Subject
Returning to VN's erotic "sleight of words" in a Playboy
interview and "dormant patterns"
interview and "dormant patterns"
From
Date
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Dear List,
Please, excuse me for returning to the same "bunny" subject again but, as
usual, I drowned my initial observations under a load of quotes.
The fact is that I'm too pleased to have been taken in by a master conjurer
not to expect some kind of echo from the Nablers - after being able to
demonstrate how one of VN's audiovisual "sleights of words" operate.* Only
after Joseph Aisenberg wondered about the sound of the "o" in Lolita and in
"lollipop" that it occurred to me that I'd placed the words "Haze" and
"Hase" side by side in my mind, not noticing that VN had avoided to
pronounce them together during a recorded interview. He stuck to "bunny" and
"hare".
Nabokov must have either expected his Playboy interviewer to say it aloud or
that his reader would fill it in graphically after finding its reference in
print:
V.Nabokov: Dolly, which went nicely with the surname "Haze," where Irish
mists blend with a German bunny-I mean a small German hare. Playboy: You're
making a word-playful reference, of course, to the German term for
rabbit-Hase. Could we consider this manoeuver as a "knight's move"?
Jansy Mello
..........................................................
*- Brian Boyd wrote to the VN-L in 2001: ". The two most important of the
rabbit doctors, Krolik and Lagosse, have strong associations with eros and
erotica.[ ]Somehow Playboy and its Bunny evoked an echo in VN's mind with
butterflies and The Beau and the Butterfly.[ ] No one is likely to be able
to discover when Nabokov first noticed that the names of two celebrated
lepidopterists, Seitz and Krulikowsky, both "belonged to the leporine
group," but with his eye for pattern and his early knowledge of both
lepidopterists, it may well have been a "found pattern" that sat dormant in
his mind for a long time until the Playboy-Bunny-Beau-Butterfly prompted him
to complicate the pattern much further [ ] Vladimir Nabokov Forum -
<https://listserv.ucsb.edu/lsv-cgi-bin/wa?A2=nabokv-l;71105483.0102>
https://listserv.ucsb.edu/lsv-cgi-bin/wa?A2=nabokv-l;71105483.0102
Search archive with Google:
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Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
AdaOnline: "http://www.ada.auckland.ac.nz/
The Nabokov Society of Japan's Annotations to Ada: http://vnjapan.org/main/ada/index.html
The VN Bibliography Blog: http://vnbiblio.com/
Search the archive with L-Soft: https://listserv.ucsb.edu/lsv-cgi-bin/wa?A0=NABOKV-L
Manage subscription options :http://listserv.ucsb.edu/lsv-cgi-bin/wa?SUBED1=NABOKV-L
Please, excuse me for returning to the same "bunny" subject again but, as
usual, I drowned my initial observations under a load of quotes.
The fact is that I'm too pleased to have been taken in by a master conjurer
not to expect some kind of echo from the Nablers - after being able to
demonstrate how one of VN's audiovisual "sleights of words" operate.* Only
after Joseph Aisenberg wondered about the sound of the "o" in Lolita and in
"lollipop" that it occurred to me that I'd placed the words "Haze" and
"Hase" side by side in my mind, not noticing that VN had avoided to
pronounce them together during a recorded interview. He stuck to "bunny" and
"hare".
Nabokov must have either expected his Playboy interviewer to say it aloud or
that his reader would fill it in graphically after finding its reference in
print:
V.Nabokov: Dolly, which went nicely with the surname "Haze," where Irish
mists blend with a German bunny-I mean a small German hare. Playboy: You're
making a word-playful reference, of course, to the German term for
rabbit-Hase. Could we consider this manoeuver as a "knight's move"?
Jansy Mello
..........................................................
*- Brian Boyd wrote to the VN-L in 2001: ". The two most important of the
rabbit doctors, Krolik and Lagosse, have strong associations with eros and
erotica.[ ]Somehow Playboy and its Bunny evoked an echo in VN's mind with
butterflies and The Beau and the Butterfly.[ ] No one is likely to be able
to discover when Nabokov first noticed that the names of two celebrated
lepidopterists, Seitz and Krulikowsky, both "belonged to the leporine
group," but with his eye for pattern and his early knowledge of both
lepidopterists, it may well have been a "found pattern" that sat dormant in
his mind for a long time until the Playboy-Bunny-Beau-Butterfly prompted him
to complicate the pattern much further [ ] Vladimir Nabokov Forum -
<https://listserv.ucsb.edu/lsv-cgi-bin/wa?A2=nabokv-l;71105483.0102>
https://listserv.ucsb.edu/lsv-cgi-bin/wa?A2=nabokv-l;71105483.0102
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
Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
AdaOnline: "http://www.ada.auckland.ac.nz/
The Nabokov Society of Japan's Annotations to Ada: http://vnjapan.org/main/ada/index.html
The VN Bibliography Blog: http://vnbiblio.com/
Search the archive with L-Soft: https://listserv.ucsb.edu/lsv-cgi-bin/wa?A0=NABOKV-L
Manage subscription options :http://listserv.ucsb.edu/lsv-cgi-bin/wa?SUBED1=NABOKV-L