SKB argues logically with Jansy
["you still miss the point that there’s no evidence that VN (or VN via HH)
was making any connection between the two Charlottes via phonetic wordplay on
Haze/Hayes"] and notes on typical LitCrit illogic, an
assertion like: “Of course VN knew about Madame C Hayes, or why else
would he have named Lo’s mum C Haze?”. For SKB, "This is the sort of
false “proof by assertion”[...] Until we have more evidence, it’s fruitlessly
premature to strongly opinionate on whether the mooted Hayes/Haze wordplay is
childish/cruel/demeaning, brilliantly justified, or so damned cunningly
Nabokovian/Humbertian, or whatever."
He concedes that "Jansy may have inadvertently
offered an alternative theory for Lo’s mum’s name". By mispelling Hayes as
Hays "wonderful and convincing allusions to the HAYS Hollywood
movie-morality “production” code" were opened. "What could be more
relevant to Charlotte Haze’s persona than this stifling, conventional list
of puritanical dos and don’ts (mainly don’ts)? [...] We can have NO DOUBT that
VN was familiar with this Code! But the CLINCHERs for wannabe allusionists are
(i) the early campaigns for film censorship were led by a Martin J QUIGLEY (the
link with Guilty/Quilty is too obvious to be worth mentioning) (ii) Hays himself
sported the initials WHH (William Harrison HAYS). The HH cannot be mere
coincidence. This plausible link retains some of the “HH contempt for his wife”
that Tim and Jansy find in the Haze/Hayes hypothesis, but is surely less cruel
and childish!"
JM: Using my
characteristic (but not LitCrit) illogic, I
must reassert that I didn't say that there was
any evidence for any phonetic connection bt. the two Charlottes,
mainly because it clashes with my irrational response to Nabokov's
writing (check: "it strikes me as false or gross, as not being typical
of Nabokov...").But, Stan, at the time VN was writing "Lolita", he had
no idea that his novel would become a best-seller and made into movies, to
boot: why ascribe such a critical, but important, role to Hays and
Quigley?
I wish you and other mathematically inclined
participants would help me along a different kind of reasoning.
I recently repeated Zimmer's quote from VN:"... It is the pathetic sight of an iridiscent future transpiring
through the shell of the past, something of the kind I experience when dipping
into my books written in the twenties.” I couldn't find the exact date when VN described his vision of the
future through its shell of the past, but he often toiled with this
idea ( in a Berlin beer-house, when watching a child look at him, or
while looking at the ship to America through an imagined future
recollection by his son Dmitri, are the two examples that come to my
mind).
It was announced to lay-people (cf. news
in Time magazine,June 25, 2001) that science had started
to decode the agony of dying stars and identify a mysterious "dark
matter". It was when we learned that the distant past had become actually
observable in the present - and the future of our cosmos as well.
An intuition about "seeing the past, or the
future" needs no astronomical confirmation to arise and, besides,
since the early sixties at least, we've learned that the rays of the
sun, as we see them, reach us with a delay of six or eight minutes.
Nevertheless, from the ways by which Nabokov
applied his own perceptions and reasonings to
literature, there are many other similar deductions in his novels,
poems and stories.
Cf. Walker's return to "Slava" (The
Nabokovian,61,2008) from where I'll only extract VN's lines:"but my word, curved to form an aerial viaduct/ spans the world,
and across in a strobe-effect spin/ of spokes I keep endlessly passing
incognito/ into the flame-licked night of my native
land."
Isn't VN almost describing a "quantum leap" and
how consciousness/words may affect matter?