Subject
Re: [Fwd: Fetching Jewels From The Deep ....]
From
Date
Body
Arnie Perlstein: "...Wilson did _NOT_ discern Jane Austen's shadow stories... too entranced with the Freudian aspects of the novel to realize that the Freudian sexual experience of Emma was only a piece of the whole....Nabokov was smart enough to realize that Jane Austen's literary allusions were there ...for reasons other than to show off her own erudition, but I don't think he realized that these were actually important clues to the shadow story...As for your final comment, can you explain what you mean [ "Nabokov's eye for detail and the unexpected 'life' bubbling up, is shown at the end of his CD lecture when..."] Austen went even further--she deliberately created the impression in her novels that the minor characters were there for nothing...but covertly, she gave each of them an important thematic purpose, pointing to the shadow story."
JM: Touché, Arnie! I've been using the expression "shadow story" under the illusion that I knew what you meant.
Although I concur with you that Wilson was excessively entranced by some kind of Freudian "symbolism," I also cannot understand your words that the "Freudian sexual experience of Emma was only a piece of the whole," ..."one small 'tile' in the very complex 'mosaic' of the full shadow story of Emma, involving _all_ the major characters," so it'll be wise of me to stop engaging in even wider tesselations.
btw: In his lecture on Charles Dickens Nabokov refers to an example of "oblique description of speech...sometimes used to speed up or to concentrate a mood...Esther is persuading secretly married Ada to go with her to visit Richard..." which, in turn, reminds me of the paragraph in which Nabokov introduces Jane Austen's introductions... Would Jane Austen's insertion in "Ada," with that particular example, be just a coincidence?
Bend Sinister's "delicious death"in Thula ultimately led me to Zembla, and to Peter Lubin's "Kickshaws and Motley." Lubin details several syntactic tics (Wow! what a marvellous example for timely tropes...) derived from Nabokov's fondness of tmesis, such as the English phrasal tmesis, when an "expression rather than a word is ruptured by an alien verbal insertion. The original phrase may range from adjective-plus-noun to complete sentence. 'Ultimate dim Thule' qualifies as phrasal tmesis since 'Ultima Thula' and its variant 'ultimate Thule' are recognized expressions." No piece of cake, at all!
According to Lubin "Nabokov manipulates, remanipulates, obmanipulates the smallest details as well as the 'themes and motifs.' Isn't phrasal tmesis a syntactic equivalent of those 'specious lines of play' his books are filled with?" ... Tmesis is "the greater deception writ small. The mind apprehends the terminal words which it expects to find juxtaposed, and then must accommodate the alien phonemes thrust between...(W)e should not forget that rare brand of "anticipatory" or "proleptic" tmesis which Nabokov has induced in other, earlier writers. Here a phrase is perceived as being tmetically cleaved only in retrospect, for remote reasons the original author could hardly have guessed..."
In fact, one can only truly read Nabokov when we become re-readers.
Alexey Sklyarenko [answering "Who wrote a short-story about a father who climbed into a tree and disappeared in it?"] sends The Ballad of Longwood Glen ( That Sunday morning, at half past ten,/ Two cars crossed the creek and entered the glen./ In the first was Art Longwood, a local florist,/With his children and wife (now Mrs. Deforest.../...And the tree was suddenly full of noise,/ Conventioners, fishermen, freckled -boys. /Anacondas and pumas were mentioned by some,/And all kinds of humans continued to come").
JM: Thank you!
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/
JM: Touché, Arnie! I've been using the expression "shadow story" under the illusion that I knew what you meant.
Although I concur with you that Wilson was excessively entranced by some kind of Freudian "symbolism," I also cannot understand your words that the "Freudian sexual experience of Emma was only a piece of the whole," ..."one small 'tile' in the very complex 'mosaic' of the full shadow story of Emma, involving _all_ the major characters," so it'll be wise of me to stop engaging in even wider tesselations.
btw: In his lecture on Charles Dickens Nabokov refers to an example of "oblique description of speech...sometimes used to speed up or to concentrate a mood...Esther is persuading secretly married Ada to go with her to visit Richard..." which, in turn, reminds me of the paragraph in which Nabokov introduces Jane Austen's introductions... Would Jane Austen's insertion in "Ada," with that particular example, be just a coincidence?
Bend Sinister's "delicious death"in Thula ultimately led me to Zembla, and to Peter Lubin's "Kickshaws and Motley." Lubin details several syntactic tics (Wow! what a marvellous example for timely tropes...) derived from Nabokov's fondness of tmesis, such as the English phrasal tmesis, when an "expression rather than a word is ruptured by an alien verbal insertion. The original phrase may range from adjective-plus-noun to complete sentence. 'Ultimate dim Thule' qualifies as phrasal tmesis since 'Ultima Thula' and its variant 'ultimate Thule' are recognized expressions." No piece of cake, at all!
According to Lubin "Nabokov manipulates, remanipulates, obmanipulates the smallest details as well as the 'themes and motifs.' Isn't phrasal tmesis a syntactic equivalent of those 'specious lines of play' his books are filled with?" ... Tmesis is "the greater deception writ small. The mind apprehends the terminal words which it expects to find juxtaposed, and then must accommodate the alien phonemes thrust between...(W)e should not forget that rare brand of "anticipatory" or "proleptic" tmesis which Nabokov has induced in other, earlier writers. Here a phrase is perceived as being tmetically cleaved only in retrospect, for remote reasons the original author could hardly have guessed..."
In fact, one can only truly read Nabokov when we become re-readers.
Alexey Sklyarenko [answering "Who wrote a short-story about a father who climbed into a tree and disappeared in it?"] sends The Ballad of Longwood Glen ( That Sunday morning, at half past ten,/ Two cars crossed the creek and entered the glen./ In the first was Art Longwood, a local florist,/With his children and wife (now Mrs. Deforest.../...And the tree was suddenly full of noise,/ Conventioners, fishermen, freckled -boys. /Anacondas and pumas were mentioned by some,/And all kinds of humans continued to come").
JM: Thank you!
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/