----- Original Message -----
Sent: Monday, January 12, 2004 2:34 AM
Subject: Re: Fw: Fw: more thoughts on the creepy
'Wingstroke'
Yes, I noticed the same when writing about TT for
my book, Nabokov at the Movies, particularly similar notions of death
and falling, which is something Don talks about in his essay in the The
Garland Companion. Kern's idea of death as “a gliding dream, a fluffy
fall" prefigures the pleasure R. and his ghostly companions experience as they
fall through layers of time, whereas this is
the one prospect that instils abject terror in Hugh. There are also parallel
notions of the ability to defy death through flight, i.e. the Superman episode
and Hugh's dream about being on an aeroplane at the end of the novel. This
connects back with Ivanov's "flight" at the end of Perfection and
also notions of earthbound
existence being similar to the dilemma of flightless birds, and the importance
of dreams and the imagination in overcoming such corporeal constraints.
Hermann Karlovich, for example, communicates this when he likens himself to
the penguin who “flies only in its sleep”.
Barbara Wyllie
SSEES/UCL
> This week I've been rereading Transparent Things and couldn't
help notice
> its distant kinship with Wingstroke, what with the sking
and quasi angel
> narrators and death themes.
>
Dane
>