Vladimir Nabokov

NABOKV-L post 0016577, Wed, 25 Jun 2008 14:00:24 -0300

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Re: [MUSINGS] children's rhymes
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J.Aisenberg: You did not mean literal ghosts. I thought this because Boyd is/was convinced that ...Yes, I know exactly what you mean, each time I read the book I feel I can see more and more of the lives of the servants, who seem to know more about what's going than Van and Ada do. [Van ...comes upon Blanche ...attempts to seduce her and she reels off a curious French speech...Van thinks it sounds stiff and bookish and it dampens his ardor.Later that day...he and Ada come across a cheap romantic novel ...that belongs to one of the servants--the novel Blanche got her speech from? ]

JM: Yes, that was my point: there are hidden independent, but sustained, operatic plots to follow in gesture, sound and fury.
And there are surprises with myriads of "ancillary" patches, important by themselves for they are mainly "living words" more than theyn are lost dream-state chains of ideas. It is as if VN, vying with Freud, invented a "literary unconscious" all of his own.

Stan Kelly-Bootle: Is Nabokov "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? [...] Gogol's masks (whether deliberate or not) do not necessarily hide deeper "truths" [...] 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?"

JM: Stan questioned those "deeper realities". I have the impression that in a former message he mentioned multiple "dimensions" and "parallel simultaneous realities": perhaps, instead of reasoning in "depth", we might follow "time-forks" to aim at a "symphonic-syntonic" effect, instead of attribute more weight to one information over another? "Simultaneous truths"?
The "anagrammatical" paper-chase was a cryptographed one,to boot: is one level more "real" than the others? VN confessed he interspersed false clues and wrong leads...can we trust his word? Why not be simply spooked by "coincidental", "random" or "fateful"anagrammatical significations which have run out of control to obey the elusive workings of language and signification?
"What is truth said gesting Pilate and didn't wait for an answer...?" = when I said that "Lacan...considered material reality as pertaining to the imaginary register" I forgot to specify that I mean "material reality as perceived by our senses". I'd rather search after some kind of general "truth" than chase after someone else's specific "reality" ...

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