Lara Delage-Toriel (Strasbourg)
Bodies in
Translation:
Deriving Meaning from Motion in Nabokov‚s works
Much
thought has been
devoted to the intellectual, moral, spiritual, metaphysical and
aesthetic
dimensions of Nabokov‚s fictional world. Much less has been said about
its
actual physicality, in particular the eloquence of bodily motion,
whether it be
part of an externally codified system, as in dancing ˆ Œthe automaton‚s
somnambulic languor‚ that becomes the law of Franz‚s existence as
Martha
teaches him to waltz in King Queen Knave ˆ or whether it be simply a
spontaneous gesture, as in the case of Pnin, a Œveritable encyclopedia
of
Russian shrugs and shakes‚. The significance of the relationship
between body
and language in terms of boundaries and limits, both physical and
cultural,
first occurred to me when I linked Pnin‚s ŒRussian Œrelinquishing‚
gesture‚
‘made in a moment of dramatic pathos ˆ to a note from Nabokov‚s
translation of
Eugene Onegin (VI, 13, ll. 4-5), in which the master wordsmith admits
his
incapacity to translate this particular element of the Russian idiom.
His
description of the gesture (which is totally lost in his translation)
is
however exhaustive and extremely minute, revealing a properly
scientific degree
of observation as Nabokov dwells on the body‚s language in slow motion
(ŒIf
analyzed in slow motion by the performer, he will see that his right
hand...).
Bodies in motion thus appear as a particularly significant means of
transition
within variously faceted semiotic systems, which may be correlated or
contrasted and opposed. For instance, we may notice that whereas Pnin‚s
gestures dramatize distance, the ŒJavanese-like gestures‚ made by
Charlotte
Haze induce suggestive comparison, as is made quite clear by Nabokov‚s
directions in the screenplay of Lolita: Œthese gestures will be
repeated by
Dolly Schiller in last scene of play‚. These instances and reflexions
are mere
indications towards a paper that proposes to look at Nabokov‚s work
from a
fresh Œkinetic‚ angle bringing into perspective the specific impact of
physical
motion within the dynamic space of his fictional world and language.
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Zoran Kuzmanovich (Davidson College)
"Report[:]
No
Ghosts Walk" or "The Already Told is Bunched Up Again"'
Conference papers ought to
be provocative in diagnosis, utopian in scope, and performative in
delivery.
Knowing in advance that I will fall short of those three goals, the
paper I
propose here will treat dints of discourse devoted to the banal trope
of a man
haunted by the spectre of a dead woman he's known intimately as that
trope
makes its transit stops in the works of Poe ("Ligeia"), Kipling
("The Phantom Rickshaw"), and Nabokov ( from the "The Return of
Chorb," to _Lolita_ and "The Vane Sisters"). The
uncanny repetition of the much discussed
but still cryptic stuff of Nabokov's spooks requires a second level to
the
paper: a meditation on the differences between a reading strategy that
decides
to do without the theological and puzzle-solving meaning and a strategy
that
sets out to recover, limit, and defend such a meaning through the
invocation of
Nabokov's always overdetermined ghostly presence. The second strategy
seems to
me to lead to a double-bind with serious consequences for any critic.
Because
Nabokov was already a self-annotator, dispenser of annotations,
inventor of
serial selves, notoriously generous provider of red herrings and
cartographer
of nerve points of which most readerly anatomies are innocent, reading
Nabokov's fictions so as to unconceal inscribed otherworldly presences,
anagram-loving phantoms, or the textualized landscape of St. Petersburg
makes
Nabokov live outside his writing space as a competitive phantom of
one's
reading while at the same time forcing one to confess one's own
alienating
distance from the Nabokov text, distance to which one's commentary can
only
serve as a monumental testament. The second consequence, and one I hope
will
have occurred only once in a thousand years of criticism, has to do
with the
tone of one's annotations or comments produced out of precisely such a
double
bind being read as acts of aggression towards both Nabokov and the
critic's
presumed audience.