Vladimir Nabokov

NABOKV-L post 0022838, Tue, 15 May 2012 13:07:58 -0300

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[SIGHTING] Steven Belletto's No Accident, Comrade and a skylark
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Excerpt from S.Belletto's "No Accident, Comrade: Chance and Design..." related to coincidences in Nabokov, as an additional contribution to C.Kunin's comment ("There is a skylark in Pnin - the importance of which, if any, escapes me"), once we regard "the skylark" as part of the farsical misunderstandings and "random likenesses" in Pnin.

" Nabokov uses chance to question the logic of such homophobic constructions of sexuality descended from Freud; by focusing attention on how coincidence operates in Pale Fire, we wee that the chance present in the novels shifting registers is controlled by both the driving narrative of Kinbote's Zembla tale and by those containement norms it apparently reflects. There is a moment in Pnin ...about another professor who appears at Wordsmith College - when the narrator remarks that a gas station attendant looks markedly like one of Pnin's colleague, "one of those random likenesses as pointless as a bad pun."[ ] This pronouncement bears a special significance to Pale Fire because it links the potential for real-life coincidences to textual or linguistic coincidences. For Nabokov, in fact, it seems that part of a pun's work is to suggest, even on the minute phonemic leve, that in a fictional world all ostensibly chance moments are actually examples of what I have called narrative chance." S.Belletto mentions Nabokov's answer to Alfred Appel in 1967 at this point:
AA: "[s]some critics may find the use of concidence in a novel arch or contrived."
Nabokov: "But in 'real' life they do happen...Very often you meet with some person or some event in 'real' life that would sound pat in a story. It is not the coincidence in the story that bothers us so much as the coincidence of coincidences in several stories by different writers, as, for instance, the recurrent eavesdropping device in nineteenth-century Russian fiction" [ ]. and S.Bellotto adds: "The response reminds us once again that absolute chance must become narrative chance when it is interpreted as meaningful."..(p.67-68)
No Accident, Comrade: Chance and Design in Cold War American ... - Resultado da Pesquisa de livros do Google
books.google.com.br/books?isbn=0199826889...Steven Belletto - 2011

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