Vladimir Nabokov

NABOKV-L post 0025072, Tue, 11 Feb 2014 13:56:28 -0200

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Re: [Old SIGHTING] Nabokov's Berlin: Nabokov, art and evil
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PS:
J.Connolly: "We recall the last words of "The Fight" (1925): "Or perhaps what matters is not the human pain or joy at all but, rather, the play of shadow and light on a live body, the harmony of trifles assembled on this particular day, this particular moment, in a unique and inimitable way." The major English novels would seem to refute that proposition."

"Lolita"
"...an abstract idea, a painting, stippled Hopkins or shorn Baudelaire, God or Shakespeare, anything of genuine kind."

"Every movement she made in the dappled sun plucked at the most secret and sensitive chord of my abject body."

" I ... had visually possessed dappled nymphets in parks..."

"... then I saw (petrified with a kind of sacred disgust) the man close his eyes and bare his small, horribly small and even, teeth as he leaned against a tree in which a multitude of dappled Priaps shivered."

"The Enchanter": "Here I invoke the law of degrees that I repudiated where I found it insulting: often I have tried to catch myseslf in the transition from one kind of tenderness to the other...and would very much like to know...whether one is a rare flowering of the other on the Walpurgis Night of my murky soul; for ir they are separate entities, then there must be two separate kinds of beauty, and the aesthetic sense, invited to dinner, sits down with a crash between two chairs (the fate of any dualism)...under the pretext of discussing something remarkable, I am merely seeking a justification for my guilt." (23,24) ..."was it the anguish that always accompanied his hopeless yearning to extract something from beauty, to hold it still for an instant, to do something with it..?." (p.31)

"his gaze mechanically followed the flitting of children in the colored haze...[ ] A violet-clad girl of twelve (he never erred), mas treading rapidly and firmly on skates...and approached his bench through the variable luck of the sunlight...swinging her liberated arms, flashing in and out of sight, mingling with a kindred play of light beneath the ciolet-and-green trees."(28)..

"losing the layer of violet that disintegrated into ashes under his terrible, unnoticed gaze." (29)

Jansy Mello:Once again the quotes I managed to select seem to deviate from the initial theme (the "play of shadow and light on a live body"), perhaps because my extensive snippings cut off the imagetic flow of a skater or tennis-player child-beauty moving in a dappled glade. Nevertheless, they are interrelated and almost self-revelatory, like a watermark on paper, by their rejection of a dualistic approach to dark and light or good and evil (btw: notice "gaze..haze")*

I wonder if the insinuated "law of degrees" (E,p.23) is connected, in any way, to his grey creation Jacob Gradus, in Pale Fire...

GM Hopkins's "pied beauties"** are spotted, stippled, dappled, brindled and...pious, unlike what "Arthur" or "Humbert" experience in relation to "mortal beauty".

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* - Surprisingly, the lines from "The Enchanter," about the downcrash of "aesthetic sense," offer a new perspective for Lesley Chamberlain's conclusion that "Nabokov...was tempted to think taste ruled out evil."

** - Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–89). Poems. 1918.
http://www.bartleby.com/122/13.html
Pied Beauty

GLORY be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough; 5
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change: 10
Praise him.

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