Dear Don,
Like you, I enjoy VN's creation of one protagonist
with two discrete ( or indiscrete) personalities, specially in "The Eye" ( which
you didn't think had any relation to the idea that inspired Machado de
Assis's "Pothumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas" , where the division, like in "The
Eye", has something to do with "before and after death" ).
Even more discretly still, we may discover this
kind of "split" permeating almost every VN novel like
the sometimes ghostly maid Blanche and sister Rose, or Lucette as "a
mermaid in Atlantis" bubbling inside a crystal glass in Terra (approximate
references). I'm sure RLS's kind of "split" is not the only option to
understand these doublings in VN - as most readers will certainly agree
without blinking an eye ( or two).
I've been reading Dennis Lehane's "Shutter Island",
whose plot develops in an insane asyllum built like a fortress in an
island. Cawley, one of the superintentends of the asyllum observed to a
detective who was investigating one of the inmates, said: " here we
approach the frightening beauty of a fully developed paranoid structure. If you
believed yourself to be the only possessor of the truth, then probably everyone
else would be lying and therefore, if everyone were lying any other
truth would probably be also a lie ..." ( I'm reading in
Portuguese so I don't have the exact wording in English).
VN would probably have enjoyed and
applied self-referential traps similar to those of the "liar's paradox" (
the paradox of Epimenides) which, in a way, demand such a "split" perception to
be "meta-psychologically" and metalinguistically apprehensible -
sometehing taken up by Pulitzer winning Douglas Hoffstadter
in "Goedel, Escher, Bach,the Art of the Fugue": All discrete Cretans lie, I
am a Cretan, therefore, I'm lying...
And so am I...like everyone else.
Jansy
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Wednesday, October 18, 2006 8:58
PM
Subject: [NABOKV-L] S-K-B
While not being convinced by CK's Jeckel &
Hyde thesis, I might mention that both THE EYE and LATH! certainly feature one
protagaonist with two discrete personalities Don
Johnson
Search the Nabokv-L archive at
UCSB
Contact the
Editors
All private editorial communications, without exception,
are read by both co-editors.
Visit Zembla
View Nabokv-L Policies