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http://www.mantex.co.uk/ou/a319/nab-000.htm
Nabokov tutorials
50 studies of The Collected Stories
I think I shall read through these...
Some excerpts:
Nabokov always stays within the unwritten conventions of what is permissible in misleading the reader this way. The attentive reader is given just sufficient clues to avoid being taken in.
The participant's senses seem unusually heightened in such a way as to create a sense of spiritual euphoria.
Nabokov went on to develop certain notions - especially the frisson of the largely aesthetic moment
frisson \free-SOHN\, noun:
An emotional thrill; a shudder of excitement, pleasure, or fear.
When we think a story hasn't been invented, there's an extra frisson in reading it.
Frisson comes from the French, from Old French friçon, a trembling.
A propos of Nabokov's interest in different levels of reality, he was 'still searching for ways to fit a world beyond into the world of the human, but he had not found his own way yet.'
Two of his favourite topics - Art and Death - a subject which he treats many times throughout both his stories and novels - the artist-figure as a tormented eccentric, and a representative of the almost sacred belief Nabokov had in the value of individual human personality.
Nabokov side-steps this potential trap with some very neat linguistic footwork. Statements of admitted invention are used as a subtle bridge into an account of what could be known or surmised. 'I imagine for some reason that when she started pulling on her stockings the silk kept catching on the toenails of her icy feet. She arranged her hair as best she could' (p.180). The transition here from surmise ('I imagine') to statement ('She arranged') is hardly noticeable. This is a very skillful manipulation of narrative mode in a twenty-five year old writer just embarking on his literary career.
Just then a chrysalis from the boy's collection bursts open in the warmth of the room and a large moth emerges, opens its wings, and takes a 'full breath under the impulse of tender, ravishing, almost human happiness'
Centuries will roll by...everything will pass, but...my happiness will remain, in the moist reflection of a streetlamp...in everything with which God so generously surrounds human loneliness.
Nabokov tutorials
50 studies of The Collected Stories
I think I shall read through these...
Some excerpts:
Nabokov always stays within the unwritten conventions of what is permissible in misleading the reader this way. The attentive reader is given just sufficient clues to avoid being taken in.
The participant's senses seem unusually heightened in such a way as to create a sense of spiritual euphoria.
Nabokov went on to develop certain notions - especially the frisson of the largely aesthetic moment
frisson \free-SOHN\, noun:
An emotional thrill; a shudder of excitement, pleasure, or fear.
When we think a story hasn't been invented, there's an extra frisson in reading it.
Frisson comes from the French, from Old French friçon, a trembling.
A propos of Nabokov's interest in different levels of reality, he was 'still searching for ways to fit a world beyond into the world of the human, but he had not found his own way yet.'
Two of his favourite topics - Art and Death - a subject which he treats many times throughout both his stories and novels - the artist-figure as a tormented eccentric, and a representative of the almost sacred belief Nabokov had in the value of individual human personality.
Nabokov side-steps this potential trap with some very neat linguistic footwork. Statements of admitted invention are used as a subtle bridge into an account of what could be known or surmised. 'I imagine for some reason that when she started pulling on her stockings the silk kept catching on the toenails of her icy feet. She arranged her hair as best she could' (p.180). The transition here from surmise ('I imagine') to statement ('She arranged') is hardly noticeable. This is a very skillful manipulation of narrative mode in a twenty-five year old writer just embarking on his literary career.
Just then a chrysalis from the boy's collection bursts open in the warmth of the room and a large moth emerges, opens its wings, and takes a 'full breath under the impulse of tender, ravishing, almost human happiness'
Centuries will roll by...everything will pass, but...my happiness will remain, in the moist reflection of a streetlamp...in everything with which God so generously surrounds human loneliness.
