Jansy Mello: I just discovered that Eliane Moraes's paper has also been published in France, in a collection related to "Le Corps et ses traductions," Ed. Desjonquères, Paris, 2008, edited by Camille Dumoulié and Michael Riaudel. Its title in French is "L'ingénuité d'un pervers : langage, enfance et érotisme chez Nabokov." Perhaps Eliane Moraes's interesting conjectures about Humbert Humbert's new language ( "Trata-se, pois, de uma língua outra que já não é mais o inglês" i.e., "the language he employs is another language, it's no longer English") translates better into French.

Vladimir Nabokov, together with James Joyce, is considered by many as one of the best prose stylists in English literature. Eliane Moraes may have based her assessment on HH's own words ( "you can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style"), but the more I explore her article, the more I'm convinced that her source was not Nabokov's, or Humbert Humbert's English ( she even translated, in her Brazilian text, Lolita's working title as "The Kingdom by the Shore"). Either a murderer's "fancy prose style" is a kind of international thing, or the main elements present in Nabokov's prose style survive intact inspite of (good? indiferent?) translations. This issue seems to be worth examining...

In one of his interviews ( BBC.1962) Nabokov said :" I don't think in any language. I think in images. I don't believe that people think in languages...No, I think in images, and now and then a Russian phrase or an English phrase will form with the foam of the brainwave, but that's about all." Inspite of his conclusivon "that's about all", perhaps there's something else, something non-verbal, taking place in VN's (and in some of the other writer's) style.

I found a promising review by Gerald Bruns, about a book (which I haven't read, yet): Thinking in Literature: Joyce, Woolf, Nabokov by Anthony Uhlmann , Continuum, 2011. ISBN 9781441140562*. "What makes the question of "thinking in literature" arise? No doubt the traditional answer still carries weight: Plato gave the poet his once and future identity by making him (if "him" is the word) a philosophical outcast. Impersonators, image-makers, and storytellers are incompatible with a just and rational state over which the philosopher presides as "the guardian of rationality"... But it was as such a guardian that Aristotle reconceptualized poetry so as to find a place for it within his own teachings. The concepts of mimesis and plot show that poetry is a kind of knowledge and that it hangs together consecutively -- has, in some sense, a logic that makes it at least a subsidiary of the philosopher's corporation (Poetics, 1451-52).One shortfall of this line of thinking is that it reduces literature to its narrative form and thus brackets much of what is original and compelling about literary modernism, principally its experiments with language (recall the way Aristotle brushes aside lexis as a thing of small importance)[ ] Uhlmann updates these concepts with the help of Gilles Deleuze's studies of Spinoza and Leibniz, such that the concept of relation, for example, becomes useful with respect to art because it involves "a kind of linking or connection that proceeds across gaps, urging flashes of insight to emerge, to speak from ourselves to the mute tableau, as a lightening flash leaps from the sky to the ground, or a signal across a synapse" (p. 12). So a Cubist collage or one of Samuel Beckett's later fictions is not simply an aleatoric assembly of random particles but an example of the disjunctive logic (parataxis) of literary modernism.

*- Thinking in Literature ..."examines how the Modernist novel might be understood as a machine for thinking, and how it offers means of coming to terms with what it means to think. It begins with a theoretical analysis, via Deleuze, Spinoza and Leibniz, of the concept of thinking in literature, and sets out three principle elements which continually announce themselves as crucial to the process of developing an aesthetic expression: relation; sensation; and composition. Uhlmann then examines the aesthetic practice of three major Modernist writers: James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Vladimir Nabokov. Each can be understood as working with relation, sensation and composition, yet each emphasize the interrelations between them in differing ways in expressing the potentials for thinking in literature."