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Re: Split personality in PF
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Re: [NABOKV-L] Split personality in PFAB wrote: "Now that strikes me as an excellent point, and one that hadn't occurred to me. I mean the idea of Shade as the versipel. The more I think of it, the better it sounds."
He was answering my comment:
"Now what about this for a "versipel":
"His misshapen body, that gray mop of abundant hair, the yellow nails of his pudgy fingers, the bags under his lustreless eyes, were only intelligible if regarded as the waste products eliminated from his intrinsic self by the same forces of perfection which purified and chiseled his verse. He was his own cancellation." ?
Now, I'll dare to advance one step further. How about the novel "Pale Fire" itself for a "versipel"?
Only in "ADA" did Nabokov fully develop his idea, initially elaborated in "Lolita", about immortality as the end-result of an author's shedding his corporeal presence to emerge like a butterfly in the shimmering pages of his writing ( and this, as an idea, is common enough, but not how VN rendered it in his writing!).
As I see it a "versipel" is achieved when the physical body is transmuted ( "cancelled") into the "body of the letter" in a poem or novel (or when we reach "the underside of the weave", using Kinbote's expression ).
In Kinbote's sentence ( quoted in blue) we see clearly how VN described the mistery of artistic creation - when it is not the author, his characters, his own philosophy or any particular "message" ( the waste products) that establish the 'perfection which purifies and chisels the verse"...
Jansy
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He was answering my comment:
"Now what about this for a "versipel":
"His misshapen body, that gray mop of abundant hair, the yellow nails of his pudgy fingers, the bags under his lustreless eyes, were only intelligible if regarded as the waste products eliminated from his intrinsic self by the same forces of perfection which purified and chiseled his verse. He was his own cancellation." ?
Now, I'll dare to advance one step further. How about the novel "Pale Fire" itself for a "versipel"?
Only in "ADA" did Nabokov fully develop his idea, initially elaborated in "Lolita", about immortality as the end-result of an author's shedding his corporeal presence to emerge like a butterfly in the shimmering pages of his writing ( and this, as an idea, is common enough, but not how VN rendered it in his writing!).
As I see it a "versipel" is achieved when the physical body is transmuted ( "cancelled") into the "body of the letter" in a poem or novel (or when we reach "the underside of the weave", using Kinbote's expression ).
In Kinbote's sentence ( quoted in blue) we see clearly how VN described the mistery of artistic creation - when it is not the author, his characters, his own philosophy or any particular "message" ( the waste products) that establish the 'perfection which purifies and chisels the verse"...
Jansy
Search the archive: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/archives/nabokv-l.html
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