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[NABOKOV-L] Ravings on Electra,
Lettrocalamities and... Darwinism, PS
Lettrocalamities and... Darwinism, PS
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Dear List,
The stories of murder and incest in "Ada or Ardor" ( and now "Ardor" may acquire a new meaning for me) , led me to wonder if we could understand why Van avoided Lucette, why Ada was as murderous as some portray her, why only after Demon's death could Van and Ada live together ,aso,... by linking Lettro-calamity to incest, through amber-Electra, and plays by Sophocles, Aeschylus and others.
I cannot remember Nabokov writing about Orestes, Iphigenia, Electra or Agamemnon.though. There were some who described an "Electra complex" as a feminine counterpart to the "Oedipus complex", a negligible clue.
Eugene O'Neill's adaptation of the trilogy written by Aeschylus ('Oresteia') in "Mourning becomes Electra" actualized the Greek myth to establish the family-life or a Northern general in the American Civil War (Agamemnon: General Ezra Mannon, Clytemnestra, Christine, Orestes is Orin, Electra, his daughter Lavinia.) Could VN have critically inserted references to him, or to Aeschylus?
Sibling incest, as present in the plays by Aeschylus, might have a weak indicator in Nabokov's recurrent use of a squirrel (Aeschylus?) *
As it is, I'm enjoying the side-show.
JM
..............................................................................................................................................
* The wonders of coincidence: today a friend was discussing explicit real-life/play references to Shakespeare, in the movie "Shakespeare in Love", and casually observed that nowadays we would not be struck by any news concerning a general killed by his wife and her lover, like it happened with Agamemnon. Next, by a different route and in a different context, I was led from Levi-Strauss to amber Electra, and to Lettrocalamities - and Agamemnon.
While trying to find out if the sound of the name "Aeschylus" had any relation to "squirrel" ( I found no confirmation), I found a discussion about Darwinism and Drama. Google-magic?
Below, the link and excerpts.
www.usu.edu/markdamen/clasdram/chapters/043gkorig.htm - 52k -
The Origins of Greek Theatre
..."By seeing the rise of drama this way, we can circumvent the positivistic bias-also called cultural Darwinism-which is innate in prior models and predicates an orderly accretion of events leading to the perfected "final form" of a species. Punctuated equilibrium doesn't demand that we seek any underlying logic behind the change from epic to lyric to drama..Rejecting cultural Darwinism brings additional benefits. For instance, no longer must the earlier forms of art that the original dramatists borrowed and reconfigured in creating their new ones be seen as "primitive" drama or failed attempts to make theatre. Epic and lyric poetry were simply different genres of literature playing to a different age, perfectly mature and viable forms of artistic expression for their day [...] Finally, a punk eek approach to the question of the early evolution of drama explains one more troublesome feature of the historical record, the prominence of dithyramb. Tragedy's rise was not inevitable [...] rather, it is a unique phenomenon, unlikely to have happened outside of Athens in the 500s BCE or without the agency of visionary men with tremendous sensitivity to the tastes and sensibilities of their day... If Aeschylus, for instance, had decided to become a dithyrambist instead of a tragedian-that is, if instead he had seen in dithyramb the potential for artistic expression that he saw and realized in tragedy-we could very well be talking about the triumph of dithyramb and asking ourselves what this "goat-song" genre was for which there is all but no evidence and, according to Aristotle, was the forerunner of the crowning achievement of Greek art in the Classical Age, the magnificent dithyramb."
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The stories of murder and incest in "Ada or Ardor" ( and now "Ardor" may acquire a new meaning for me) , led me to wonder if we could understand why Van avoided Lucette, why Ada was as murderous as some portray her, why only after Demon's death could Van and Ada live together ,aso,... by linking Lettro-calamity to incest, through amber-Electra, and plays by Sophocles, Aeschylus and others.
I cannot remember Nabokov writing about Orestes, Iphigenia, Electra or Agamemnon.though. There were some who described an "Electra complex" as a feminine counterpart to the "Oedipus complex", a negligible clue.
Eugene O'Neill's adaptation of the trilogy written by Aeschylus ('Oresteia') in "Mourning becomes Electra" actualized the Greek myth to establish the family-life or a Northern general in the American Civil War (Agamemnon: General Ezra Mannon, Clytemnestra, Christine, Orestes is Orin, Electra, his daughter Lavinia.) Could VN have critically inserted references to him, or to Aeschylus?
Sibling incest, as present in the plays by Aeschylus, might have a weak indicator in Nabokov's recurrent use of a squirrel (Aeschylus?) *
As it is, I'm enjoying the side-show.
JM
..............................................................................................................................................
* The wonders of coincidence: today a friend was discussing explicit real-life/play references to Shakespeare, in the movie "Shakespeare in Love", and casually observed that nowadays we would not be struck by any news concerning a general killed by his wife and her lover, like it happened with Agamemnon. Next, by a different route and in a different context, I was led from Levi-Strauss to amber Electra, and to Lettrocalamities - and Agamemnon.
While trying to find out if the sound of the name "Aeschylus" had any relation to "squirrel" ( I found no confirmation), I found a discussion about Darwinism and Drama. Google-magic?
Below, the link and excerpts.
www.usu.edu/markdamen/clasdram/chapters/043gkorig.htm - 52k -
The Origins of Greek Theatre
..."By seeing the rise of drama this way, we can circumvent the positivistic bias-also called cultural Darwinism-which is innate in prior models and predicates an orderly accretion of events leading to the perfected "final form" of a species. Punctuated equilibrium doesn't demand that we seek any underlying logic behind the change from epic to lyric to drama..Rejecting cultural Darwinism brings additional benefits. For instance, no longer must the earlier forms of art that the original dramatists borrowed and reconfigured in creating their new ones be seen as "primitive" drama or failed attempts to make theatre. Epic and lyric poetry were simply different genres of literature playing to a different age, perfectly mature and viable forms of artistic expression for their day [...] Finally, a punk eek approach to the question of the early evolution of drama explains one more troublesome feature of the historical record, the prominence of dithyramb. Tragedy's rise was not inevitable [...] rather, it is a unique phenomenon, unlikely to have happened outside of Athens in the 500s BCE or without the agency of visionary men with tremendous sensitivity to the tastes and sensibilities of their day... If Aeschylus, for instance, had decided to become a dithyrambist instead of a tragedian-that is, if instead he had seen in dithyramb the potential for artistic expression that he saw and realized in tragedy-we could very well be talking about the triumph of dithyramb and asking ourselves what this "goat-song" genre was for which there is all but no evidence and, according to Aristotle, was the forerunner of the crowning achievement of Greek art in the Classical Age, the magnificent dithyramb."
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/