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Re: children's rhymes
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Re: [NABOKV-L] children's rhymesSK-B [answers " VN considered Gogol's prose as "four-dimensional, at least. He may be compared to his contemporary, the mathematician Lobachevsky ..."] an intriguing ...reference... slightly misleading! Lobachevsky and Bolyai certainly "[co-]invented" Non-Euclidean Geometry independently... but not in the 4-dimensional sense apparently implied by VN...One must avoid confusing the concepts of dimension and euclideanism!! VN had in mind, I suppose, the emerging Theory of General Relativity ... unknown to Bolyai or Lobachevsky at the time.
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Can Jansy tell us if this quote ( all reality is a mask) pre- or post-dates VN's famous warning that references to reality should always (really!) be protected with quotational caution: "reality"?... 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)
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JM: My New Directions edition doesn't inform the original date of VN's biography of Gogol, but my translated copy acknowledges copyrights in 1944.
This being so the comparison bt. Gogol's four-dimensional prose and Lobachevsky must antecede "Reality, is the only word in the language that has no meaning without quotation marks." ( I know this sentence appears in Strong Opinions but I could not locate my copies at home to find the exact date of the interview.)
Lacan, as you know, considered material reality as pertaining to the "imaginary register", and I think VN would concur. Cf. SO, a 1962 interview:
In your new novel, Pale Fire, one of the characters says that reality is neither the subject nor the object of real art, which creates its own reality. What is that reality? Reality is a very subjective affair. I can only define it as a kind of gradual accumulation of information; and as specialization... You can get nearer and nearer, so to speak, to reality; but you never get near enough because reality is an infinite succession of steps, levels of perception, false bottoms, and hence unquenchable, unattainable...So that we live surrounded by more or less ghostly objects ...
You say that reality is an intensely subjective matter, but in your books it seems to me that you seem to take an almost perverse delight in literary deception. The fake move in a chess problem, the illusion of a solution or the conjuror's magic: ...all art is deception and so is nature; all is deception in that good cheat, from the insect that mimics a leaf to the popular enticements of procreation.
Nevertheless, when considering the concept of "species" ( 1935/37- but published in 2000, as a chapter on Father's Butterflies), VN's views depart from a different perspective...
Jansy
PS: Please, let me see your forthcoming CACM article on "The Fabrication of Reality".
(I always thought Tom Lehrer was mocking & accusing Lobachevsky of doing a thorough "research", but I never seriously considered the matter any further, just followed the lines.)
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Can Jansy tell us if this quote ( all reality is a mask) pre- or post-dates VN's famous warning that references to reality should always (really!) be protected with quotational caution: "reality"?... 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)
...................................
JM: My New Directions edition doesn't inform the original date of VN's biography of Gogol, but my translated copy acknowledges copyrights in 1944.
This being so the comparison bt. Gogol's four-dimensional prose and Lobachevsky must antecede "Reality, is the only word in the language that has no meaning without quotation marks." ( I know this sentence appears in Strong Opinions but I could not locate my copies at home to find the exact date of the interview.)
Lacan, as you know, considered material reality as pertaining to the "imaginary register", and I think VN would concur. Cf. SO, a 1962 interview:
In your new novel, Pale Fire, one of the characters says that reality is neither the subject nor the object of real art, which creates its own reality. What is that reality? Reality is a very subjective affair. I can only define it as a kind of gradual accumulation of information; and as specialization... You can get nearer and nearer, so to speak, to reality; but you never get near enough because reality is an infinite succession of steps, levels of perception, false bottoms, and hence unquenchable, unattainable...So that we live surrounded by more or less ghostly objects ...
You say that reality is an intensely subjective matter, but in your books it seems to me that you seem to take an almost perverse delight in literary deception. The fake move in a chess problem, the illusion of a solution or the conjuror's magic: ...all art is deception and so is nature; all is deception in that good cheat, from the insect that mimics a leaf to the popular enticements of procreation.
Nevertheless, when considering the concept of "species" ( 1935/37- but published in 2000, as a chapter on Father's Butterflies), VN's views depart from a different perspective...
Jansy
PS: Please, let me see your forthcoming CACM article on "The Fabrication of Reality".
(I always thought Tom Lehrer was mocking & accusing Lobachevsky of doing a thorough "research", but I never seriously considered the matter any further, just followed the lines.)
Search archive with Google:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
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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/