Subject
Re: [NABOKOV-LIST] [THOUGHTS] Gogol's "fourth dimension"; a "gory
trophy"
trophy"
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Date
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On 23/06/2008 22:21, "jansymello" <jansy@AETERN.US> quotes VN:
"A piece of most important information, the main structural idea of the
story is here deliberately masked by Gogol ( because all reality is a
mask).".."in Gogol's books the real plots are behind the obvious ones" (page
152)
>
1. Can Jansy tell us if this quote pre- or post-dates VN's famous warning
that references to reality should always (really!) be protected with
quotational caution: "reality"? I've taken this warning as a valuable but
teasing clue to Nabokovian epistemology. Being neither a tenured philosopher
nor a Quantum Cosmologist (dieu soit loue), VN the novelist/poet is not
required to give us formally consistent explanations for what David Deutsch
calls "The Fabric of Reality!" (See my forthcoming "The Fabrication of
Reality," CACM, July, 2008)
2. Are the missing "" around reality in the above citation significant? Has
VN dropped his own "mask" (that natural quotational caution) in order to
venture a serious definition of reality? If so, is he claiming more than the
existence of a deeper 'real' reality lurking below a layer (mask) that we
can penetrate with the proper effort and discernment? Allowing for the
brevity of this parenthetical remark, we logician bean-counters must still
point out that "all reality is a mask" does not imply that "all masks are
real." In other words, Googol's masks (whether deliberate or not) do not
necessarily hide deeper "truths" as VN seems to imply. Attentive re-readers
must distinguish the "clues," good, bad and entirely imagined. The
anagrammatical paper-chase, for example, has been rendered less creative by
computer programs that can mix'n'match character strings in all known
languages. Remarkably,
"To be or not to be, that is the question. Whether 'tis nobler in the mind
to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune ... " is an anagram of
"In one of the Bard's best-thought-of tragedies, our insistent hero, Hamlet,
queries on two fronts about how life turns rotten."
Does this alter your views on spooky anagrammatical significations?
3. So many paradoxes persist however many ""s we unleash or suppress. Gogol
and VN can cleverly mask their true plots and narrational intentions
(avoiding the boring obvious), but they can't risk being too impenetrable!
Nor can they avoid the innate ambiguities of La Condition HomoSapienne. In
Deutsche's MVI (Multiverse Interpretation) Reality, the ambiguous states of
photons in multi-slit interference experiments are resolved by adding as
many parallel universes as required to provide a universe for each of the
photons' quantum states. Who says Nature must be parsimonious?
Stan Kelly-Bootle.
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"A piece of most important information, the main structural idea of the
story is here deliberately masked by Gogol ( because all reality is a
mask).".."in Gogol's books the real plots are behind the obvious ones" (page
152)
>
1. Can Jansy tell us if this quote pre- or post-dates VN's famous warning
that references to reality should always (really!) be protected with
quotational caution: "reality"? I've taken this warning as a valuable but
teasing clue to Nabokovian epistemology. Being neither a tenured philosopher
nor a Quantum Cosmologist (dieu soit loue), VN the novelist/poet is not
required to give us formally consistent explanations for what David Deutsch
calls "The Fabric of Reality!" (See my forthcoming "The Fabrication of
Reality," CACM, July, 2008)
2. Are the missing "" around reality in the above citation significant? Has
VN dropped his own "mask" (that natural quotational caution) in order to
venture a serious definition of reality? If so, is he claiming more than the
existence of a deeper 'real' reality lurking below a layer (mask) that we
can penetrate with the proper effort and discernment? Allowing for the
brevity of this parenthetical remark, we logician bean-counters must still
point out that "all reality is a mask" does not imply that "all masks are
real." In other words, Googol's masks (whether deliberate or not) do not
necessarily hide deeper "truths" as VN seems to imply. Attentive re-readers
must distinguish the "clues," good, bad and entirely imagined. The
anagrammatical paper-chase, for example, has been rendered less creative by
computer programs that can mix'n'match character strings in all known
languages. Remarkably,
"To be or not to be, that is the question. Whether 'tis nobler in the mind
to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune ... " is an anagram of
"In one of the Bard's best-thought-of tragedies, our insistent hero, Hamlet,
queries on two fronts about how life turns rotten."
Does this alter your views on spooky anagrammatical significations?
3. So many paradoxes persist however many ""s we unleash or suppress. Gogol
and VN can cleverly mask their true plots and narrational intentions
(avoiding the boring obvious), but they can't risk being too impenetrable!
Nor can they avoid the innate ambiguities of La Condition HomoSapienne. In
Deutsche's MVI (Multiverse Interpretation) Reality, the ambiguous states of
photons in multi-slit interference experiments are resolved by adding as
many parallel universes as required to provide a universe for each of the
photons' quantum states. Who says Nature must be parsimonious?
Stan Kelly-Bootle.
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/