On 23/06/2008 22:21, "jansymello" <jansy@AETERN.US> quotes VN:
"A piece of most important information, the main structural idea of the story is here deliberately masked by Gogol ( because all reality is a mask).".."in Gogol's books the real plots are behind the obvious ones" (page 152)
>
1. Can Jansy tell us if this quote pre- or post-dates VN's famous warning that references to reality should always (really!) be protected with quotational caution: "reality"? I've taken this warning as a valuable but teasing clue to Nabokovian epistemology. Being neither a tenured philosopher nor a Quantum Cosmologist (dieu soit loue), VN the novelist/poet is not required to give us formally consistent explanations for what David Deutsch calls "The Fabric of Reality!" (See my forthcoming "The Fabrication of Reality," CACM, July, 2008)
2. Are the missing "" around reality in the above citation significant? Has VN dropped his own "mask" (that natural quotational caution) in order to venture a serious definition of reality? If so, is he claiming more than the existence of a deeper 'real' reality lurking below a layer (mask) that we can penetrate with the proper effort and discernment? Allowing for the brevity of this parenthetical remark, we logician bean-counters must still point out that "all reality is a mask" does not imply that "all masks are real." In other words, Googol's masks (whether deliberate or not) do not necessarily hide deeper "truths" as VN seems to imply. Attentive re-readers must distinguish the "clues," good, bad and entirely imagined. The anagrammatical paper-chase, for example, has been rendered less creative by computer programs that can mix'n'match character strings in all known languages. Remarkably,
"To be or not to be, that is the question. Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune ... " is an anagram of
"In one of the Bard's best-thought-of tragedies, our insistent hero, Hamlet, queries on two fronts about how life turns rotten."
Does this alter your views on spooky anagrammatical significations?
3. So many paradoxes persist however many ""s we unleash or suppress. Gogol and VN can cleverly mask their true plots and narrational intentions (avoiding the boring obvious), but they can't risk being too impenetrable! Nor can they avoid the innate ambiguities of La Condition HomoSapienne. In Deutsche's MVI (Multiverse Interpretation) Reality, the ambiguous states of photons in multi-slit interference experiments are resolved by adding as many parallel universes as required to provide a universe for each of the photons' quantum states. Who says Nature must be parsimonious?
Stan Kelly-Bootle.