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Re: THOUGHTS: Shade's Mockingbird
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J.Aisenberg:I thought the sense of an answer always eluding our passionate readerly search was the point. Doesn't Shade's epiphany over the "mountain" "fountain" confusion point to this. What's imortant is that one feels there must be something more than this life, and that the complex skein of the phenomena existence reflects this. When we look too hard, become obsessed, the pattern his characters think they can find in life becomes a distorted mirror of their egos, hence Kinbote's attempt to assimilate the poem to his lost-kindom, which was probably only just a delusion anyway[...] JA describes "the whimsical nature of Nabokov's none the less constant and consistent metaphysical thinking." and adds that the "common-sensical people are the ones who believe in an after-life."
JM: I agree with you that VN offers "the sense of an answer always eluding our passionate search", that he suggests that there is "something more than this life", that his use of a certain "referential mania" allows his characters to express and be limited to "a distorted mirror of egos" that impede their reaching-out in order to rid themselves from the limitations by their restricted imaginings. At the same time VN makes us share in his meta-literary metaphysical questionings as if ( and here I tread on muskovy-glass) he, Nabokov, had hoped an answer would one day be reached - one with a retrospective redemptory effect.
In Shade's "Pale Fire" we find a sincerely serious observation than may be related to JA's note on "common-sense" :
So why join in the vulgar laughter? Why
Scorn a hereafter* none can verify:
[...]
It isn't that we dream too wild a dream:
The trouble is we do not make it seem
Sufficiently unlikely; for the most
230 We can think up is a domestic ghost.
* - The Russian word potustoronnost is sometimes translated as "the otherworld", but it also appears in English as "the hereafter". The latter bears all the trappings of our all too human spaciotemporal world and our verbal common-sense logic and syntax. This limitation is not present in "the otherworld" ( it can be seen either as "eternal", pertaining to a parallel universe or to the possible-worlds theory of fiction).
I don't know if there is any research about in what circumstances VN employed this word in Russian in his works in general, and why he emphasized the English "hereafter" in "Pale Fire", the consequences of this.
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JM: I agree with you that VN offers "the sense of an answer always eluding our passionate search", that he suggests that there is "something more than this life", that his use of a certain "referential mania" allows his characters to express and be limited to "a distorted mirror of egos" that impede their reaching-out in order to rid themselves from the limitations by their restricted imaginings. At the same time VN makes us share in his meta-literary metaphysical questionings as if ( and here I tread on muskovy-glass) he, Nabokov, had hoped an answer would one day be reached - one with a retrospective redemptory effect.
In Shade's "Pale Fire" we find a sincerely serious observation than may be related to JA's note on "common-sense" :
So why join in the vulgar laughter? Why
Scorn a hereafter* none can verify:
[...]
It isn't that we dream too wild a dream:
The trouble is we do not make it seem
Sufficiently unlikely; for the most
230 We can think up is a domestic ghost.
* - The Russian word potustoronnost is sometimes translated as "the otherworld", but it also appears in English as "the hereafter". The latter bears all the trappings of our all too human spaciotemporal world and our verbal common-sense logic and syntax. This limitation is not present in "the otherworld" ( it can be seen either as "eternal", pertaining to a parallel universe or to the possible-worlds theory of fiction).
I don't know if there is any research about in what circumstances VN employed this word in Russian in his works in general, and why he emphasized the English "hereafter" in "Pale Fire", the consequences of this.
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/