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[ NABOKOV-LIST]... the dead center of the year in Pale Fire
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Walter Miale: A work of art has no importance whatever to society," Vladimir Nabokov insisted. "It is only important to the individual, and only the individual reader is important to me." Nabokov managed to pull off what Joyce and others could only muse about: to awaken from the nightmare of history.
J.Aisenberg: What if it turns out you're not playing chess with a concealed concealer but bouncing a ball off a brick wall? Nabokov entertains this idea in his work with a certain uneasiness, it lurks in his books, being routed and dismissed over and over again, but always remaining as a distinct possibility, the dead thing at the center of transparent colored rings.
Jansy Mello: Walter, your quote, arriving during the discussion at the List about Nabokov's concept of "species" and his emphasis on (individual) "specimens" made me realize the irony of VN's words on the unimportance of art to society and its value to the individual.
Until now I'd always interpreted it as a kind of defense of "ars gratia artis". It has now acquired an entirely new meaning to me (as an individual).
J.Aisenberg, novelists don't need to be consistent ( perhaps only their critics have to be). Is the sentece about the "dead thing at the center" Nabokov's own? I usually felt (very inconsistently and non-philosophically) that the center of a spinning universe might be a reference to TS Eliot's lines in The Four Quartets and not a "thing" at all.
Another sentence of VN's on "center" is to be found in Pale Fire, Kinbote's commentary to lines 1-4: "The poem was begun at the dead center of the year, a few minutes after midnight July 1".( I just realized that today is July 1)
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J.Aisenberg: What if it turns out you're not playing chess with a concealed concealer but bouncing a ball off a brick wall? Nabokov entertains this idea in his work with a certain uneasiness, it lurks in his books, being routed and dismissed over and over again, but always remaining as a distinct possibility, the dead thing at the center of transparent colored rings.
Jansy Mello: Walter, your quote, arriving during the discussion at the List about Nabokov's concept of "species" and his emphasis on (individual) "specimens" made me realize the irony of VN's words on the unimportance of art to society and its value to the individual.
Until now I'd always interpreted it as a kind of defense of "ars gratia artis". It has now acquired an entirely new meaning to me (as an individual).
J.Aisenberg, novelists don't need to be consistent ( perhaps only their critics have to be). Is the sentece about the "dead thing at the center" Nabokov's own? I usually felt (very inconsistently and non-philosophically) that the center of a spinning universe might be a reference to TS Eliot's lines in The Four Quartets and not a "thing" at all.
Another sentence of VN's on "center" is to be found in Pale Fire, Kinbote's commentary to lines 1-4: "The poem was begun at the dead center of the year, a few minutes after midnight July 1".( I just realized that today is July 1)
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/