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Phileas Fogg: Nabokov and Cortazar's time travels
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JM: Returning to Liuba Tarvi's recent posting about "relativity in literature,"* instead of inquiring about the disparity in time between Terra and Anti-Terra in "Ada," I found another related item that might be worth considering, namely Uncle Dan's travels "in a counter-Fogg direction on a triple trip." Did this trope allude to any "disparity" in connection to Dan's and Marina's marriage? Reporting back to the paragraph in "Ada" I find that there might be yet another space-time symbolism involved, now related to elevators and to flight: "One afternoon in the spring of 1871, he proposed to Marina in the Up elevator of Manhattan's first ten-floor building, was indignantly rejected at the seventh stop (Toys), came down alone and, to air his feelings, set off in a counter-Fogg direction on a triple trip round the globe, adopting, like an animated parallel, the same itinerary every time. In November 1871, as he was in the act of making his evening plans...an aerocable from Marina (forwarded with a whole week's delay via his Manhattan office which had filed it away through a new girl's oversight in a dove hole marked RE AMOR) arrived on a silver salver telling him she would marry him upon his return to America."
I couldn't find the postings mentioning various authors who'd been inspired by Verne's book, because I'd like to add Julio Cortázar's "Around the Day in Eighty Worlds" The author was named after Jules Verne and in his first chapter he confesses that the title of his book deliberately twists Jules Verne's (one of his favorite authors when he was a child), without "offending the planetary saga of Phileas Fogg, Esq." after listening to Lester Young's "Three Little Worlds". For Julio Cortázar "jazz is an invention that remains faithful to the theme it is opposing, transforming and making it shine." In these pieces their "almost absent theme... evokes matter and anti-matter ...as in Mallarmé" and hearing them is like watching "the comings and goings of stars, anagrams and palindromes" Cortázar proceeded to twist Verne's title because, as with Lester's jazz playing, "the melodic scheme threw him over, on the opposite side of the weave of a carpet in which the same colors and the same strands were being interwoven in a different way."
Like John Shade, Nabokov also disliked jazz. In spite of this, there's something in common between the process, described by Cortázar thru jazz, and Nabokov's time travels. Cortázar describes his experience as similar to becoming like the porous surface of a sponge whose breathing allows "fish to float in and out of remembrances and permits the creation of fulmintating alliances between distinct times and matter." However, there is a marked difference in the way both writers proceed with this "sponge-like breathing". In a joyfully playful collection of articles Cortázar weaves quotes upon quotes, travels from ancient to modern days, by his references to pertinent authors, but without embedding them, or the sections extracted from another author's sentences, in the folds of the text. I seems to me that his quotations are seriously and respectfully reproduced, inspite of their being mentioned in a humoristic context. In Nabokov, part of the fun of its play depends on a "search after Wally's whereabouts," as if the reader had to engage in fishing the mobile recollections. Nabokov's quotes are also humoristically or even cruelly deformed....
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*"There are other strange time asynchronizations between the plot lines in AK.Alexandrov, for instance, singles out several major knots of what he calls a "consistent temporal discontinuity between the major plot lines".....The two main protagonists seem to be strangely disconnected, and unhappy in their own way. As is well known, Tolstoy did not believe in marriage bliss." (LT)
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