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Re: THOUGHTS re: consistency
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Date
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Jay Livingston: That brunette on his arm...was Lolly Hayes, an up-and-coming starlet. Hope you had fun, Clark.
And didn't Rita Hayworth look stunning last night...
JM: Besides Lolita Haze, we find Rita...[Cf. I would be a knave to say, and the reader a fool to believe, that the shock of losing Lolita cured me of pederosis[...] Solitude was corrupting me [...] This is how Rita enters the picture.[...]She was twice Lolita's age and three quarters of mine: a very slight, dark-haired, pale-skinned adult[...] - I think she had some Spanish or Babylonian blood[...]Dear Rita! We cruised together for two dim years, from summer 1950 to summer 1952[...] I told her I was trying to trace a girl and plug that girl's bully. Rita solemnly approved of the plan[...]
Stan K-B (on consistency, to GS): [...]Wonderful citations that remind us of VN's blistering genius _as a novelist_. One of the hallmarks is the ability to create "convincing" characters who may or may not "agree" with the writer's current opinions[...]It's not "inconsistent" to replace or refurbish your opinions in the light of new evidence or fresh pondering. Au contraire, that's central to the rational intellect embodied in the "scientific method." Novelists/dramatists, more so than poets, perhaps, have the luxury (duty?) of inventing "mouths" through which opinions can be mooted and bandied pro'n'con.
JM: While searching for Rita, in "Lolita", I came across a spec ial instance of "consistency", directly from HH's mouth (more than the recognition that his "accursed nature could not change", the symptomatic consistency like the scorpion's in the old parable).
Here it is: I have often noticed that we are inclined to endow our friends with the stability of type that literary characters acquire in the reader's mind. No matter how many times we reopen "King Lear," never shall we find the good king banging his tankard in high revelry, all woes forgotten, at a jolly reunion with all three daughters and their lapdogs. Never will Emma rally, revived by the sympathetic salts in Flaubert's father's timely tear. Whatever evolution this or that popular character has gone through between the book covers, his fate is fixed in our minds, and, similarly, we expect our friends to follow this or that logical and conventional pattern we have fixed for them. Thus X will never compose the immortal music that would clash with the second-rate symphonies he has accustomed us to. Y will never commit murder. Under no circumstances can Z ever betray us. We have it all arranged in our minds, and the less often we see a particular person the more satisfying it is to check how obediently he conforms to our notion of him every time we hear of him. Any deviation in the fates we have ordained would strike us as not only anomalous but unethical. We would prefer not to have known at all our neighbor, the retired hot-dog stand operator, if it turns out he has just produced the greatest book of poetry his age has seen.
Umberto Eco describes the immutable qualities in epics, fairy-tales, even novels in which "characters get installed as natives in our memory, as if they'd existed ever since in our parents' memory: young as Methusalem and millennial, like Peter Pan." For him, when we learn that things shall always happen in the way they are told in a story, despite our fears and desires, we may then experience a thrill that results from one's realization that we are submitted to an inexorable destiny. Unaltered relationships and characters in works of fiction express one of the functions of literature, namely, to instruct the reader about the unfathomable design of fate: "Unchangeable stories teach us how to die and literature humbles us into accepting death and destiny" (Eco,2001).
If historical facts can be variously interpreted and testimonies modified, we are often invited to review our convictions, should they prove to have been mistaken. The need of constant reformulations doesn't arise in literature: sentences such as Sherlock Holmes was unmarried, or Anna Karenin killed herself are always valid as original "textual facts" that cannot be refuted.
In this respect we find Nabokov's (1944) own assessment*. In a letter to Edmund Wilson he mentioned, informally, that whereas science is always open to revision (changing the perspective from where we look at nature), a work of art is not: his concepts about classification of butterflies or on evolution might "remain a wonderful and indispensable thing for some 25 years, after which another fellow will show how wrong I was in this or that. Herein lies the difference between science and art".
....
* already brought up in the list in postings related to "science and art".
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And didn't Rita Hayworth look stunning last night...
JM: Besides Lolita Haze, we find Rita...[Cf. I would be a knave to say, and the reader a fool to believe, that the shock of losing Lolita cured me of pederosis[...] Solitude was corrupting me [...] This is how Rita enters the picture.[...]She was twice Lolita's age and three quarters of mine: a very slight, dark-haired, pale-skinned adult[...] - I think she had some Spanish or Babylonian blood[...]Dear Rita! We cruised together for two dim years, from summer 1950 to summer 1952[...] I told her I was trying to trace a girl and plug that girl's bully. Rita solemnly approved of the plan[...]
Stan K-B (on consistency, to GS): [...]Wonderful citations that remind us of VN's blistering genius _as a novelist_. One of the hallmarks is the ability to create "convincing" characters who may or may not "agree" with the writer's current opinions[...]It's not "inconsistent" to replace or refurbish your opinions in the light of new evidence or fresh pondering. Au contraire, that's central to the rational intellect embodied in the "scientific method." Novelists/dramatists, more so than poets, perhaps, have the luxury (duty?) of inventing "mouths" through which opinions can be mooted and bandied pro'n'con.
JM: While searching for Rita, in "Lolita", I came across a spec ial instance of "consistency", directly from HH's mouth (more than the recognition that his "accursed nature could not change", the symptomatic consistency like the scorpion's in the old parable).
Here it is: I have often noticed that we are inclined to endow our friends with the stability of type that literary characters acquire in the reader's mind. No matter how many times we reopen "King Lear," never shall we find the good king banging his tankard in high revelry, all woes forgotten, at a jolly reunion with all three daughters and their lapdogs. Never will Emma rally, revived by the sympathetic salts in Flaubert's father's timely tear. Whatever evolution this or that popular character has gone through between the book covers, his fate is fixed in our minds, and, similarly, we expect our friends to follow this or that logical and conventional pattern we have fixed for them. Thus X will never compose the immortal music that would clash with the second-rate symphonies he has accustomed us to. Y will never commit murder. Under no circumstances can Z ever betray us. We have it all arranged in our minds, and the less often we see a particular person the more satisfying it is to check how obediently he conforms to our notion of him every time we hear of him. Any deviation in the fates we have ordained would strike us as not only anomalous but unethical. We would prefer not to have known at all our neighbor, the retired hot-dog stand operator, if it turns out he has just produced the greatest book of poetry his age has seen.
Umberto Eco describes the immutable qualities in epics, fairy-tales, even novels in which "characters get installed as natives in our memory, as if they'd existed ever since in our parents' memory: young as Methusalem and millennial, like Peter Pan." For him, when we learn that things shall always happen in the way they are told in a story, despite our fears and desires, we may then experience a thrill that results from one's realization that we are submitted to an inexorable destiny. Unaltered relationships and characters in works of fiction express one of the functions of literature, namely, to instruct the reader about the unfathomable design of fate: "Unchangeable stories teach us how to die and literature humbles us into accepting death and destiny" (Eco,2001).
If historical facts can be variously interpreted and testimonies modified, we are often invited to review our convictions, should they prove to have been mistaken. The need of constant reformulations doesn't arise in literature: sentences such as Sherlock Holmes was unmarried, or Anna Karenin killed herself are always valid as original "textual facts" that cannot be refuted.
In this respect we find Nabokov's (1944) own assessment*. In a letter to Edmund Wilson he mentioned, informally, that whereas science is always open to revision (changing the perspective from where we look at nature), a work of art is not: his concepts about classification of butterflies or on evolution might "remain a wonderful and indispensable thing for some 25 years, after which another fellow will show how wrong I was in this or that. Herein lies the difference between science and art".
....
* already brought up in the list in postings related to "science and art".
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/