Subject
Re: Ada's erotic geography
From
Date
Body
Jansy: "I suppose that Laurece Hochard.is responding to your description of Joe Wright's "Anna Karenina,"...
Laurence Hochard:No, I simply wanted to highlight VN's "writing strategy": How he makes the uncomfortable but delighted reader share Van's and Ada's coarse (however sophisticated it may be) sensual avidity, regardless of its consequences. Once the reader has realized how far his complicity has gone (often after a second reading), he can hardly adopt a moralistic stance (if he has some intellectual honesty); this Nabokovian way of involving the reader in his characters' actions -through seemingly absent, actually well-hidden in full view! authorial comment- also enables him as an author to avoid the moralistic stance he loathes. Also, all these outrageous double-entendres in Lucette's speech, in addition to being funny, reveal her helpless hysteria, due to her early exposure to Van's and Ada's sensuality.
Jansy Mello: I see your point, sorry for having strayed so far from the theme related to VN's "writing strategy". It's present in Ada, as you point out, and in Lolita as well, when the reader falls prey to a kind of cumplicity that reveals every reader's conflictual traits. Lucette, poor girl, had silly Mlle Ida as a governess, was in part neglected by her mother and fondled by her father's pink paws...We learn very little about her childhood and adolescence (school, studies, tastes), except for her passion for her cousin and her pains.
.................................................................................................................
While I was going through "oak" stories in ADA (scenery of one of the Leitmotifs in the novel, according to Darkbloom), I was again reminded of a possible link to Goethe's Mignon (in a way, as neglected as Lucette has been), born from an incestuous relation between cousins, if I'm not mistaken. Acrobacies, Italy, Hamlet, hopeless love... all this is part of her story. (but I think she wasn't Italian, despite her song about "the land where the limes are in bloom")
ADA: "Overhead the arms of a linden stretched toward those of an oak, like a green-spangled beauty flying to meet her strong father hanging by his feet from the trapeze. ...Something rather acrobatic about those branches up there, no?’ he said, pointing./‘Yes,’ she answered. ‘I discovered it long ago. The teil is the flying Italian lady, and the old oak aches, the old lover aches, but still catches her every time."
I read that "Bildungsroman" (Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre ) a long long time ago. What carries me over to ADA is chiefly Mignon's nostalgia (it's only her songs that I can remember, probaboly because they were set to music by Schubert, perhaps also Schumann), Van and Ada's regrets towards Lucette and some of the Romantic interludes in VN's novel... (I also discovered, again, Goethe's poem about the Gingko biloba, an important plant that arises in ADA and, in PF, one of the poems written by Shade ( I don't think Ada translated it, but she was dedicated to the poet anyway ) .
In Bk. VIII Mignon, who has secretly loved Wilhelm, dies, and it is discovered that she is the daughter, by an act of incest, of the harper, who kills himself.
The novel contains eight of Goethe's finest songs, ‘Kennst du das Land’, ‘Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt’, ‘Heiß mich nicht reden, heiß mich schweigen’, and ‘So laßt mich scheinen, bis ich werde’ (sung by Mignon), ‘Wer nie sein Brot mit Tränen aß’, ‘Wer sich der Einsamkeit ergibt’, ‘An die Türen will ich schlei-chen’ (sung by the harper), and ‘Singet nicht in Trauertönen’ (sung by Philine). Also included are the ballad ‘Der Sänger’ and the satirical poem ‘Ich armer Teufel, Herr Baron’.Read more: http://www.answers.com/topic/wilhelm-meisters-lehrjahre#ixzz2SFPNJYVk
Oxford Companion to German Literature:
Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre
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/
Laurence Hochard:No, I simply wanted to highlight VN's "writing strategy": How he makes the uncomfortable but delighted reader share Van's and Ada's coarse (however sophisticated it may be) sensual avidity, regardless of its consequences. Once the reader has realized how far his complicity has gone (often after a second reading), he can hardly adopt a moralistic stance (if he has some intellectual honesty); this Nabokovian way of involving the reader in his characters' actions -through seemingly absent, actually well-hidden in full view! authorial comment- also enables him as an author to avoid the moralistic stance he loathes. Also, all these outrageous double-entendres in Lucette's speech, in addition to being funny, reveal her helpless hysteria, due to her early exposure to Van's and Ada's sensuality.
Jansy Mello: I see your point, sorry for having strayed so far from the theme related to VN's "writing strategy". It's present in Ada, as you point out, and in Lolita as well, when the reader falls prey to a kind of cumplicity that reveals every reader's conflictual traits. Lucette, poor girl, had silly Mlle Ida as a governess, was in part neglected by her mother and fondled by her father's pink paws...We learn very little about her childhood and adolescence (school, studies, tastes), except for her passion for her cousin and her pains.
.................................................................................................................
While I was going through "oak" stories in ADA (scenery of one of the Leitmotifs in the novel, according to Darkbloom), I was again reminded of a possible link to Goethe's Mignon (in a way, as neglected as Lucette has been), born from an incestuous relation between cousins, if I'm not mistaken. Acrobacies, Italy, Hamlet, hopeless love... all this is part of her story. (but I think she wasn't Italian, despite her song about "the land where the limes are in bloom")
ADA: "Overhead the arms of a linden stretched toward those of an oak, like a green-spangled beauty flying to meet her strong father hanging by his feet from the trapeze. ...Something rather acrobatic about those branches up there, no?’ he said, pointing./‘Yes,’ she answered. ‘I discovered it long ago. The teil is the flying Italian lady, and the old oak aches, the old lover aches, but still catches her every time."
I read that "Bildungsroman" (Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre ) a long long time ago. What carries me over to ADA is chiefly Mignon's nostalgia (it's only her songs that I can remember, probaboly because they were set to music by Schubert, perhaps also Schumann), Van and Ada's regrets towards Lucette and some of the Romantic interludes in VN's novel... (I also discovered, again, Goethe's poem about the Gingko biloba, an important plant that arises in ADA and, in PF, one of the poems written by Shade ( I don't think Ada translated it, but she was dedicated to the poet anyway ) .
In Bk. VIII Mignon, who has secretly loved Wilhelm, dies, and it is discovered that she is the daughter, by an act of incest, of the harper, who kills himself.
The novel contains eight of Goethe's finest songs, ‘Kennst du das Land’, ‘Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt’, ‘Heiß mich nicht reden, heiß mich schweigen’, and ‘So laßt mich scheinen, bis ich werde’ (sung by Mignon), ‘Wer nie sein Brot mit Tränen aß’, ‘Wer sich der Einsamkeit ergibt’, ‘An die Türen will ich schlei-chen’ (sung by the harper), and ‘Singet nicht in Trauertönen’ (sung by Philine). Also included are the ballad ‘Der Sänger’ and the satirical poem ‘Ich armer Teufel, Herr Baron’.Read more: http://www.answers.com/topic/wilhelm-meisters-lehrjahre#ixzz2SFPNJYVk
Oxford Companion to German Literature:
Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre
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/