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Re: Fw: [NABOKV-L] Pnin and Victor Lake's Studio II
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PPS to :...Pnin: "Rembrandt or Veronese?" "In Victor's art teacher Lake's studio there are only two framed pictures..."a copy of Gertrude Kasebier's photographic masterpiece 'Mother and Child' ...and a similarly toned reproduction of the head of Christ from Rembrandt's 'The Pilgrims of Emmaus'..." ..." in Lake's studio there were reproductions of an ancient photograph and an ancient painting, i.e., there were two different medias, in a copy, lying side by side. This fact became meaningful to me because I'd been recovering Walter Benjamin's essays related to the "aura,..."
Nabokov's squirrels and skiagraphs, his references to Jean-Paul Marat and the shadows projected by invisible things, his fascination with the aura created by a distant look towards his long past Russian childhood and the two images hanging on Lake's wall*, reminded me of superficially read articles by Walter Benjamin. However, a simple question, posed by Will Norman: "Nabokov and Benjamin?" [ in Nabokov and Benjamin: A Late Modernist Response to History by Will Norman, 2007, Oxford University, www.jstor.org/stable/25748166 - ] showed me how innocently I'd proceeded.
As Will Norman notes, "Such has been the novelist's enduring influence over scholarship on his work that a pairing like this seems unusual, if not perverse. Scholars have tended to follow Nabokov's lead in limiting comparative critical enquiry to those writers who receive his endorsement or who are subject to intertextual allusion. Few have been willing to transgress on Nabokov's taboos...Walter Benjamin, a literary critic with interests in both Marxist and Freudian theory, unites two of Nabokov's greates bugbears and so, unsurprisingly, has received little attention from Nabokov scholars** Despite their considerable ideological differences, these two writers share more than a historical location..."
A more extensive examination is to be found in Nabokov's Art of Memory and European Modernism, by John Burt Foster,1993(87-90):
"Especially striking, given the contrast between Nabokov's disdain for social messages and Benjamin's reputation as an innovative sociologist of literature, both writers take Proust seriously as a prophetic social analyst....Thus when Benjamin stresses Proust's "merciless depiction" of Parisian high society, then he suggests that his full social significance will become apparent only "in the final struggle," his Marxist terminology conveys the same general insight as Kamera Obskura.[...] Alongside their convergences, however, Nabokov and Benjamin differ sharply...when Kamera Obskura downplays Rimbaud in favor of Proust, Nabokov implicitly rejects any such effor to assimilate the modernist masters to the avant-garde [ ]Nabokov is also much less receptive to German and Austro-German thought than Benjamin; indeed, as his cultural identity develops from the mid-1920s to the early 1930s, Bergson and Proust function as polemical alternatives to Nietzsche, whom they replace, and then to Freud, whom they oppose. But Benjamin, though hardly an orthodox German theorist, does not hesitate to align the French modernists with Marxist or psychoanalytic discourse. [ ]But as heirs to French modernism, Benjamin and Nabokov diverge the most strikingly in their treatment of involuntary memory and the mnemonic image. For Benjamin as he moves from Bergson to Freud, involuntary memory is gradually displaced from its original French context [ ] Nor does Benjamin emphasize the mnemonic image, for when he distinguises between two levels of involuntary memory, he insists that only a relatively superficial layer is converned with 'isolated, though enigmatically present, visual images.' [ ]Nothing could be further from Nabokov's basic tendendy as an artist of memory in the yeats after Kamera Obskura. [ ] he will show none of Benjamin's interest in setting bounds to consciousness, or in subordinating one's personal past to a collective one. Indeed, he will even sidestep Proust's distinction between voluntary and involuntary memory. And, far from striving to capture an amorphous whole, he will give decisive priority to mnemonic images marked by vivid pictorial detail. So great are the differences between these responses to French modernism that it is hard to imagine the two writers even agreeing on the single most importan passage in the madeleine episode. Benjamin, with his interest in the collective past, would probably have pointed to the introductory comment where Marcel likens his experience to ancient Celtic belief; but Nabokov would have chose the narrator's state of intense concentration afterwards, which reaffirms the value of consciousness and leads to a hallucinatory vision of Combray.[ ] Using the words of a critic to draw conclusions he had reached long before in his own literary practice, Nabokov praised the Recherche from two separate perspectives, a "a sequence of illustrations, of images" and as "an extended comparison" that was essentially metaphorical (LL 208). After the vague imagism of Mary, this sharpened understanding of the image as both trope and sensation represents a decisive advance in Nabokov's art of memory. He willl pursue the creation of such 'colored editions' of the past with a new urgency and precision [ ] As a Franchophile German Benjamin oddly parallels Segelkrantz, while his additional interest in both Jewisn mysticism and the Russian revolution suggest a wide-ranging cultural identity just as complex as that of Nabokov, who was seven years his junior.[ ] Beyond sharing Nabokov's sense of Proust's primacy in the early twentieth-century literature, Benjamin agrees that Proust belongs with Bergson in proposing a view of time and memory whose natural form of expression can only be artistic. Bergson's Matter and Memory, he remarks, "defines the nature of experience in the durée in such a way that the readeris bound to conclude that only a poet can be the adequate subject of such an experience. Benjamin also shares Nabokov's fascination with the ambiguous status of the Recherche, which surpasses the established genrse by creating a structure "which is fiction, autobiography, and commentary in one."
The two excerpts (obtained from the internet), allowed me no other access to these two writings. However, I think that these links might be of interest to the more resourceful N-L readers who hapen to unfamiliar with them - should they agree with my rather superficial connection between Nabokov and Benjamin.
................................................................................................
* - : "a copy of Gertrude Kasebier's photographic masterpiece 'Mother and Child' (1897), with the wistful, angelic infant looking up and away (at what?); and a similarly toned reproduction of the head of Christ from Rembrandt's 'The Pilgrims of Emmaus,' with the same, though slightly less celestial, expression of eyes and mouth." (Pnin, 95)
**WN's note: "Two scholars who have mentioned Benjamin briefely in relation to Nabokov (mainly in order to assert their differences) were Dolinin and Foster."
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Nabokov's squirrels and skiagraphs, his references to Jean-Paul Marat and the shadows projected by invisible things, his fascination with the aura created by a distant look towards his long past Russian childhood and the two images hanging on Lake's wall*, reminded me of superficially read articles by Walter Benjamin. However, a simple question, posed by Will Norman: "Nabokov and Benjamin?" [ in Nabokov and Benjamin: A Late Modernist Response to History by Will Norman, 2007, Oxford University, www.jstor.org/stable/25748166 - ] showed me how innocently I'd proceeded.
As Will Norman notes, "Such has been the novelist's enduring influence over scholarship on his work that a pairing like this seems unusual, if not perverse. Scholars have tended to follow Nabokov's lead in limiting comparative critical enquiry to those writers who receive his endorsement or who are subject to intertextual allusion. Few have been willing to transgress on Nabokov's taboos...Walter Benjamin, a literary critic with interests in both Marxist and Freudian theory, unites two of Nabokov's greates bugbears and so, unsurprisingly, has received little attention from Nabokov scholars** Despite their considerable ideological differences, these two writers share more than a historical location..."
A more extensive examination is to be found in Nabokov's Art of Memory and European Modernism, by John Burt Foster,1993(87-90):
"Especially striking, given the contrast between Nabokov's disdain for social messages and Benjamin's reputation as an innovative sociologist of literature, both writers take Proust seriously as a prophetic social analyst....Thus when Benjamin stresses Proust's "merciless depiction" of Parisian high society, then he suggests that his full social significance will become apparent only "in the final struggle," his Marxist terminology conveys the same general insight as Kamera Obskura.[...] Alongside their convergences, however, Nabokov and Benjamin differ sharply...when Kamera Obskura downplays Rimbaud in favor of Proust, Nabokov implicitly rejects any such effor to assimilate the modernist masters to the avant-garde [ ]Nabokov is also much less receptive to German and Austro-German thought than Benjamin; indeed, as his cultural identity develops from the mid-1920s to the early 1930s, Bergson and Proust function as polemical alternatives to Nietzsche, whom they replace, and then to Freud, whom they oppose. But Benjamin, though hardly an orthodox German theorist, does not hesitate to align the French modernists with Marxist or psychoanalytic discourse. [ ]But as heirs to French modernism, Benjamin and Nabokov diverge the most strikingly in their treatment of involuntary memory and the mnemonic image. For Benjamin as he moves from Bergson to Freud, involuntary memory is gradually displaced from its original French context [ ] Nor does Benjamin emphasize the mnemonic image, for when he distinguises between two levels of involuntary memory, he insists that only a relatively superficial layer is converned with 'isolated, though enigmatically present, visual images.' [ ]Nothing could be further from Nabokov's basic tendendy as an artist of memory in the yeats after Kamera Obskura. [ ] he will show none of Benjamin's interest in setting bounds to consciousness, or in subordinating one's personal past to a collective one. Indeed, he will even sidestep Proust's distinction between voluntary and involuntary memory. And, far from striving to capture an amorphous whole, he will give decisive priority to mnemonic images marked by vivid pictorial detail. So great are the differences between these responses to French modernism that it is hard to imagine the two writers even agreeing on the single most importan passage in the madeleine episode. Benjamin, with his interest in the collective past, would probably have pointed to the introductory comment where Marcel likens his experience to ancient Celtic belief; but Nabokov would have chose the narrator's state of intense concentration afterwards, which reaffirms the value of consciousness and leads to a hallucinatory vision of Combray.[ ] Using the words of a critic to draw conclusions he had reached long before in his own literary practice, Nabokov praised the Recherche from two separate perspectives, a "a sequence of illustrations, of images" and as "an extended comparison" that was essentially metaphorical (LL 208). After the vague imagism of Mary, this sharpened understanding of the image as both trope and sensation represents a decisive advance in Nabokov's art of memory. He willl pursue the creation of such 'colored editions' of the past with a new urgency and precision [ ] As a Franchophile German Benjamin oddly parallels Segelkrantz, while his additional interest in both Jewisn mysticism and the Russian revolution suggest a wide-ranging cultural identity just as complex as that of Nabokov, who was seven years his junior.[ ] Beyond sharing Nabokov's sense of Proust's primacy in the early twentieth-century literature, Benjamin agrees that Proust belongs with Bergson in proposing a view of time and memory whose natural form of expression can only be artistic. Bergson's Matter and Memory, he remarks, "defines the nature of experience in the durée in such a way that the readeris bound to conclude that only a poet can be the adequate subject of such an experience. Benjamin also shares Nabokov's fascination with the ambiguous status of the Recherche, which surpasses the established genrse by creating a structure "which is fiction, autobiography, and commentary in one."
The two excerpts (obtained from the internet), allowed me no other access to these two writings. However, I think that these links might be of interest to the more resourceful N-L readers who hapen to unfamiliar with them - should they agree with my rather superficial connection between Nabokov and Benjamin.
................................................................................................
* - : "a copy of Gertrude Kasebier's photographic masterpiece 'Mother and Child' (1897), with the wistful, angelic infant looking up and away (at what?); and a similarly toned reproduction of the head of Christ from Rembrandt's 'The Pilgrims of Emmaus,' with the same, though slightly less celestial, expression of eyes and mouth." (Pnin, 95)
**WN's note: "Two scholars who have mentioned Benjamin briefely in relation to Nabokov (mainly in order to assert their differences) were Dolinin and Foster."
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/