Subject
Nablering on Field...metaphors and similes to express time
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Field mentions Ada, in 1967 as "by far the most important forthcoming work...and is to be in large degree an artistic expression and exploration of the precise meaning of time. Time has occupied an important place in almost all of Nabokov's major fiction, although it has most often been contained withing the context of the theme of memory." He next mentions The Gift, Time and Ebb and Lance. In the 1944 short-story there's probably a hint for Ada's Lettrocalamity...For him, in Time and Ebb 'a memoirist writes about the time before the 'stupendous discoveries' of the 1970's, which are evidently connected with time and immortality:'
"Elementary allobiotic phenomena led their so-called spiritualists to the silliest forms of transcendental surmise and made so-called common sense shrug its broad shoulder in equally silly ignorance. Our denominations of time would have seemed to them 'telephone numbers'. They played with electricity in various ways without having the slightest notion of what it really was - and no wonder the chance revelation of its true nature came as a most hideous surprise..."
From the Gift "Our mistaken feeling of time as a kind of growth is a consequence of our finiteness which, being always on the level of the present, implies its constant rise between the watery abyss of the past and the aerial abyss of the future... The theory I find most tempting - that there is no time, that everything is the present situated like a radiance outside our blindness - is just as hopeless a finite hypothesis as all the others."
Field understands, from Nabokov's description of his new novel, that "it is to be a scholarly sort of essay on the nature of time in which the metaphors and similes (without which, according to Nabokov, it is very difficult to speak of time at all ) gradually start to live and assume the guise of a story, after which they start "to bleed and fall apart," trailing off into the same recondite essay with which the novel begins...."
Personally, I'm as puzzled as ever by how certain reiterated Nabokov analogies and metaphors are built.* In Ada, as I understand it, Mascodagama´s tricks serve to excise the excess of "verbal body" from his work ("We think not in words but in shadows of words. James Joyce [.] gives too much verbal body to his thoughts" [SO, 30]) by placing Van´s bodily inversions side by side with his project of inverting metaphors I cannot shake off the idea that for Nabokov tropes are somehow bound to physical space and may be flicked over, like Mascodagama's maniambulations but deep down I know that I'm wrong. Field's commentary added a new level of mystery to my blind images.
Thoughts?
........................................................
*: It starts already with the 2005 article "Time Before and Time After in Nabokov's Novels" in The Nabokovian 55
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"Elementary allobiotic phenomena led their so-called spiritualists to the silliest forms of transcendental surmise and made so-called common sense shrug its broad shoulder in equally silly ignorance. Our denominations of time would have seemed to them 'telephone numbers'. They played with electricity in various ways without having the slightest notion of what it really was - and no wonder the chance revelation of its true nature came as a most hideous surprise..."
From the Gift "Our mistaken feeling of time as a kind of growth is a consequence of our finiteness which, being always on the level of the present, implies its constant rise between the watery abyss of the past and the aerial abyss of the future... The theory I find most tempting - that there is no time, that everything is the present situated like a radiance outside our blindness - is just as hopeless a finite hypothesis as all the others."
Field understands, from Nabokov's description of his new novel, that "it is to be a scholarly sort of essay on the nature of time in which the metaphors and similes (without which, according to Nabokov, it is very difficult to speak of time at all ) gradually start to live and assume the guise of a story, after which they start "to bleed and fall apart," trailing off into the same recondite essay with which the novel begins...."
Personally, I'm as puzzled as ever by how certain reiterated Nabokov analogies and metaphors are built.* In Ada, as I understand it, Mascodagama´s tricks serve to excise the excess of "verbal body" from his work ("We think not in words but in shadows of words. James Joyce [.] gives too much verbal body to his thoughts" [SO, 30]) by placing Van´s bodily inversions side by side with his project of inverting metaphors I cannot shake off the idea that for Nabokov tropes are somehow bound to physical space and may be flicked over, like Mascodagama's maniambulations but deep down I know that I'm wrong. Field's commentary added a new level of mystery to my blind images.
Thoughts?
........................................................
*: It starts already with the 2005 article "Time Before and Time After in Nabokov's Novels" in The Nabokovian 55
Search archive with Google:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
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
Visit "Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
Manage subscription options: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/