Final Thoughts

First ~ I have more ideas for my paper...the paper that never ended...usually once I turn them in, I let it go, but this one just won't do that...must be because of how Nabokov, and this class have rearranged my brain...once you know something, you cannot go back to ignorance...even if you want to in order to stop the cascade of random discoveries and thoughts that keep popping up. I will not elaborate because I have too much other work to finish tonight...

Second ~ I loved the presentations today, especially Jon's and Aaron's poem was awesome! I am counting on other blogs for a complete, more detailed summary of today's presentations....

Third ~ As difficult and frustrating as Nabokov has been (and will continue to be) for me, I am glad I had the chance to experience him with Dr. Sexson and all my amazing, inspiring, and brilliant classmates.

Fourth ~ I am a little concerned about the final, particularly the "intimate religious sacrifice"? That is ominous sounding....

Fifth ~ The final will be 25 questions - primarily derived from the class blogs, presentations (group and individual) and the final papers (which should be in the blogs).

I am sure I will think of at least 3 or 4 more things to say as I am falling asleep tonight, but I think this is the end of the blogging for this class for me...

If I could add to my paper...

After finishing (well, not really, as you can tell) my paper, more ideas haunted my day ~ showing me several key pieces of information and connections that would have been beneficial, and enhanced my term paper. Since I could not continue to work on the paper, I decided to add one more blog and share them here.

I am in another class with Sam, and when we were discussing the Lewis Hyde text Trickster Makes the World in Lynda Sexson's class this morning, Dr. Sexson read a passage about Jung discussing Mercurius (aka Hermes) on page 181 "Mercurius consists of all conceivable opposites....He is the process by which the lower and material is transformed into the higher and spiritual, and vice versa. He is the devil, a redeeming psychopomp, an evasive trickster, and God's reflection in physical nature". (my emphasis) That reflection in nature of God would have added another layer of texture to my Jungian discussion of reflections in water. I might have also used it to connect Nabokov, as the 'god' figure using his imagination and reflection to create a fictional world in the text he created. God created the 'real' world and Nabokov created a world within his work - parallel mirroring.

I should have also explored Nabokov's dislike of sleep, how he felt it was a loss of consciousness and was repulsive to him. Again, just another layer added to what has already been said.

I wish I had further elaborated on the "tension film" I briefly discussed from Transparent Things. It could have become a much deeper, more complex aspect of my discussion of reflection and mirroring.

I originally planned to talk more about anagrams, palindromes, etc. as well as just physical reflections using words and language, to really bring word play and world play together more fully.

So, maybe you could pretend I included these ideas in my final paper...or as more food for thought...

This is my final blog for English 431 ~ Good Luck on the final and have a great holiday break!

Final Paper

Time has just flown by...I cannot believe the semester is just about over. So, here is my final paper for the class...revised (again)

Playing with Worlds, Playing with Words

One of the aspects of the literature of Nabokov that has fascinated and astonished me this semester has been the way he uses words. He twists, pulls, tweaks, and remolds language and words into a completely new form to retexturize the words and their meanings, giving texture to the text. One of the main tools Nabokov uses throughout his works, which is especially prevalent in Pale Fire, is reflection. Mirrors, water, anagrams, palindromes, doppelgangers, twins, and doubles are just a handful of the many devices Nabokov uses to create the textured reflections in the texts. In Pale Fire, Nabokov does not just play with worlds; he plays with words. In Partial Magic, Robert Alter says,

“…it is obvious that the texture of Shade’s poem and it informing sensibility are far from Popean prosody, but the disparity is quite to the point, for Pale Fire is in part about how literature reuses literature, assimilates it and makes something strange and new out of it” (Alter, p. 201)

This quote resonates with Nabokov’s explanation of readers, "Curiously enough, one cannot read a book: one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader." – Nabokov, "Good Readers and Good Writers". Nabokov is both a perceptive rereader and an elegant reuser of literature. In his rewriting of literature, he alters the substance and makes something new out of it. In Pale Fire, he molds a poem and commentary into a novel. This is only the most elementary layer of the magic and texture he adds to the reflections of literature. It is both a reflection of other literature, such as Pope’s poetry and his own epic commentary on Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, and a new type of literature at the same time, a shade of previous works, yet a light all its own. This reflection of light and dark is another prevailing theme throughout the text. Nabokov layers the tensions within the novel by juxtaposing the light against the dark, the sun’s light reflecting off the moon to create a new kind of light, a pale fire.

The poem Pale Fire begins, “I was the shadow of the waxwing slain/ By the false azure in the windowpane/ I was the smudge of ashen fluff-and I/ Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky” (Pale, 33) and the Index ends with “Zembla, a distant northern land” (Pale, 315), which is a mirrored, magical world beyond “reality”. The mirror images, literal and figurative, abound, between the first and the last, the Alpha and the Omega. The reflections often double back and fold in and over themselves in layers, creating lemniscates or spirals, creating layers upon layers of intrigue, building the texture, richer, thicker, and more intricate.

In the Forward of Pale Fire, Charles Kinbote tells us,

"I am witnessing a unique physiological phenomenon: John Shade perceiving and transforming the world, taking it in and taking it apart, re-combining its elements in the very process of storing them up so as to produce at some unspecified date an organic miracle, a fusion of image and music, a line of verse" (Pale, 27).

John Shade is creating a brilliant poem by transforming and re-combining the elements (of language – words) into something magical and completely unique. Though Kinbote says this concerning Shade, we know it is really Nabokov speaking and being spoken about. The “unique physiological phenomenon” is the entire novel. In class, we have seen and discussed how exactly and precisely Nabokov crafted his texts - every word, every phrase, and every reflection intentional and deliberate.

Nabokov rereads, rewrites, and recreates previous texts, making the words all his own. He is speaking about, to, and through literary history. In order to understand the textures of Nabokov’s text, the reader must also be a rereader of the text, and even then, there will always remain elusive textures. His work is a reflection of other kinds and forms of literature, as well as specific works themselves. He relights the fire of the words in a mirror image of the previous uses. Some seem evident, such as when Shade asks “Will” to help him with a title for the poem. Our discussion with Dr. Minton and subsequent discussions showed that the ‘obvious’ explication may not be correct, or that there may be layers and textures beyond and beneath the visible. “Will” is most likely William Shakespeare, but Dr. Sexson made a case for it to potentially be William Yeats. Similarly, ghosts in Transparent Things can reach through the surface of objects to all the textures below the obvious surface.

The reflection and mirroring even play a role in his ‘biography’ Speak, Memory,

In the purity and vacuity of the less familiar hour, the shadows

were on the wrong side of the street, investing it with a sense of not

inelegant inversion, as when one sees reflected in the mirror of a barber-

shop . . . a stretch of sidewalk shunting a procession of unconcerned

pedestrians in the wrong direction, into an abstract world that all at once

stops being droll and loosens a torrent of terror. (Speak, Memory, 296)

Nabokov plays with worlds, even when he is describing his personal “reality”. In Nabokov's Pale Fire: The Magic of Artistic Discovery Brian Boyd says,

Nabokov dons the mask of a reviewer of his autobiography, and writes, among amusingly disparaging comments, of the "retrospective acumen and creative concentration that the author had to summon in order to plan his book according to the way his life had been planned by unknown players of games."

Nabokov plays games with worlds, in all the texts we have discussed in class, but I think the most complex is Pale Fire. If Nabokov is a player of games with his own “reality”, does that make his own reality as fractured as Kinbote’s appears to be? Did his incredible genius with language and words come from a disjointed world within Nabokov’s own world and mind? Was the magic a produce of madness or genius, and is there a difference? To read and reread Nabokov, is to find more questions than answers within the texture beneath the textual surface.

Near the end of Canto Three of the poem Pale Fire are the words, “this/ Was the real point, the contrapuntal theme; / Just this: not text, but texture; not the dream/ But topsy-turvical coincidence, / Not flimsy nonsense, but a web of sense” (Pale, 62-63) Nabokov builds a web, to trap the reader. In doing so, he combines the reader with the text, trapping the reader in the texture beneath the text, bringing “reality” and reflection together in harmony. Coincidences are what logicians loathe and poets love. Nabokov uses coincidences to ensnare the reader and reflect deception and duplicity.

One of the types of reflections Nabokov uses is looking into still water. This form of reflection is used in the Greek myth of Narcissus and beyond, reflecting the self. "Water," Carl Jung says, "is the commonest symbol for the unconscious". (Jung, C.G. Collected Works 9,1: 18, par. 40) Many of the water and mirror reflections occur in the commentary, when Kinbote is embellishing his tale of Zembla, the reflected inner world of Kinbote’s “reality”. Dreams are directly linked to the imagination through the unconscious mind; thus, the reflection in the water is a dream or altered world. Nabokov uses Kinbote and his imaginary world of Zembla to mirror his childhood in Russia and his family’s exile during the Bolshevik Revolution.

Jung delineated five main archetypes, including the Shadow, which he said is “the opposite of the ego image, often containing qualities that the ego does not identify with but possesses nonetheless”. Jung also believed that "in spite of its function as a reservoir for human darkness—or perhaps because of this—the shadow is the seat of creativity”. (Kaufman, C. Three-Dimensional Villains: Finding Your Character's Shadow. http://archetypewriting.com/articles/articles_ck/archetypes2_shadow.htm) The light and the dark create the whole of the self. “Anyone who perceives his Shadow and his light simultaneously sees himself from two sides and thus gets in the middle. (Jung, C.G. Collected Works l0: Civilization in Transition: 872, p 463.) Kinbote is the Shadow to Shade’s light; together they create a whole, a reflection of each other, mirroring the conscious and unconscious mind, weaving “reality” and imagination into a “complex web of sense” for the reader. Nabokov texturizes the web with the mundane and unexpected with the “realities” of the two characters. Because of his penchant for playing with worlds and words, the character that represents the light is, contrarily, named Shade, which signifies the dark, the Shadow, the world beyond the veil. A world Shade desperately wants to understand, but is beyond his reach.

Some kind of link-and-bobolink, some kind
Of correlated pattern in the game,
Plexed artistry, and something of the same
Pleasure in it as they who played it found.

It did not matter who they were. No sound,
No furtive light came from their involute
Abode, but there they were, aloof and mute,
Playing a game of worlds, promoting pawns
To ivory unicorns and ebon fauns....

The artistry and pleasure is in the play. The inventing and playing of games within the layers of the text creates the “correlated pattern” in the game of writing and reading. The game is to find the patterns reflected in the texture of the text and the web of complexities inherent in Nabokov’s play with worlds and words. He uses familiar and ordinary literary forms, such as poetry and commentary, to create an extraordinary novel. In order to experience the texture within the text, one must be a rereader, and willing to play a game of words and worlds.

***NOTE*** My paper ended up going in a completely different and surprising direction from where I had thought it would go, but when where the imagination and play took me. As a reader and rereader of Nabokov, I can say, without a doubt, that I will never look at a text the same way again. I will continue to reread Pale Fire and explore other works by Nabokov. The patterns, reflections, and complex layers thrill and astound me as a lover of both texts and games of words. Thanks for such a complex, confounding, enlightening, and textured exploration of Nabokov’s texts.

SOURCES

Alter, Robert. Partial Magic: The Novel as a Self-Conscious Genre. Berkeley: University Of California Press, 1975

Boyd, Brian. Nabokov's Pale Fire: The Magic of Artistic Discovery. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999.

Jung, C.G. Collected Works 9,1: 18, par. 40.

Jung, C.G. Collected Works l0: Civilization in Transition: 872, p 463.

Kaufman, C. Three-Dimensional Villains: Finding Your Character's Shadow. http://archetypewriting.com/articles/articles_ck/archetypes2_shadow.htm

Nabokov, Vladimir. Pale Fire. New York: Vintage International, 1989.

Nabokov, Vladimir. Speak, Memory. New York: Vintage, 1989.
Nabokov, Vladimir. Transparent Things. New York: Literary Classics, 1996.

Paper Presentations - Day #1

Congrats to all the people who presented the first day. The topics and papers were creative, entertaining, and thought provoking.

I really liked the creative pieces - hope you had fun writing them.

To the people who presented unexpectedly - fantastic job stepping up and sharing your ideas, and plans.

Christina - Amazing paper and great job reading it for us. I enjoyed hearing your ideas in your own voice.

To those yet to present - the first day set the bar pretty high, but I expect there will be many more great discoveries and surprises ahead. I am looking forward to hearing more next week.

Fun Anagrams

I found a site with anagrams from literature, movies and more...here are a few of my favorites. (the link is first in my links section)

Erewhon = Nowhere
The author Samuel Butler titled his satirical novel as an angram; incidentally, the word "nowhere" is a literal translation of the Greek utopia.

Redrum = Murder
In "The Shining", a horror movie based on Stephen King's novel of the same name. Danny, holding a knife, shouts REDRUM and writes it with a lipstick on a bathroom mirror. His mother sees in the reflection that it's MURDER spelled backwards.

Torchwood = Doctor Who
BBC science fiction series Torchwood is a spinoff of Dr. Who.

Gregory House = Huge ego, sorry
In the television series House, in the episode titled "Housetraining", the character Dr. House says his name, Gregory House, is an anagram for "Huge ego, sorry."

Memory Almost Full = For my soulmate LLM
Paul McCartney's 2007 album is titled Memory Almost Full. LLM are the initials of Linda Louise McCartney, his wife who died of breast cancer in 1998.

Salvador Dali = Avida Dollars
Andre Breton, the founder of surrealism, came up with this anagram to refer to Dali. Avida Dollars means, roughly, 'eager for dollars' in Spanish.

Group #2 Script

Here is the script from "The Vivian Darkbloom Show" aka the Group #2 Presentation, if anyone is interested. It is not exact as some last minute and improv changes were made, but the basic ideas are there:

VD – Welcome to the Vivian Darkbloom Show, I am you your host, Vivian Darkbloom. Today my guests are characters from Vladimir Nabokov’s novels Lolita and Pale Fire.

My first guest today is the elusive American dramatist Mr. Claire Quilty, educated at Columbia and known for plays such as “The Girl who Loved Lightning” and “Fatherly Love”.

CQ – Darkbloom, hmmm, sounds like a made up name…

VD – I can assure you Mr. Quilty, I am as real as you are.

CQ – I see I’ll have to remember that name. Might want to use it later on.

VD - Next is Miss Delores Haze, also known as Lolita and is accompanied by her stepfather Mr. Humbert Humbert, who is the novel’s narrator.

HH – says _______________________________________________________________

VD - And from Pale Fire, I am happy to introduce Zemblan commentator Mr. Charles Kinbote, also known as Charles the Beloved.

VD - Our final guest today is the daughter of famous poet John Shade. She is The Lady of the Lake, Miss Hazel Shade.

HS & CK – REDIPS!!!

VD – We will start out with a little icebreaker to get everyone talking. What are your hobbies?

HH – My hobbies are chess, writing, and road trips. And I enjoy sitting on a park bench, holding a book, while the soothing sounds of children splash my ears.

LO – I like playing tennis, acting, and going to the movies.

CQ – My hobbies are fast cars, photography, and pets.

VD-And what kinds of pets do you have?

CQ-I have many...(looks at Lolita)

CK –Well Vivian, In Zembla, I often entertained myself with my “boy pages, a whole mountain of gift boys from Troth, and Tuscany, and Albanoland” but my favorite playmate was certainly my dear Oleg, Duke or Rahl However now that I am living here in New Wye, I spend most of my time gazing in the windows of the Shade home.

HS – Reading, in my room, ALONE. Knitting. Swimming late at night, in the lake.

VD - Though some people may find this question too Freudian, I must ask, “How do you feel about being a character in a novel?”

CK – Well Mrs. Darkbloom let me say that I am not surprised in the least, firstly I am sure that I already exist in many history textbooks in my native Zembla and our poet and my dear friend John Shade wrote his poem Solus Rex about my fascinating life and me…

HS – No. The poem Pale Fire “might have been about you, me, or some quaint blend”. I am horrified that my father turned my suffering into entertainment.

CK – Absurd! Ahh yes I know about you, Jane Provost told me all about you. It is clearly about me and my fantastic escape from Zembla. “But then it is also true that Hazel Shade resembles me in certain respects” how very fortunate for you (looking at hazel)

VD – Moving on, Mr. Humbert?

HH – I wrote the novel about myself, so I planned to be in it. My story seems to have bits of marrow sticking to it, and blood, and beautiful bright-green flies. I elude my own slippery self, and have tried in vain to find who I am. So I welcome any exploration into the deep abyss of my soul, and prostrate myself before the winged gentle man of the jury.

VD – Miss Haze?

LO – Whatever...I guess it's cool....it doesn't surprise me that this brute would write an entire book about me.

VD – And you? (Addressing CQ)

CQ – I don’t think I am really in that book.

VD – I would not have invited you to be on the show today if you were not in the novel.

CQ – You prove to me that I’m in the book and I’ll believe you.

LO has fit, interrupt at the end of CQ’s line.

DAD you promised me we were going to go see a movie...you know, the western...the one with the cowboys and indians...and now we're HERE at this stupid TV show?

HH- Need I remind you, darling, of the desolate place I will take where we will spend years in seclusion, if need be, studying Latin and French. Enfant charmate et foubre (sly and lovely child)

VD – OK, we must get back on topic now please. You all steal and become thieves in some way, why is that?

CK – Vivian let me cut you off there as you are clearly referring to my family, the Zemblan royal family, and our crown jewels and our throne stolen from us by the extremists.

HS – No, you fool. She means because you stole my dad’s poem.

LO – (looking back and forth between HH and CQ) they both stole my life.

HH – You stole my heart, delicious daughter, with your wily ways.

CQ – You came to me.

HH – What did you say?

CQ – I said, “I saw a bee.”

CK – Ahh, yes, yes bees! Yes I once knew a beautiful man boy beekeeper, he worked in the royal mows at our palace. A mow being the Zemblan word for a field next to a barn of course!

LO – OMG not this stuff again. Shut him up.

CQ – Where’d you get her?

HH – Hmmm?

CQ – I said, “The weather’s getting better.” Who’s the girl?

HH – My daughter.

CQ – No, she’s not.

HH – What?

CQ – I said, “July was really hot.”

LO-(interrupts) When will this be over? I just want to go now...

HH – Hush. I will get you an ice cream as soon as we are done.

LO – Pedophile.

HH – I can’t help it if I suffer from excessive desire.

CQ-What ever happened to strength and reverence?

VD – Human beings attend! If you all cannot get along, I will have to stop reading, close my book and you will cease to exist until the book is opened again. Vladimir Nabokov, who created you all, has a great love for the game of chess. If you were a chess piece, which piece would you be? (Confusion and questioning who VN is…yes or no on this, we have not been using it while practicing)

CK – mmm of course you are referring to Solus Rex, the chess problem in which the king is left alone on the board. This is why my friend John Shade wrote about me and why the poem was meant to be entitled Solus Rex, I am clearly the king piece! And soo… (cut CK off here)

HH – Solus Rex is an inferior move. I am of course the knight protecting my Frigid Queen.

LO – Well, I guess that makes me the queen. Gee, thanks for answering that one for me, DAD. And while we're on the topic, SHE would be a pawn because pawns are useless, common, and ugly.

HS – XANAX or another silly nonsense phrase (crying)

CQ – (jumps in) Chess, hmmm, nope don’t play chess. Too much deception. Too much strategy. Kind of beneath a man of my ilk. Besides I’m a terrible liar.

VD – Back to our rational discussion if you please. Since there has been so much disagreement, I am going to try something different now. I am going to ask you each to talk about another guest. What mythic character would another guest be?

CK – Vivian I am going to have to cut you off again because I think we can all agree that no one here is really qualified to make any commentary on a man like myself! So let me just say that I would certainly be considered Zeus, as he is king of the gods and I am a king myself, what could be more fitting! Although I did once overhear someone, I think it was Sybil Shade, say that I was more akin to Narcissus which make very little sense indeed! ( take out mirror and admires self)

HH – my Lolita is, of course, the Goddess Venus, and Hazel over there is Mania, the very personification of insanity, Goddess of the dead and nights spirits.

HS – She (looking at LO) must be Persephone because she gets raped.

LO – At least I get some.

CQ silences the girls before it goes further.

CQ – You, Mr. Humbert are Acteaon from my play, The Enchanted Hunters

LO – On that topic, Vivian, Mr. Quilty here would be Pan, who is said to be the companion and seducer of nymphs, as well as the god of theatrical criticism...seeing as you write plays and all....

HH – Lolita, darling, don’t talk to strangers.

CQ – I’d hardly consider myself a stranger.

HH starts to pull a gun, realizing who CQ is, everyone begins talking loudly over one another and VD closes the book. Everyone stops.

VD – Resemblances are the shadows of differences. Different people see different similarities and similar differences.

Good night and thank you for watching the Vivian Darkbloom Show. Tune in tomorrow when my guest will be Mr. Hugh Person.

Helena will be posting the Group Presentation Blog for our group.

Initial Impressions

My initial impressions of Transparent Things was one of confusion, which is not surprising given the author and topic. My main struggle was figuring out who the narrators were. I knew they were shades, ghosts, specters, 'transparent things' from the beginning. The 'we' and the language changes indicated there were more than one, but the questioning of who it was made me feel the narrator was unreliable, like Kinbote and Humbert. The discussion about the narrator in class helped me a lot, and I am sure will enhance my second reading of Transparent Things.

Briefly looking for more information about the novel, I found the following on the Zembla website:

Transparent Things

Transparent Things, Nabokov's 16th novel, and 7th in English, McGraw-Hill, 1972. (Transparent Things can be found in many public libraries and is available online from Available from Amazon.com and from Barnes & Noble.)

"In matters of art, 'avant garde' means little more than conforming to some daring philistine fashion, so, when the curtain opened, Hugh was not surprised to be regaled with the sight of a naked hermit sitting on a cracked toilet in the middle of an empty stage."

Awkward American Hugh Person is sent to Switzerland to interview R., a novelist represented by the Publishing firm Person works for. He meets and falls in love with sensuous, sullen Armande, and their odd courtship and marriage, coupled with R.'s literary observations, shape the events of the novel. Diaphanous, dream-like, fleeting, Transparent Things explores the interaction between memory and observation in a delicate yet precise style.

"Once more he has managed to shape a formless, potentially threatening reality into a precise and transparent work of literary art while continually demonstrating for the benefit of attentive and imaginative readers the exact means employed for bringing about this transformation."
Simon Karlinsky

Akiko Nakata's Notes to Transparent Things [in Japanese, with images]
A Bibliography of Critical Works on Transparent Things

I love the Simon Karlinsky quote...elegant, concise, and insightful. I look forward to exploring the bibliography linked above for more discussion of the book (Hope I can find some of the articles). The Akiko Nakata site is full of interesting articles on Nabokov and his works.

Time to go be a rereader...