Vladimir Nabokov

NABOKV-L post 0024511, Thu, 22 Aug 2013 15:34:00 -0300

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Enkrypted words and transparencies
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PS to " Keats and fictional Shade were working on the assurance of spiritual survival over the material world (the ashen fluff) and they were attunded to the mysteries of "representation." ( like HH's confidence (Lolita) in cave-painted aurochs and angels?)."

Jansy Mello: So many different quotes come to my mind that it's hard to track them down since I'm not writing a paper, but simply sharing several conjectures with the VN-L. Here are HH's closing lines in "Lolita":
"I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita."

HH acknowledges art as a refuge that's dependent on "durable pigments" and "prophetic sonnets" ("Lolita") or, as in Pushkin or in Keats, it relies on the physical survival of durable pigments, nightingales and singing poets.
Survival, then, is not simply some undefined "spiritual continuity." Althougu art transcends the individual, it still relies on what seems to be "the survival of the species" and there'll be nothing left when Humanity and animal life disappear from the Earth. Art needs interlocution?
Cf.VN's "In Paradise" (1927) when "classificatory tags" are meaningless in Paradise since there are no humans to pay heed to them. Cf Vladimir Nabokov, Poems And Problems (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970. Or as poem 12, p.46/47, in the French Gallimard edition: "Poèmes et Problèmes" (1970_.
In Paradise: " My soul, beyound distant death/ your image I see like this;/a provincial naturalist/an eccentric lost in paradise. // There, in a glade, a wild angel slumbers/ [ ]then - but there are no learned journals,/ nor any readers in paradise!/[ ] whom will you tell, whom?"
Perhaps, on the more literal and inspired level, this is why Hazel's ghost offers ineffective warnings and still presses on to move the pen of poets like John Shade, or their shadows, like Charles Kinbote? .

(In the meantime I found other interesting sets of lines by Nabokov that contradict HH's despair and solve the problem of animal classification. In Speak, Memory (SO,pg 90), VN offers a "a map of three country estates with a winding river and a figure of the butterfly Parnassius mnemosyne for a cartographic cherub..." Cherubs, Parnassus and Mnemosyne!

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