[Sandy Klein from
http://evidenceanecdotal.blogspot.com/2008/09/quaintly-circumstantial.html ,in
Are You There, Crocodile?: Inventing Anton Chekhov, Michael Pennington lovingly
describes his visit to Melikhovo[...]thrilled to have stood on the steps where
the dandyish-looking Chekhov was famously photographed holding Quinine, his
dachshund [...] Pennington picks up the Chekhov/Nabokov
connection.[..]coincidences, however abhorrent in art, are reality’s consolation
prizes. JM: Dachs must have been favourites among
artists. Victor Hugo's grandson had a dachs, called "Lolita" and he once
dressed her up to meet Picasso's dachs, "Lump", as a "bride".]
Stan K-B to Sandy/Jansy: I’m both
proud and ashamed that I knew the French slang for “lap dog” when I was 10 years
old, some years before I discovered the literal meaning of “lecheur
con.”
JM: Should I be proud or ashamed that
I still don't get it? I understand the literal alusion but
not how it is employed in ordinary discourse.
In Portuguese we have equivalents (at least three
& they may be freely employed, even by kids) but they carry
no erotic suggestion. They are offensive slang-words used to
describe a despicable flattering attitude. Actually, behavioristically
speaking, timid dogs are, really, "lap dogs"!
S.
K-B:The “deep” significance of “coincidences” continues to
intrigue. [...]The difficult thing for HomSaps to accept is that many of the
things that happen have very small, even zero prior probabilities. Don your
logic hard-hats and listen up: all impossible events have zero probability, but
some zero probability events do happen. We mathematicians have the useful term
“vanishingly small.” [...] You could argue that in fiction you are free to
invent an event (what d’you make of that rhyme?!) of varying probabilities
betweeen 0 and 1, but since you have left the realm of actualities, it becomes
difficult to estimate or even define “probability.” In the real world we can in
principle estimate the fraction of real outcomes to potential outcomes. In a
novel, we can ditch causal chains, and, as in VN’s Invitation to a Beheading or
Prospero’s Tempest, just make the pageant disappear. That’s quite a
coincidence, nein?
JM: While I
was searching for Nabokov on "coincidence" I discovered another
instance in which Nabokov mentions the "Cry Wolf" analogy he used in GRGW
and in his Cornell Lecture - and that was mentioned a few days ago here in the
List.
In 1962, SO,page11: "Do you
know how poetry started? I always think that it started when a cave boy came
running back to the cave, through the tall frass, shouting as he ran,
"Wolf,wolf," and there was no wolf. His baboon-lie parents, great sticklers for
the truth, gave him a hiding, no doubt, but poetry had been born - the tall
story had been born in the tall grass." (the
question he is answering is about "reality as an intensely subjective matter"
and "perverse delight in literary deception").
Later on we read: "poetry
represents the mysteries of the irrational perceived through rational
words" (p.44).
See, Stan, both my parents-in-law were born on the same day and, several
decades later, so was I. By itself, this would not represent an
extraordinary coincidence were it not for a gipsy once (before my
husband met me) telling him that he was going to marry a
girl whose birthday coincided with both his parents' (nevertheless, since
he is a playful guy, he might have invented the gipsy-story after
he discovered the three similar dates. He swears he didn't).
Here are somes examples I had underlined in my Vintage
"Strong Opinions":
p.67 I:Some critics may
find the use of coincidence in a novel arch or contrived. I recall that you
yourself at Cornell Called Dostoevski's usage of coincidence
crude.
VN: But in "real" life they do
happen [...] It is not the coincidence in the story that bothers us so much
as the coincidence of coincidences in several stories by different
writers, as, for instance, the recurrent eavesdropping device in
nineteenth-century Russian fiction.".
p.79: "There is no science without
fancy, and no art without facts."
p.147/8: "I go by books, not by
authors [...]War and Peace, though a little too long, is a rollicking
historical novel[...] In terms of artistic structure it does not satisfy me. I
derive no pleasure from its cumbersome message, from the didactic interludes,
from the artificial coincidences..."
p.177:"I am subject to the
embarassing qualms of superstition: a number, a dream, a coincidence can
affect me obsessively - though not in the sense of absurd fears but as
fabulous ( and on the whole rather bracing) scientific enigmas incapable of
being stated, let alone solved."