed full conjunction in the course of three trips.
> The promiscuity (R's preoccupation?) of the novel's leading ladies
> requires some kind of interpretive treatment. There is a nod to Lolita in
> the scene from ch. 17 describing Hugh's and Armande's unusual ritual of
> copulation; note that here it is as if Lolita is forcing Humbert to
pretend
> that nothing is going on (he has to hide the preparations, pretend this is
> just sofa-talk). The ref. to their being on stage is a nod back to the way
> Humbert sets the scene in that chapter. Julia, too, is sexually
oriented --
> the adjective in the not very hidden unscrambled title of the play -
> stunning -- may be echoed when Julia discusses how she wishes to dazzle
> some people in Moscow. What else is on that list of "darling words"
> supplied by Armande?
> How many other obscenities are in similar near view? John Rea has
> mentioned Mr. Pines. The following lines seem particularly suggestive:
> "He lives somewhere in Switzerland, I think?"
> "Yes at Diablonnet, near Versex."
> "Diablonnet always reminds me of the Russian for 'apple trees':
> yabloni." The presence of VerSEX may trigger a different Russian word that
> sounds like yabloni, common in many vulgar expressions. Perhaps an
> additional step (downwards) are the apple trees (with their Edenic
> associations and results). Here, I am aware I may be moving out on a limb,
> but Armande Chamar's very name has genital associations (Russian/German)
if
> we see it as two mirrored equivalents framed by two "ar"s.
> Nabokov has used Scham before -- openly in Bend Sinister and, I would
argue,
> in Pnin. I cannot recall other instances of similar play with a "mand"
> syllable. Armande's being of both Belgian and Russian origin (with Hugh
> guessing two Germanic possibilities) might be relevant. Not as clear a
case
> as that of the Russified Frenchman Konstantin Chateau, but the theme is
> there.
>
> Is this better than the jock talk of the fashionable writers R.
> criticizes? Is our task of readers akin to that of the humble
proofreaders
> who bring obscenities to the surface? Yet this may be a necessary part of
> reaching the moment "where the orgasm of art courses through the whole
> spine with incomparably more foce than sexual ecstasy or metaphysical
> panic." (p.102
>
> Yet one more comment on fit. The final page of the book returns us to
> the image of a box "grown completely transparent and hollow." We should
> recall the box with "Fit" when we read the following line: "This is, I
> believe, IT (italicized); not the crude anguish of physical death but the
> incomparable pangs of the mysterious mental maneuver needed to pass fro
> mone state of being to another. Easy, you know, does it, son". Is the
> final maneuver akin to a proofreader's, replacing fit with it?
> And -- to return to the crudeness with which we began -- a word which
> appears with strange frequency in TT is stuff (stuffiness 19; Armande
> "demanded hard realistic stuff reflecting our age" (books about Violence
and
> Oriental Wisdom"; the muzzled stuff 31; same stuff 32; Neo buddhism and
all
> that stuff 60; really wonderful stuff 76 (ostensibly about R's work but
> perhaps about the debauching of Julia, several of these uses are sexually
> suggestive); I can't recall VN using this word so
> often elsewhere; indeed, it seems like the mark of laziness, and perhaps
it
> is a marker of R's laziness in writing? This is a highly vague and
> unnecessary word -- its repeated use by VN may be a way of distinguishing
> his narrator from the other American writer residing in Switzerland.
> Eric
>
> PS While we are on ch. 11, note the way that the mock-arson subverting or
> supporting Cunning Stunts hints at the real arson at the book's end, when
> Hugh is also expecting a sexual encounter. Of course, nearly every
> chapter looks forward to that one, but the link here seems especially
> direct.
>
>
> ---------- End Forwarded Message ----------
>
>
>
> D. Barton Johnson
> NABOKV-L
>
>
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D. Barton Johnson
NABOKV-L