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Report: Back from Upside-Down
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ED S.Blackwell:sends exciting information about the "Nabokov Upside Down" conference (abstracts are for now available at: https://custom.cvent.com/F171CE82AA5645B8BA021387DB23D170/files/d0ef422e8c6642ce956c587060d284fd.pdf )
JM: The great bulk of writings on Nabokov is currently unavailable to me. The list of titles and abstracts at Brian Boyd's University of Auckland "Upside Down International Vladimir Nabokov Conference" was truly "incandescent" and I would thank participants who would mail a copy of their papers to me off-list, should this not go against the adopted policies.
Stephen Blackwell's abstract offers a tantalizing paragraph for "Space--Time and Nabokov' Upside--Down Butterflies"
"This abiding sense of the temporal depth of species, akin to temporal depth in human life, allowed him to make discoveries about butterfly classification that were advanced for their time and have been upheld by genetic sequencing techniques developed decades later. Nabokov's discoveries are an example of the productive journey of a scientific concept (space--time) making its way through creative, artistic consciousness, where it facilitated advances in an unrelated branch of science,
taxonomy."
I could just eke my way through the black rectangle at the Wikipedia (a bit guiltily, though, because I'm in full agreement with their campain [ "Imagine a World Without Free Knowledge"], against recent IAP laws), to find information about "the theory of recapitulation, also called the biogenetic law or embryological parallelism...is a disproven biological hypothesis that in developing from embryo to adult, animals go through stages resembling or representing successive stages in the evolution of their remote ancestors. ..While some examples of embryonic stages showing superficial features of ancestral organisms exist, the ontological hypothesis itself has been completely disproven for the field biology. By contrast, there is no consensus against its validity outside of biology; recapitulation theory is still considered plausible and applied by some reasearchers in fields like Behavioral Development, the study of the origin of language, and others," trying to refresh my memory about the law expressed as "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny." Although I'm unsure if Steve Blackwell was working with this biological formulation (it differs from the parallel SB has established*), it was immediately brought to my mind when when I read about "space-time" and the relation bt. "the concept of species and the temporal depth in human life," applied to Nabokov's discoveries on butterfly classification.
I do hope I'll get the opportunity to get S.Blackwell's article to fully understand its rich promise.
S. E. Sweeney's "Backwards,Contrariwise,Downside Up:Thinking in Different Directions in Nabokov" was equally tantalizing - for Nabokov's kinaesthetic imagery has always struck a deep chord in me, mainly because there's something in the way he discovers "natural" patterns to express them through rythm and style, thereby evoking the sensation of broken symmetries, spirals, sudden thrusts and sweeping flights in his readers .
"Nabokov's characters often imagine themselves or, perhaps, try to imagine themselves in new positions in space. That is, they attempt to conceive of the body as moving in an entirely different direction. To cite just a few examples, consider Van walking on his hands in Ada, Vadim reversing his position at the end of an imaginary walk in Look at the Harlequins! or Philip Wild mentally erasing his body from the toes upwards in The Original of Laura. Many of Nabokov's other novels and stories also describe a protagonist's efforts, whether peripheral or pivotal, to mentally transcend the body's physical orientation. In figures of speech, meanwhile, he often compares instances of metaphysical thinking to an acrobatic feat ---- from the description of his father's elevation in Speak, Memory to the personification of thought as a trapeze artist in Bend Sinister. Such proprioceptive, kinaesthetic imagery suggests that Nabokov may have conceived of thought itself as analogous to the body's physical movement through space. Certainly, he repeatedly drew on this analogy to depict his characters' mental processes for readers, especially with regard to thinking of something new or unexpected. By describing, in his fiction, the effort to imagine one's body moving differently through space, Nabokov evokes the twists and turns of consciousness, emphasizes each narrative's implicit spatial form, and prompts readers to follow a mental trajectory that will lead them
somewhere they have never been before.."
.....................................................................................................................................................................
* - In the early XXth Century it inspired Sigmund Freud's phylogenetic fantasy (only published in 1985) "Overview of the Transference Neuroses," edited by Ilse Grubrich-Simitis; translated by Axel Hoffer and Peter T.Hoffer, Cambridge,Mass:Harvard Univ.Press,1987
Search archive with Google:
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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/
JM: The great bulk of writings on Nabokov is currently unavailable to me. The list of titles and abstracts at Brian Boyd's University of Auckland "Upside Down International Vladimir Nabokov Conference" was truly "incandescent" and I would thank participants who would mail a copy of their papers to me off-list, should this not go against the adopted policies.
Stephen Blackwell's abstract offers a tantalizing paragraph for "Space--Time and Nabokov' Upside--Down Butterflies"
"This abiding sense of the temporal depth of species, akin to temporal depth in human life, allowed him to make discoveries about butterfly classification that were advanced for their time and have been upheld by genetic sequencing techniques developed decades later. Nabokov's discoveries are an example of the productive journey of a scientific concept (space--time) making its way through creative, artistic consciousness, where it facilitated advances in an unrelated branch of science,
taxonomy."
I could just eke my way through the black rectangle at the Wikipedia (a bit guiltily, though, because I'm in full agreement with their campain [ "Imagine a World Without Free Knowledge"], against recent IAP laws), to find information about "the theory of recapitulation, also called the biogenetic law or embryological parallelism...is a disproven biological hypothesis that in developing from embryo to adult, animals go through stages resembling or representing successive stages in the evolution of their remote ancestors. ..While some examples of embryonic stages showing superficial features of ancestral organisms exist, the ontological hypothesis itself has been completely disproven for the field biology. By contrast, there is no consensus against its validity outside of biology; recapitulation theory is still considered plausible and applied by some reasearchers in fields like Behavioral Development, the study of the origin of language, and others," trying to refresh my memory about the law expressed as "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny." Although I'm unsure if Steve Blackwell was working with this biological formulation (it differs from the parallel SB has established*), it was immediately brought to my mind when when I read about "space-time" and the relation bt. "the concept of species and the temporal depth in human life," applied to Nabokov's discoveries on butterfly classification.
I do hope I'll get the opportunity to get S.Blackwell's article to fully understand its rich promise.
S. E. Sweeney's "Backwards,Contrariwise,Downside Up:Thinking in Different Directions in Nabokov" was equally tantalizing - for Nabokov's kinaesthetic imagery has always struck a deep chord in me, mainly because there's something in the way he discovers "natural" patterns to express them through rythm and style, thereby evoking the sensation of broken symmetries, spirals, sudden thrusts and sweeping flights in his readers .
"Nabokov's characters often imagine themselves or, perhaps, try to imagine themselves in new positions in space. That is, they attempt to conceive of the body as moving in an entirely different direction. To cite just a few examples, consider Van walking on his hands in Ada, Vadim reversing his position at the end of an imaginary walk in Look at the Harlequins! or Philip Wild mentally erasing his body from the toes upwards in The Original of Laura. Many of Nabokov's other novels and stories also describe a protagonist's efforts, whether peripheral or pivotal, to mentally transcend the body's physical orientation. In figures of speech, meanwhile, he often compares instances of metaphysical thinking to an acrobatic feat ---- from the description of his father's elevation in Speak, Memory to the personification of thought as a trapeze artist in Bend Sinister. Such proprioceptive, kinaesthetic imagery suggests that Nabokov may have conceived of thought itself as analogous to the body's physical movement through space. Certainly, he repeatedly drew on this analogy to depict his characters' mental processes for readers, especially with regard to thinking of something new or unexpected. By describing, in his fiction, the effort to imagine one's body moving differently through space, Nabokov evokes the twists and turns of consciousness, emphasizes each narrative's implicit spatial form, and prompts readers to follow a mental trajectory that will lead them
somewhere they have never been before.."
.....................................................................................................................................................................
* - In the early XXth Century it inspired Sigmund Freud's phylogenetic fantasy (only published in 1985) "Overview of the Transference Neuroses," edited by Ilse Grubrich-Simitis; translated by Axel Hoffer and Peter T.Hoffer, Cambridge,Mass:Harvard Univ.Press,1987
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/