Subject
Nablering on Field...idle thoughts
From
Date
Body
From former postings
"our awareness of being is not a dot in eternity, but a slit, a fissure, a chasm running along the entire breadth of metaphysical time, bisecting it and shining - no matter how narrowly - between the back panel and fore panel" (Ada)
"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." (the Gift)
The subject of the first quote is a mental state (our awareness of being) related to metaphysical time. It's simultaneously a fissure and a source of light - like the rays of the sun in the horizon at the crack of dawn, separating the oceanic waters.and heaven, as it came out in another, very distinct, novel. However, maybe these images shouldn't have been set side by side nor is their significance one that VN has meant to describe. Perhaps they aren't intended as images that occupy a place in space, In fact, as stated in the sentence from The Gift,most theories are "just as hopeless a finite hypothesis as all the others" and the prevalent "awareness" in a sense of impotent wonder that strikes different VN characters, an emotion that they share with their readers.
Trying to explore a little more VN`s relation to time, duration and to Henri Bergson's philosophy I turned to " Vladimir Nabokov - Bergsonian and Russian Formalist Influences in his Novels" (Ed.Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), where author Michael Glynn discusses Nabokov's "anti-symbolism". For M. Glynn, "Nabokov's tropes tend to reveal rather than adumbrate...Nabokov was always deeply suspicious of symbols and for him the world was real and endlessly interesting, not a mere analogue.."(14/5). "In the verse, as in the prose, Nabokov`s otherworld turns out to be not a vague Symbolist eidolon, but a world of the here and now."(17)
Michael Glynn believes that "Nabokov`s views were also buttressed by the deep-seated anti-symbolism that he encountered in Bergson's notion of scientific knowledge. Bergson's negative view of science as a form of symbolism was derived from his notion of duration...(60) But Michael Glynn isn't writing a novel or a poem and his conceptualization of symbols and Symbolists seems to be rather distant from the verbal and imagetic flow I was following in the wake of Nabokov's characters and their words? signifiers? symbols?metaphors? patterns?
My mistake here results from having tried to lift the veil that separates an author and the characters he creates, as if a living human face was speaking from behind a set of masks and a collection of strong opinions...
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"our awareness of being is not a dot in eternity, but a slit, a fissure, a chasm running along the entire breadth of metaphysical time, bisecting it and shining - no matter how narrowly - between the back panel and fore panel" (Ada)
"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." (the Gift)
The subject of the first quote is a mental state (our awareness of being) related to metaphysical time. It's simultaneously a fissure and a source of light - like the rays of the sun in the horizon at the crack of dawn, separating the oceanic waters.and heaven, as it came out in another, very distinct, novel. However, maybe these images shouldn't have been set side by side nor is their significance one that VN has meant to describe. Perhaps they aren't intended as images that occupy a place in space, In fact, as stated in the sentence from The Gift,most theories are "just as hopeless a finite hypothesis as all the others" and the prevalent "awareness" in a sense of impotent wonder that strikes different VN characters, an emotion that they share with their readers.
Trying to explore a little more VN`s relation to time, duration and to Henri Bergson's philosophy I turned to " Vladimir Nabokov - Bergsonian and Russian Formalist Influences in his Novels" (Ed.Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), where author Michael Glynn discusses Nabokov's "anti-symbolism". For M. Glynn, "Nabokov's tropes tend to reveal rather than adumbrate...Nabokov was always deeply suspicious of symbols and for him the world was real and endlessly interesting, not a mere analogue.."(14/5). "In the verse, as in the prose, Nabokov`s otherworld turns out to be not a vague Symbolist eidolon, but a world of the here and now."(17)
Michael Glynn believes that "Nabokov`s views were also buttressed by the deep-seated anti-symbolism that he encountered in Bergson's notion of scientific knowledge. Bergson's negative view of science as a form of symbolism was derived from his notion of duration...(60) But Michael Glynn isn't writing a novel or a poem and his conceptualization of symbols and Symbolists seems to be rather distant from the verbal and imagetic flow I was following in the wake of Nabokov's characters and their words? signifiers? symbols?metaphors? patterns?
My mistake here results from having tried to lift the veil that separates an author and the characters he creates, as if a living human face was speaking from behind a set of masks and a collection of strong opinions...
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/