Vladimir Nabokov

NABOKV-L post 0020979, Tue, 16 Nov 2010 13:37:49 -0200

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{NABOKOV-L] general ideas, ring and a love of details
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Jim Twiggs recently mentioned Nabokov's detestation of general ideas while he emphatically denied any allusion to Barthes in "Pale Fire" and its two dead authors. Although I wouldn't have thought about it as related to VN's avoidance of general ideas in this sense. He writes, in SO (p.7) "As an artist and scholar I prefer the specific detail to the generalization, images to ideas, obscure facts to clear symbols, and the discovered wild fruit of the synthetic jam."

While reading about GM Hopkins I found an interesting commentary by Desmond Egan related to what I understand to be Nabokov's preference for details. The comparison is beween Hopkins and the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa:

"The great Portuguese poet, Fernando Pessoa (1888 - 1935), said it was his custom, to think with the emotions and feel with the mind (text 131 The Book of Disquiet) and in another entry (298) he marvellously dramatises the psyche of the creative writer, one caught up by life so totally that a ride on a streetcar, leading him to experience vicariously the lives of passengers, clothes, their factories, workers,managers trying to stay calm', their private lives, The whole world opens up before my eyes merely because in front of me - on the nape of a dark-skinned neck whose other side has I don't know what face - I see a regularly irregular dark-green embroidery on a light-green dress. (p. 290) and from that, the loves, secrets, souls of all who helped make the dress; and then the seats in the tram take him to distant places, workers, houses, lives, realities, everything ... so that, I get off the streetcar dazed and exhausted. I've just lived all of life. Hopkins was no different. Time and again, too, we can notice that, like Pessoa, he invokes the concrete rather than any abstraction: the instinct of a genuine poet."

On a different track, but still quoting Desmond Egan, I'd like to compare now the pleasure Nabokov extracted from technical terms and dictionary words (as, for example, in his play with the word "tits") and what has been ascribed to Hopkins (although Nabokov often favored words that might indicate Hopkins, such as "stipled" and "dappled", I only found a direct mention to this Jesuit poet in "Lolita.").
"This image includes an example of Hopkins's excited use of a technical term (I think of Shakespeare's 'know a hawk from a handsaw'. a hawk being a large trowel for cement; of Emily Dickenson's 'valves' of attention, referring to the valves or half-doors; or of Hopkins's own 'rung on the rein' in "The Windhover' of the same year where 'ring' means 'to rise spirally'. Poets enjoy such precise, technical words). 'Bow' means the sound-bow of a bell - the lower part, where the hammer strikes and where the note finds its greatest amplification. So: every hanging bell, whenstruck, throws out ('broad' is an adverb meaning 'abroad') its special sound or 'name'."
So the word "ring" also means "to rise spirally"...I wonder if Nabokov knew that.


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