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Re: Fw: [NABOKV-L] [NABOKOV-L] A muderder's fancy prose
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DN: a translation of VN's "The Word", a pirate version anonymously signed "L.V.", that has been kicking around the internet for some time,[...] my (previous and legitimate) translation of this story [...] has been included in the most recent edition of The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov (Knopf), and that someone who publishes an unsigned plagiarized work is a thief and a coward.
JM: Thank you for informing us about the inclusion of "The Word" in a legitimate translation in the most recent edition of VN's stories. I fully sympathize with you in your indignation against pirate versions.
J.A.: I realized you were looking more deeply into the epistemological quiddity of the phrase [...] I'm still not quite certain what the precise boundaries of your speculation on this front are [...] Do you mean that Kinbote often experiences a freedom from euphemisms? As in he's straightforward and direct about sexuality? Cause I would disagree. [...] In fact I always thought he was a lot more vague than H.H., but perhaps I misunderstood your point. I know I don't know what you mean by the obscene being "outside the scene", that sounds a little like deconstructionist talk.
JM: From the informed and articulate article you sent on Kubrick's movies* I extracted a few sentences which led me to conclude that you know what "obscene:ouside the scene" means. Perhaps I could add then:"outside the limits, in excess (hybris)". Violence, erotism and mystic experiences often touch this area that seems to lie outside the regulated boundaries of "words". VN, so I assume, was able to experience "otherwordly" intimations and he often tried to indicate this in his books and stories. Therefore he could delve deep into our "human soul", in its loftiest and its most degraded expressions, and, in your words, could turn "an aesthetic limitation into an amazing advantage". We often forget that VN was endowed with sinesthesia and that this probably was ever present in his relationship with words and prose. Independently of our abilities to understand him in Russian, English or French there'll always be a special quality in his writing that remains elusive to the common reader. I also wonder about the fetichistic, enchanted or animistic power of certain "words" as they were employed by VN.
I'm unable, at present, to explain why I thought Kinbote was more exempt than HH from "euphemisms". Van and Ada certainly were free - and in any case I didn't have in mind four-letter words ( these only add noise,shock, color or smell to what is indescribable as such).
btw: Speaking about concrete letters and words, I don't remember any reference, among the various meanings offered to the word "bodkin", to its use in the process of hand-printing. I came across:"it took him a minute exactly to get his setting rule, bodkin,composing-stick and galley out of the locked cupboard where they were kept. These were his own [...] Tyvydordow wpent no time in distributing the type from the reserves of the thirty-five letters and fifteen punctuation marks..."
Later on, in this same novel: " he picked up one or two letters from the violated upper-case, and from habit let them fall into what could have been their right places[...] Tomorrow I shall start downstairs with the monotype. Onto the folded apron he put his composing stick, his setting-rule, his shears, the sponge, and the bodkin in its cork for removing wrong letters, and with two movements of his hands made them into a compact parcel [...] I shall throw them in the river." (CF.Penelope Fiztgerald, "The Beginning of Spring",pg 40-122,Flamingo, 1989)
...............................................................................................................................................................................
*Joseph Aisenberg - A Clockwork Orange http://www.brightlightsfilm.com/61/61clockwork.html)
Excerpts:
To watch Stanley Kubrick's 1971 adaptation of Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange is to enter a nightmare, a curiously frigid funhouse inferno where human values have been turned upside down. The ordinary order of things has been made stale, ugly and repressive; repulsive brutality has been given a fluid allure, a breathless excitement. [...]In the decades since its release, critics have been pretty passionately split on the subject[...] an appreciation of the director by James Naremore, the author seemed oddly uneasy in his critical assessment of the movie's ultimate value[...] Burgess eventually wearied of defending it, grew to wish he had never written the book. Kubrick was pompous. "Although a certain amount of hypocrisy exists about it, everyone is fascinated by violence[...] Our interest in violence in part reflects the fact that on the subconscious level we are very little different from our primitive ancestors . . ." He argued that the film's violent content did not provide an audience with the easy rhetorical set-ups that usually made its consumption guilt-free[...] it remains, as Gore Vidal once said of the novel, "chilling and entirely other." Not to mention that the kernel of primitive truth in the material remains ever relevant[...].you still can't help feeling these filmmakers were really trying to do something. They shrugged off all the old rules, the generations of genericism that had previously dictated the spreading of creamy predigested bromides over everything, so anything would go down nice in the end[...] After several viewings, the film's walloping force strikes one now as not being much related to the dramatic ideas at stake in its narrative scaffolding about free-choice either[...] "The power of the story is in the character of Alex," Kubrick told an interviewer, "who wins you over somehow, like Richard III despite his wickedness, because of his intelligence and wit and total honesty. He represents the id, the savage repressed side of our nature which guiltlessly enjoys the same pleasures of rape."[...] 'Everything's rotten. Why shouldn't I do what I want? They're worse than I am.' In the new mood . . . people want to believe the hyperbolic worst, want to believe in the degradation of the victims[...]It's the crux of Kubrick's approach. "I'd say my intention . . . was to try to see the violence from Alex's point of view,"[...] "It was necessary to find a way of stylizing the violence, just as Burgess does by his writing style."[...] Alex, in Kubrick's film, is really no more than a self-centered sociopath who rapes, batters and steals for kicks while seeing himself in heroic terms as less corrupt than those he destroys, as the one who is essentially wronged[...].the director's feelings about his antihero were somewhat mixed. "Alex, like Richard [III] is a character whom you should dislike and fear," Kubrick said in an interview with Penelope Houston, "and yet you find yourself drawn very quickly into his world and find yourself seeing things through his eyes[...] What's so striking about A Clockwork Orange, and what probably got on these critics' nerves, is that Kubrick had progressed so much as a filmmaker he was able to successfully do here what he had failed at in his somewhat satisfying 1962 adaptation of Lolita. In that earlier picture, Humbert Humbert's quest for underage nymphets became a singular yearning for a very sexually mature-looking Dolores Haze. The point to Vladimir Nabokov's great novel was in Humbert's feverish sexual obsession, his wild hyperbolic projections and witty self-justifications. The film turned the book's tricky game of moral perception into an objective reality where Humbert, despite desiring an underage girl, came across as a suave, sincere, desperately well-meaning lover manipulated and cheated by everyone else around him, and not the "vain and cruel wretch"Nabokov wrote his novel about. Though vestiges of the written character's nature remain, despite much cleansing[...] all these do is give the film's situations and characters a cold-fish unpleasantness that stews throughout without ever quite coming to fruition [...]By contrast, A Clockwork Orange totally and overwhelmingly immerses the viewer in the character's state of mind[...] You try to pinpoint exactly where the line between both lies, which is probably being plugged as two sides of the same ugliness, and all you come up with is a queasy ambivalence that makes parsing the story's message impossible; a viewer's own crude urges and fears start to trickle into the background of what's playing across the screen. What I mean is that the audience - never told precisely where they stand in relation to what goes on - projects its own subconscious feelings onto what Kubrick dramatizes through Alex[...]That the film attempts to provoke responses in viewers they may not be able to fully articulate, that Kubrick himself may not have been able to fully articulate, I think goes without saying. But ascribing a rigorous meta-moral to these things, as critics have permitted themselves to do without the least self-control [...].
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JM: Thank you for informing us about the inclusion of "The Word" in a legitimate translation in the most recent edition of VN's stories. I fully sympathize with you in your indignation against pirate versions.
J.A.: I realized you were looking more deeply into the epistemological quiddity of the phrase [...] I'm still not quite certain what the precise boundaries of your speculation on this front are [...] Do you mean that Kinbote often experiences a freedom from euphemisms? As in he's straightforward and direct about sexuality? Cause I would disagree. [...] In fact I always thought he was a lot more vague than H.H., but perhaps I misunderstood your point. I know I don't know what you mean by the obscene being "outside the scene", that sounds a little like deconstructionist talk.
JM: From the informed and articulate article you sent on Kubrick's movies* I extracted a few sentences which led me to conclude that you know what "obscene:ouside the scene" means. Perhaps I could add then:"outside the limits, in excess (hybris)". Violence, erotism and mystic experiences often touch this area that seems to lie outside the regulated boundaries of "words". VN, so I assume, was able to experience "otherwordly" intimations and he often tried to indicate this in his books and stories. Therefore he could delve deep into our "human soul", in its loftiest and its most degraded expressions, and, in your words, could turn "an aesthetic limitation into an amazing advantage". We often forget that VN was endowed with sinesthesia and that this probably was ever present in his relationship with words and prose. Independently of our abilities to understand him in Russian, English or French there'll always be a special quality in his writing that remains elusive to the common reader. I also wonder about the fetichistic, enchanted or animistic power of certain "words" as they were employed by VN.
I'm unable, at present, to explain why I thought Kinbote was more exempt than HH from "euphemisms". Van and Ada certainly were free - and in any case I didn't have in mind four-letter words ( these only add noise,shock, color or smell to what is indescribable as such).
btw: Speaking about concrete letters and words, I don't remember any reference, among the various meanings offered to the word "bodkin", to its use in the process of hand-printing. I came across:"it took him a minute exactly to get his setting rule, bodkin,composing-stick and galley out of the locked cupboard where they were kept. These were his own [...] Tyvydordow wpent no time in distributing the type from the reserves of the thirty-five letters and fifteen punctuation marks..."
Later on, in this same novel: " he picked up one or two letters from the violated upper-case, and from habit let them fall into what could have been their right places[...] Tomorrow I shall start downstairs with the monotype. Onto the folded apron he put his composing stick, his setting-rule, his shears, the sponge, and the bodkin in its cork for removing wrong letters, and with two movements of his hands made them into a compact parcel [...] I shall throw them in the river." (CF.Penelope Fiztgerald, "The Beginning of Spring",pg 40-122,Flamingo, 1989)
...............................................................................................................................................................................
*Joseph Aisenberg - A Clockwork Orange http://www.brightlightsfilm.com/61/61clockwork.html)
Excerpts:
To watch Stanley Kubrick's 1971 adaptation of Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange is to enter a nightmare, a curiously frigid funhouse inferno where human values have been turned upside down. The ordinary order of things has been made stale, ugly and repressive; repulsive brutality has been given a fluid allure, a breathless excitement. [...]In the decades since its release, critics have been pretty passionately split on the subject[...] an appreciation of the director by James Naremore, the author seemed oddly uneasy in his critical assessment of the movie's ultimate value[...] Burgess eventually wearied of defending it, grew to wish he had never written the book. Kubrick was pompous. "Although a certain amount of hypocrisy exists about it, everyone is fascinated by violence[...] Our interest in violence in part reflects the fact that on the subconscious level we are very little different from our primitive ancestors . . ." He argued that the film's violent content did not provide an audience with the easy rhetorical set-ups that usually made its consumption guilt-free[...] it remains, as Gore Vidal once said of the novel, "chilling and entirely other." Not to mention that the kernel of primitive truth in the material remains ever relevant[...].you still can't help feeling these filmmakers were really trying to do something. They shrugged off all the old rules, the generations of genericism that had previously dictated the spreading of creamy predigested bromides over everything, so anything would go down nice in the end[...] After several viewings, the film's walloping force strikes one now as not being much related to the dramatic ideas at stake in its narrative scaffolding about free-choice either[...] "The power of the story is in the character of Alex," Kubrick told an interviewer, "who wins you over somehow, like Richard III despite his wickedness, because of his intelligence and wit and total honesty. He represents the id, the savage repressed side of our nature which guiltlessly enjoys the same pleasures of rape."[...] 'Everything's rotten. Why shouldn't I do what I want? They're worse than I am.' In the new mood . . . people want to believe the hyperbolic worst, want to believe in the degradation of the victims[...]It's the crux of Kubrick's approach. "I'd say my intention . . . was to try to see the violence from Alex's point of view,"[...] "It was necessary to find a way of stylizing the violence, just as Burgess does by his writing style."[...] Alex, in Kubrick's film, is really no more than a self-centered sociopath who rapes, batters and steals for kicks while seeing himself in heroic terms as less corrupt than those he destroys, as the one who is essentially wronged[...].the director's feelings about his antihero were somewhat mixed. "Alex, like Richard [III] is a character whom you should dislike and fear," Kubrick said in an interview with Penelope Houston, "and yet you find yourself drawn very quickly into his world and find yourself seeing things through his eyes[...] What's so striking about A Clockwork Orange, and what probably got on these critics' nerves, is that Kubrick had progressed so much as a filmmaker he was able to successfully do here what he had failed at in his somewhat satisfying 1962 adaptation of Lolita. In that earlier picture, Humbert Humbert's quest for underage nymphets became a singular yearning for a very sexually mature-looking Dolores Haze. The point to Vladimir Nabokov's great novel was in Humbert's feverish sexual obsession, his wild hyperbolic projections and witty self-justifications. The film turned the book's tricky game of moral perception into an objective reality where Humbert, despite desiring an underage girl, came across as a suave, sincere, desperately well-meaning lover manipulated and cheated by everyone else around him, and not the "vain and cruel wretch"Nabokov wrote his novel about. Though vestiges of the written character's nature remain, despite much cleansing[...] all these do is give the film's situations and characters a cold-fish unpleasantness that stews throughout without ever quite coming to fruition [...]By contrast, A Clockwork Orange totally and overwhelmingly immerses the viewer in the character's state of mind[...] You try to pinpoint exactly where the line between both lies, which is probably being plugged as two sides of the same ugliness, and all you come up with is a queasy ambivalence that makes parsing the story's message impossible; a viewer's own crude urges and fears start to trickle into the background of what's playing across the screen. What I mean is that the audience - never told precisely where they stand in relation to what goes on - projects its own subconscious feelings onto what Kubrick dramatizes through Alex[...]That the film attempts to provoke responses in viewers they may not be able to fully articulate, that Kubrick himself may not have been able to fully articulate, I think goes without saying. But ascribing a rigorous meta-moral to these things, as critics have permitted themselves to do without the least self-control [...].
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Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
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