On Sandy P. Klein's
posting of Alexander Nazaryan's article (http://www.brooklynrail.org/) ["Lolita may be a coquette, but it is the boundless
possibility of English that is the true object of Humbert Humbert’s lust.
An exemplary polymath, Nabokov found himself enthralled more by the
near-infinite cornucopia afforded by words; the lives drawn by them
sometimes seem secondary."]
Stan K-B notes that: ' In
the interests of the Nabokovian linguistic precision ...a key notion in modern
linguistics is that the “cornucopia afforded by words” is not “near-infinite”
but truly infinite.' [...] What is arcane and enthralling is that, given
an arbitrary mapping of integers to letters/words/sentences, the entire
Nabokovian published corpus can be found embedded in sequences of the digits of
(Greek) PI! "[...] On "Nazaryan’s conjecture that HH’s real lust was for words
rather than for nymphets. Really? That would lead to a drastic re-reading of
“Lolita” the novel! We would now seem to have HH inventing his carnal
adventures; are Lo and his other victims merely figments of a frustrated but
highly literate imagination? "
Joseph Aisenberg agrees "one
hundred percent, but I think the critic was merely echoing that old idea that
Nabokov's novel was a record of his love affair with the English languange [...]
The critic took this idea somewhat literally [...] it seems like the idea of
linguistic proxy, while not being exactly the heart of the book,
represents a certain Quixotic something [...] I always wondered, is artistic
perfection really much of a palliative for Humbert? Because if it is, then
Humbert doesn't really believe, as he says, that he has only words to play
with."
JM: Stan, "the boundless possibility
of English" and a truly infinite "cornucupia afforded by words" is,
indeed, quite a long stretch! I wonder, though,
how this demarcation and mapping of "letters/words/sentences of
the entire Nabokovian published corpus" to reach PI has been achieved ( I'm
assuming the news is that it's an exclusive quality of VN's literal
patterning)?
[ to JA} By "linguistic proxy" do you mean a fetish? Because
VN also inspired Shade to write (lines 949-952):
And all the time, and all
the time, my love,
You too are
there, beneath the word, above
The
syllable, to underscore and stress
The vital rhythm.
M.Roth:[...][...] the "aunts and
orphans" thread and the Cedarn thread unite in Mrs. Browning's "Aurora Leigh,"
[...]"As when you paint your portrait for a friend,/Who keeps it in a drawer
and looks at it/Long after he has ceased to love you, just/To hold together what
he was and is. That's precisely what "PF" is: an attempt by John
Shade to hold together what he was and is [...] "cedarn shade" was indeed a well-known
cliche [...]Interesting too that
most of these uses of cedarn carry with them Milton's original context--a
paradise or hereafter, Arcadian or Elysian. "Ravenstone," of course, comes
from the German Rabenstein, the place of the gallows, which is mentioned in
Goethe's Faust[...] Baring-Gould writes: "A German name for [the gallows] is the
raven's stone, not only, perhaps, because raven's come to it, but because the
raven was the sacred bird of Odin." Odin is easily tied the Erl-King, and round
and round we go [...].
JM: Round and round we go...
and I forgot to add the raven mentioned by J.A.Haney in his comments to "The Slovo" ( The Song
of Igor's
Campaign): "Celtic
deity Mortigan, the goddess of war and death (cf. Russian Maria Morevna),
on whose shoulders perched a raven and a squirrel."
I agree with you, PF represent a poet's attempt to
"hold together what he was and is" but I would rather consider it in
relation to Nabokov himself.
Like in "Lenore" or in Goethe's Romantic "arcady"
themes, Nabokov was dealing with loss, permanent loss (grief for a
lost childhood, child-loves, Russia and language) when he developped PF and
a Zemblan dream.
Btw, Wolfgang Iser ( "Das Fiktive and das
Imaginäre"), compares Virgil's eclogues and Sannazaro's, Sidney's
and W.Alexander 's works on Arcadia, to illustrate
how, for a poet that is grieving for a lost love, to search
for Arcadia doesn't imply in an attempt to recover a
lost paradise, but to find a place where it is possible to mourn for
it.
Although the references to Arcady are more insistent in
PF, I think most of VN's works are, among other things, a
superb ellaboration of life's experiences of deep and
irreparable loss: Ada, Lolita, Pnin,...