Petter Naess: "I
believe I once came across a comparable instance in which VN, in the midst of
answering a literary question... interjects "Down,Fido" (or something like
that...), but now I'm unable to locate that passage. I think it was in Strong
Opinions, but a cursory skim missed it.Anyone know the passage? Perhaps I
remember it all wrong..."
JM: In Strong
Opinions the first appearance of such a "dog" (cf.Vintage,78) was in
1967, during an interview with Alfred Appel Jr ( who notes that
VN doesn't like to talk off the cuff ,ie: "off the Nabocuff").
While googling I discovered
that there is, indeed, a“Fido”- theory of meaning, by
Gibert Ryle [ Cf. Philosophy and a
reference to "Platonic realism or hypostization."*] Perhaps Petter Naess has
substituted the Plato-Fido reference by accident, but a
Fido-search is worth pursuing further!
Changing the subject:
In Nabokov's Poetics of Vision, or, What
Anna Karenina is Doing in Kamera obskura by Thomas
Seifrid (Zembla), there is an epigraph extracted from
"Dar": "A mysl' liubit zanavesku i kameru obskuru."
Dar (383) ..."But thought likes curtains and
the camera obscura." The Gift (338).
[QUERY]: When Nabokov
chose the title for what later became known as "Laughter in the Dark" ( "Camera
Oscura") did he intend it to suggest, literally, a "dark room," or
was he indicating the apparatus, used by Duerer, Vermeer and various other
painters, that is also designated by "Camera Obscura"? Or, perhaps,
both?
.............................................................................................................................
* Extract: Philosophy of language: "My dog
Fido is an entity, and is designated by the name “Fido.” On analogy, some
theories of meaning claim that every meaningful expression refers to or
designates an extra-linguistic entity, including abstract entities, and derives
its meaning from what it designates. Gibert Ryle applied a derogatory label to
this theory of meaning. According to him, this analogy is naive and incorrect.
“Fido” stands in the relation of designation to my dog Fido. However, not every
meaningful expression is a name that stands for some entity. For all expressions
to be meaningful in this way, we would in the first place have to invent whole
classes of abstract entities to which expressions that do not function in a
designating way could seem to stand in a relation of designation. The expression
“red” would, for example, give rise to the expression “redness” to stand for the
objective property of redness. But this multiplication of entities would be
futile. The central objection here is that having meaning is not identical with
standing for. Other philosophers call this theory Platonic realism or
hypostatization.“I am still not quite sure why it seems so natural to assume
that all words are names, and even that every possible grammatical subject of a
sentence, one-worded or many-worded, stands to something as the proper name
‘Fido’ stands for the dog Fido, and what is a further
..."
** Wiki: The camera obscura (Latin
for "dark room"; "darkened chamber") is an optical device that projects an
image of its surroundings on a screen. It is used in drawing and for
entertainment, and was one of the inventions that led to photography. The device
consists of a box or room with a hole in one side. Light from an external scene
passes through the hole and strikes a surface inside where it is reproduced,
upside-down, but with colour and perspective preserved. The image can be
projected onto paper, and can then be traced to produce a highly accurate
representation. Although the pinhole camera and camera obscura are credited to
Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen, 965–1039), for the first clear description and correct
analysis of the device and for first describing how an image is formed in the
eye using the camera obscura as an analogy, primitive forms of a camera obscura
were known to earlier scholars since the time of Mozi and Aristotle. Euclid's
Optics (ca 300 BC), presupposed the camera obscura as a demonstration that light
travels in straight lines. When Ibn al-Haytham began experimenting with the
camera obscura phenomenon, he stated (in Latin translation), Et nos non
inventimus ita, "we did not invent this".
The camera lucida was
patented in 1807 by W.Hyde Wollaston.There seems to be evidence that the camera
lucida was actually nothing but a reinvention of a device clearly described 200
years earlier by Johannes Kepler in his Dioptrice (1611). By the 19th
century, Kepler’s description had totally fallen into oblivion, so Wollaston’s
claim was not challenged. The term "camera lucida" (Latin "Light Room" as
opposed to Camera Obscura "Dark Room") is Wollaston's. ...The name "camera
lucida" (Latin for "lit room") is obviously intended to recall the much older
drawing aid, the camera obscura (Latin for "dark
room"). There is no optical similarity between the devices. The camera lucida is
a light, portable device that does not require special lighting conditions. No
image is projected by the camera lucida.