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Fw: ideal spectators or readers
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Dear List,
In the first place, a correction. Nabokov doesn't use the word "tesselated" when he writes about his mother's veiled face. The lines I had in mind came from Speak, Memory (Chapter 2) page 38:
"I watched, too, the familiar pouting movement she made to distend the network of her close-fitting veil drawn too tight over her face, and as I write this, the touch of reticulated tenderness that my lips used to feel when I kissed her veiled cheek comes back to me - "
There's no "reticulated tenderness" in the granoblastic roughness of stone and granular squares...
And yet, also in SM ( chapter 15), there is tenderness and magic in the building up of a mosaic. The scene begins with VN watching Dmitri at the sea shore when, "among those slightly convex chips of majolica ware found by our child there was one whose border of scroll-work fitted exactly, and continued, the pattern of a fragment I had found in 1903 on the same shore, and that the two tallied with a third my mother had found on that Mentone beach in 1882, and with a fourth piece of the same pottery... and so on, until this assortment of parts, if all had been preserved, might have been put together to make the complete, absolutely complete, bowl, broken by some Italian child..." ( like a "mosaic of time and space to suit my desires and demands", SO, page 48)
The picture in the attach was taken and "mounted" in 1900, by Valério Vieira, when he inserted his own thirty egos to represent himself as pianist, violinist, conductor, waiter and spectator. Not only this very early photograph fits our present discussion about the results of the square root of I ( if you multiply the I two or thirty times you still get the same mathematical result, isn't that so S K-B?*) , but it reminds me of one of Nabokov's sentence about "ideal readers" since, as stated in SO,ch 7, page 95: "Artistic originality has only its own self to copy."... "I write for myself in multiplicate, a not unfamiliar phenomenon on the horizons of shimmering deserts" S. O, Ch.8 ( page 114)... "my books are addressed to Adam von L. [anagram], to my family, to a few intelligent friends, and to all my likes in all the crannies of the world, from a carrel in America to the nightmare depths of Russia." (Strong Opinions, page 196).
But, contrasting with photographer Valério's collage: " I am very careful to keep my characters beyond the limits of my own identity." (SO,ch2, page 13 and SO,Ch. 14: "I alone can judge if details that look like bit of my 'real" self in this or that novel or mine are as authentic as...The best part of a writer's biography is not the record of his adventures but the story of his style."
* - In SO ( Ch.17) Nabokov comments on the "existence of ego": " A linguistic problem: the singular act of mimetic evolution to which we owe the fact that in Russian the word "ego" means "his", "him"."
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In the first place, a correction. Nabokov doesn't use the word "tesselated" when he writes about his mother's veiled face. The lines I had in mind came from Speak, Memory (Chapter 2) page 38:
"I watched, too, the familiar pouting movement she made to distend the network of her close-fitting veil drawn too tight over her face, and as I write this, the touch of reticulated tenderness that my lips used to feel when I kissed her veiled cheek comes back to me - "
There's no "reticulated tenderness" in the granoblastic roughness of stone and granular squares...
And yet, also in SM ( chapter 15), there is tenderness and magic in the building up of a mosaic. The scene begins with VN watching Dmitri at the sea shore when, "among those slightly convex chips of majolica ware found by our child there was one whose border of scroll-work fitted exactly, and continued, the pattern of a fragment I had found in 1903 on the same shore, and that the two tallied with a third my mother had found on that Mentone beach in 1882, and with a fourth piece of the same pottery... and so on, until this assortment of parts, if all had been preserved, might have been put together to make the complete, absolutely complete, bowl, broken by some Italian child..." ( like a "mosaic of time and space to suit my desires and demands", SO, page 48)
The picture in the attach was taken and "mounted" in 1900, by Valério Vieira, when he inserted his own thirty egos to represent himself as pianist, violinist, conductor, waiter and spectator. Not only this very early photograph fits our present discussion about the results of the square root of I ( if you multiply the I two or thirty times you still get the same mathematical result, isn't that so S K-B?*) , but it reminds me of one of Nabokov's sentence about "ideal readers" since, as stated in SO,ch 7, page 95: "Artistic originality has only its own self to copy."... "I write for myself in multiplicate, a not unfamiliar phenomenon on the horizons of shimmering deserts" S. O, Ch.8 ( page 114)... "my books are addressed to Adam von L. [anagram], to my family, to a few intelligent friends, and to all my likes in all the crannies of the world, from a carrel in America to the nightmare depths of Russia." (Strong Opinions, page 196).
But, contrasting with photographer Valério's collage: " I am very careful to keep my characters beyond the limits of my own identity." (SO,ch2, page 13 and SO,Ch. 14: "I alone can judge if details that look like bit of my 'real" self in this or that novel or mine are as authentic as...The best part of a writer's biography is not the record of his adventures but the story of his style."
* - In SO ( Ch.17) Nabokov comments on the "existence of ego": " A linguistic problem: the singular act of mimetic evolution to which we owe the fact that in Russian the word "ego" means "his", "him"."
Search the archive: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/archives/nabokv-l.html
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
