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[NABOKOV-L] Entropy
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GS: wrote that "...VN's works refuse to decrease their entropy..."
JM: I wish it were also in my power to refuse subjection to entropy. On second thoughts, though, I suppose that as long as readers exist, VN's works shall be safe. But I wonder now what did VN imply when he described an "irrevocably converging development" in Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle . In this novel time and space are split "because a gap of up to a hundred years one way or another existed between the two earths; a gap marked by a bizarre confusion of directional signs at the crossroads of passing time." And yet both Terra and Anti-Terra display "an essential sameness" and a "live organic reality". Then, two paragraphs later, we read that "two chess games with identical openings and identical end moves might ramify in an infinite number of variations, on one board and in two brains, at any middle stage of their irrevocably converging development". I think this assertion can be as true for chess-matches as for the convergence of the parallel spaces of Terra and Anti-Terra, or to the incestuous pair Van and Ada. In chess all the pieces in a particular match have to be placed onto the board right at the beginning of a game. Despite "the infinite number of variations" that generate the story of one´s life, a definite end is expected. This is not true for other kinds of game, such as the Chinese "Go" in which pieces can be added in a process of unceasing creation (Brazilian physicist Mario Novello believes that, as models, both games are compatible with our present reality). By bringing together chess-games and novel Nabokov might have implied that, when his book is examined by two brains - the author´s and the reader´s - a converging path will emerge in the end, after the uncountable variations that every reading allows are explored: will Terra and Anti-Terra come together in infinity?
Following a different path ( but still thinking of Lucette as a little mermaid swimming inside a bubble of prosecco) I re-read H.G.Wells' ( 1899!) "The Crystal Egg" to find out more about its "observed observer". The author ( careful to leave the rigorous annotations to an unseeing scientist, so as to give the observing reader the option to refuse the validity of what the scientist annotated) offers us a vision of a world inside an egg that carries itself as another egg lying inside itself. Next he gives us an alternative: either the crystal egg is situated, simultaneously, in two distinct worlds, or there are twin eggs that establish a fraternal connection that allows an observer to be observed, without one world interfering in the other ( or so it seemed at first). While there are fiction readers in the world shall Hugh Wells equally resist?
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JM: I wish it were also in my power to refuse subjection to entropy. On second thoughts, though, I suppose that as long as readers exist, VN's works shall be safe. But I wonder now what did VN imply when he described an "irrevocably converging development" in Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle . In this novel time and space are split "because a gap of up to a hundred years one way or another existed between the two earths; a gap marked by a bizarre confusion of directional signs at the crossroads of passing time." And yet both Terra and Anti-Terra display "an essential sameness" and a "live organic reality". Then, two paragraphs later, we read that "two chess games with identical openings and identical end moves might ramify in an infinite number of variations, on one board and in two brains, at any middle stage of their irrevocably converging development". I think this assertion can be as true for chess-matches as for the convergence of the parallel spaces of Terra and Anti-Terra, or to the incestuous pair Van and Ada. In chess all the pieces in a particular match have to be placed onto the board right at the beginning of a game. Despite "the infinite number of variations" that generate the story of one´s life, a definite end is expected. This is not true for other kinds of game, such as the Chinese "Go" in which pieces can be added in a process of unceasing creation (Brazilian physicist Mario Novello believes that, as models, both games are compatible with our present reality). By bringing together chess-games and novel Nabokov might have implied that, when his book is examined by two brains - the author´s and the reader´s - a converging path will emerge in the end, after the uncountable variations that every reading allows are explored: will Terra and Anti-Terra come together in infinity?
Following a different path ( but still thinking of Lucette as a little mermaid swimming inside a bubble of prosecco) I re-read H.G.Wells' ( 1899!) "The Crystal Egg" to find out more about its "observed observer". The author ( careful to leave the rigorous annotations to an unseeing scientist, so as to give the observing reader the option to refuse the validity of what the scientist annotated) offers us a vision of a world inside an egg that carries itself as another egg lying inside itself. Next he gives us an alternative: either the crystal egg is situated, simultaneously, in two distinct worlds, or there are twin eggs that establish a fraternal connection that allows an observer to be observed, without one world interfering in the other ( or so it seemed at first). While there are fiction readers in the world shall Hugh Wells equally resist?
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/