EDNote: Jansy Mello sent the following message that never made it to me
for review. If other posts were lost during the server outage, please
re-send them. ~SB
There were several messages on various
topics piling up in former VN-postings. I
made a personal selection of items, extracted from the exchanges bt. JA
and LH. which, perhaps, deserve a re-reading or may encourage further
discussion.
JA: Why is what the idea of Quixote added to civilization
so important?
(probably
JA means Quixote as an example to represent other fictional characters,
such as Emma Bovary, Krug, aso?)
LH: [...] RLSK chapter 16: "that if you looked
well at the prettiest girl while she was exuding the cream of the
commonplace, you were sure to find
some minute blemish in her beauty" says Sebastian, which does not
prevent him from being enslaved by precisely one of these "prettiest
girl"(= death/
mortality)
( LH
stressed the symbolic meaning of minute blemishes,small imperfections
and related these to mortality. VN, often brought up three shadows,
three women, three ghosts, the moira or parcae and Kinbote mentions the
relationship bt. fairy-tales and number three)
JA: [...] I have to admit, I rather liked Nina
Rechnoy more than I did Sebastian. She was glamorous, funny, and in
much of the stuff she had to say
rather sharp about someone like Sebastian, who really would have been
tiresome in life. His arrogant obsessiveness seems to have to been
taken to
its frightening extreme in Humbert.
(opening
into further analysis of VN's "arrogant obsessive" characters - so
"tiresome in life" - and how VN rendered women, mainly, as glamorous
and funny)
LH: Although I really admire B Boyd, I think he
may have missed something here: BS, imo, is more about Krug's than
Paduk's weaknesses.
J.A. re: So you thought the story was
sympathetic to Paduk at some level?
JA: Nabokov uses literature as a model for Intelligent Design and in
books, no matter how "surprising" they may seem to the characters and
the reader,
the end of course is already waiting for us to get there...Nabokov's
playful view of God's handiwork. He said it over and over again.
Somewhere in this
notion I think one may resolve the inconsistency of his criticsim of
"implausibility" and his veiw that there was nothing "realistic" to
fiction