Re: [NABOKV-L] NABOKOV ONLY GRUDGINGLY RESPECTED IT ...

He added: This deep, detailed critical study (some 200 pages) must be read through thoughtfully rather than cherry-picked for the sour sound-bites!9...) Guy Davenport’s Foreword explains the context for VN’s reported delight in ‘tearing apart Don Quixote, a cruel and crude old book, before 600 students in Memorial Hall, much to the horror and embarrassment of some of my more conservative colleagues.’ Davenport continues, ‘Tear it apart he did, for good critical reasons, but he also put it back together.’ (My bold emphasis.)(...) in sweeping away the over-sentimental accretions to Cervante’s characters, VN has increased our interest in the novel.

JM: Two of the things that interested me in VN's lectures on Don Quixote were (1) his loving attention to detail as we find it in his study of Cervantes' novel, which allowed him to expand on words and feelings from very palpable quotidian literary descriptions..( Cf. for example, page 69 of VN's lectures on Quixote: "The wretched sense of poverty mingles with his general dejection and he finally goes to bed, moody and heavy-hearted. Is it only Sancho´s absence and the burst threads of his stockings that induce this sadness, this Spanish soledad, this Portuguese saudades, this French angoisse, this German sensucht, this Russian toska? We wonder - we wonder if it does not go deeper".); (2) the similarity bt. how he understood and put together the broken chapters of M.C's novel and his description of James Joyce's choice of very different styles in "Ulysses",this time in his Lectures on English Literature.

[Cp.with what Foucault wrote on Quixote (1966, Les Mots et Les Choses, ch.III)]

The scene in which Sancho watched Quixote's sommersaults might have been one of the inspirations for Van's Mascodagama act, although the reference to watching the world while standing upside-down arises in the Ulysses lecture.

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