Still following the Millhauser thread initiated by SB I accidentaly
reached a sighting about Philip Pullman, reported years ago at the
Nab-L, only because the reviewer mentioned Millhauser.* But, going
back to some of SB's points [ "Within the space of one allusively
dense paragraph, we read of "the monkey cage at Beardsley Park Zoo" in
Connecticut [a real place!], Pike's Peak, and Huck Finn.The paragraph also
mentions "the whaling ship at Mystic Seaport" ...built in New Bedford when
Herman Melville departed that city on his whaling adventure. What's more,
the whole paragraph is built as a reference to Saul Steinberg's "The World as
Seen From 9th Ave.", the New Yorker's cover of March 29, 1976--a humorous
anticipatory reference to the hoped-for place of publication?"], I
extracted a small selection of references, related
to Melville, from "Bend Sinister" and "Lolita," Nabokov's first
two American novels which share very subtle, but surprising, moods and
indications.**
Lolita: "One group, jointly with the
Canadians, established a weather station on Pierre Point in Melville Sound.
Another group, equally misguided, collected plankton." (the Beardsley
entries are omitted since they pop up all over the novel)
Bend Sinister (foreword): "A chance selection
of iambic incidents culled from the prose of Moby Dick appears in the guise of
'a famous American poem'"
and,as indicated by VN, in the
same mood as Humbert's polar-expedition report, we get to Chapter
Twelve: "He looked up various odds and ends he had stored at odd
moments for an essay which he had never written and would never write because by
now he had forgotten its leading idea, its secret combination...A newspaper
clipping mentioned that the State Entomologist had retired to become Adviser on
Shade Trees, and one wondered whether this was not some dainty oriental
euphemism for death. On the next slip of paper he had transcribed passages from
a famous American poem:
A curious sight — these bashful bears./These timid warrior
whalemen
And now the time of tide has come;/The ship casts off her
cables
It is not shown on any map;True places never are
This lovely light, it lights not me;/All loveliness is anguish —
"
We can expect Melville's "iambic incidents"( that tranform some of
the lines from Moby Dick turn it into an "American poem") to
reappear in Nabokov's other novels, but without any
direct reference to Mellville's name and writings.
...............................................................................................................................
* - "Build your literary house on the borderlands, as the English writer
Philip Pullman has done, and you may find that your work is recommended by
booksellers, as a stopgap between installments of Harry Potter...Yet all mystery
resides there, in the margins, between life and death, childhood and adulthood,
Newtonian and quantum, “serious” and “genre” literature. And it is from the
confrontation with mystery that the truest stories have always drawn their
power. One encounters the unassuageable ache of the imagined past, for example,
at a more or less implicit level, in American writers from Cooper and Hawthorne
through Faulkner and Chandler, right down to Steven Millhauser
and Jonathan Franzen...While Pullman alludes to Nabokov
(one of the characters in The Subtle Knife voyages to Nova Zembla), his
paired Oxfords stand in a very different relation from that of Ada's Terra and
Antiterra, which reflect and comment only upon each other, locked in a
transdimensional self-regard which in turn mirrors that of the vain Van
Veen. Instead, Pullman has consciously and overtly founded the
structure of his fictional universe on the widely if not universally accepted
"many-worlds hypothesis," derived from quantum physics—in His Dark Materials
there will eventually turn out to be (rather conservatively) "millions" of such
worlds, though in the end Pullman has only guided us through half a dozen of
them.Lyra's and ours are only two among the infinite number of possible Oxfords,
all of which, according to the hypothesis at its most extreme,
exist."
Volume 51, Number 5 · March 25, 2004 "Dust & Daemons" by
Michael Chabon.
** - It's difficult to point them out when they arise from an an
excess of miscellaneous items, newspaper clippings
with information about pre-historic art and extinct animals, items about
nostalgia, aso, which one assumes Nabokov collected in a shoe-box
filled with notecards. Some of them provide doubtful
links...[as Krug's perception that "he and his son
and wife and everybody else are merely my whims and megrims" and
Humbert's aurochs, "glacial drifts, drumlins, and
gremlins, and kremlins" (ie: megrim/gremlin)].
Another flimsy whimsy link: (Bend Sinister's "...that bit about the delicious death of an Ohio honey
hunter (for my humour's sake I shall preserve the style in which I once
narrated it at Thula to a lounging circle of my Russian friends) and a cake from a 1950 Agatha Christie novel, one
which Humbert significantly mentions by name ( "A Murder is
Announced") i.e, "Mr. Patrick. He called it Delicious Death. My
cake! I will not have my cake called that!" / "It was a compliment really," said
Miss Blacklock. "He meant it was worth dying to eat such a
cake.".