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Re: [NABOKOV-L] Serendipities:RLSK and ADA: glory holes
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David Krol: The garden pavilion of the elegant American Embassy (the Schoenborn Palace) in Prague is also know as the Glorietta. It rests halfway up the Petrin Hill and has a wonderful view of Prague Castle and the city. Prague, of course, is also the resting place of VN's mother.
JM: An elegant link to the American Embassy's Glorietta in Prague, proudly displaying the American flag. In several languages, flags and banners are designated "pavilions" and, although equally glorious they can serve as an example of linguistic travelings extending into multiverses (etymological time travels?). This is why my plight with these words (gloriette, arbor, pavilion), happening at the same time as Sklyarenko's insistence on Mesmer and hypnotism, led me onto very strange lands, teeming with Nabokovian questions.
In "Transparent Things" there is a material "return to the past" when Hugh (like Chorb) turns in his tracks leading onto somnambulism and murder. There's also "another world" in it, co-existing with the one in which its character is moving about. Already in "Lolita" and in "Pale Fire" the reports of a madman are intermingled with a "common-sense world" text, unfoding almost independently from a fantasy world (Zembla, Elfland, the Faerie). In "Ada" the memoirists's effort to recreate his past mingle fantastic events and historical facts while the reader is informed about Terra and Anti-Terra right from start, before he learns about dorophones, Lettro-calamity, jikkers or mermaids. In most of the novels, ghostly influences are hinted at, with the power to dissolve boundaries between worlds and those lying in fiction's fiction.
My first project this morning was to retrieve the plot of the delightful-awful movie about the hypnotist "Svengali," mostly aiming at the captivating moments of comedy one also finds in it. But the I was carried to Francis, in "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligaris" (with its murderous sonambulist Cesare and its 1920 narrative twist*). Before I could get a grip onto my chair, I was led to Wells's time travels, Sherlock Holmes's ressuscitation ("the Woman in Green, based onSir Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Empty House), "The Three Faces of Eve" and... The Wizzard of Oz, DC Comics heroes such as Superman and Wonder Woman, Swift's Gulliver, Lewis Carroll's "Through the Looking-Glass", Xanadu, Kalevala, C.S. Lewis' Narnia, J.L Borges' 1941 "The Garden of Forking Paths," moving from a parallel universe onto multiverses and SciFi.
The extensive entries in wikipedia related to these themes didn't mention any novel by Nabokov: a strange omission **.
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* "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (German: Das Kabinett des Doktor Caligari) is a 1920 silent horror film directed by Robert Wiene from a screenplay by Hans Janowitz and Carl Mayer. It is one of the most influential of German Expressionist films and is often considered one of the greatest horror movies of the early times. This movie is cited as having introduced the twist ending in cinema" [...] Francis discovers that "Caligari" is actually the director of the local insane asylum, and... that he is obsessed with the story of a mystic called Caligari, who, in 1793, visited towns in northern Italy and used a somnambulist to murder people in a similar fashion. After being confronted with the dead Cesare, Caligari reveals his mania and is imprisoned in his asylum [...] A "twist ending" reveals that Francis' flashback is actually his fantasy: he, Jane and Cesare are all inmates of the insane asylum, and the man he says is Caligari is his asylum doctor, who, after this revelation of the source of his patient's delusion, says that now he will be able to cure Francis.
** - Self-reference, infinite return and the tactics of involution (as those ascribed to "Lolita" by Alfred Appel Jr. in his foreword) are commented in the wiki entry for "multiverses": "These stories often place the author, or authors in general, in the same position as Zelazny's characters in Amber. Questioning, in a literal fashion, if writing is an act of creating a new world, or an act of discovery of a pre-existing world.
Occasionally, this approach becomes self-referential, treating the literary universe of the work itself as explicitly parallel to the universe where the work was created. Stephen King's seven-volume Dark Tower series hinges upon the existence of multiple parallel worlds, many of which are King's own literary creations. Ultimately the characters become aware that they are only "real" in King's literary universe (this can be debated as an example of breaking the fourth wall), and even travel to a world — twice — in which (again, within the novel) they meet Stephen King and alter events in the real Stephen King's world outside of the books." (in a vein like Max Beeerbohm's earlier 'Enoch Soames")
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JM: An elegant link to the American Embassy's Glorietta in Prague, proudly displaying the American flag. In several languages, flags and banners are designated "pavilions" and, although equally glorious they can serve as an example of linguistic travelings extending into multiverses (etymological time travels?). This is why my plight with these words (gloriette, arbor, pavilion), happening at the same time as Sklyarenko's insistence on Mesmer and hypnotism, led me onto very strange lands, teeming with Nabokovian questions.
In "Transparent Things" there is a material "return to the past" when Hugh (like Chorb) turns in his tracks leading onto somnambulism and murder. There's also "another world" in it, co-existing with the one in which its character is moving about. Already in "Lolita" and in "Pale Fire" the reports of a madman are intermingled with a "common-sense world" text, unfoding almost independently from a fantasy world (Zembla, Elfland, the Faerie). In "Ada" the memoirists's effort to recreate his past mingle fantastic events and historical facts while the reader is informed about Terra and Anti-Terra right from start, before he learns about dorophones, Lettro-calamity, jikkers or mermaids. In most of the novels, ghostly influences are hinted at, with the power to dissolve boundaries between worlds and those lying in fiction's fiction.
My first project this morning was to retrieve the plot of the delightful-awful movie about the hypnotist "Svengali," mostly aiming at the captivating moments of comedy one also finds in it. But the I was carried to Francis, in "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligaris" (with its murderous sonambulist Cesare and its 1920 narrative twist*). Before I could get a grip onto my chair, I was led to Wells's time travels, Sherlock Holmes's ressuscitation ("the Woman in Green, based onSir Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Empty House), "The Three Faces of Eve" and... The Wizzard of Oz, DC Comics heroes such as Superman and Wonder Woman, Swift's Gulliver, Lewis Carroll's "Through the Looking-Glass", Xanadu, Kalevala, C.S. Lewis' Narnia, J.L Borges' 1941 "The Garden of Forking Paths," moving from a parallel universe onto multiverses and SciFi.
The extensive entries in wikipedia related to these themes didn't mention any novel by Nabokov: a strange omission **.
..................................................................................................................................................
* "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (German: Das Kabinett des Doktor Caligari) is a 1920 silent horror film directed by Robert Wiene from a screenplay by Hans Janowitz and Carl Mayer. It is one of the most influential of German Expressionist films and is often considered one of the greatest horror movies of the early times. This movie is cited as having introduced the twist ending in cinema" [...] Francis discovers that "Caligari" is actually the director of the local insane asylum, and... that he is obsessed with the story of a mystic called Caligari, who, in 1793, visited towns in northern Italy and used a somnambulist to murder people in a similar fashion. After being confronted with the dead Cesare, Caligari reveals his mania and is imprisoned in his asylum [...] A "twist ending" reveals that Francis' flashback is actually his fantasy: he, Jane and Cesare are all inmates of the insane asylum, and the man he says is Caligari is his asylum doctor, who, after this revelation of the source of his patient's delusion, says that now he will be able to cure Francis.
** - Self-reference, infinite return and the tactics of involution (as those ascribed to "Lolita" by Alfred Appel Jr. in his foreword) are commented in the wiki entry for "multiverses": "These stories often place the author, or authors in general, in the same position as Zelazny's characters in Amber. Questioning, in a literal fashion, if writing is an act of creating a new world, or an act of discovery of a pre-existing world.
Occasionally, this approach becomes self-referential, treating the literary universe of the work itself as explicitly parallel to the universe where the work was created. Stephen King's seven-volume Dark Tower series hinges upon the existence of multiple parallel worlds, many of which are King's own literary creations. Ultimately the characters become aware that they are only "real" in King's literary universe (this can be debated as an example of breaking the fourth wall), and even travel to a world — twice — in which (again, within the novel) they meet Stephen King and alter events in the real Stephen King's world outside of the books." (in a vein like Max Beeerbohm's earlier 'Enoch Soames")
Search archive with Google:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
Visit "Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
Manage subscription options: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/