“(Re)writing Considered as an Act of Murder: How to rewrite Nabokov’s Despair in a Post-Nouveau Roman Context,” Nabokov Studies 2, The International Nabokov Society (1995): 251-76. (original) (raw)
Related papers
A Conjuror's smile: Vladimir Nabokov in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight
2009
Abstract: V., a minor businessman in Marseilles , is trying to write a faithful biography about his prematurely deceased brother, the poet Sebastian Knight. A kaleidoscopic, multicoloured gallery of characters hovers about his hopeless search; by using these masks, together with the exploitation of some metafictional devices, as the mise en abyme, Nabokov manages to create a hypnotic yet elusive image of himself inside his novel. Resume: V., un petit marchand de Marseille, est en train d‟ecrire une biographie fidele de son frere prematurement disparu: le poete Sebastian Knight. Dans sa recherche sans espoir il voit flotter une galerie kaleidoscopique et multicolore de personnages; a travers l‟utilisation de ces masques et de certains procedes metanarratifs comme la mise en abyme, Nabokov reussit a inscrire, a l‟interieur du roman, une image de soi aussi hypnotique que fuyante.
Gabriel Josipovici's novel The Big Glass reveals a multifarious fabric of rewriting. It first takes on an intertextual aspect since the text makes use of Marcel Duchamp's notes for his "Green Box" which accompanies his plastic work, the Large Glass. This first dimension brings to the foreground the notion of reiteration in two different ways. On the one hand, it is the idea of rewriting that comes into play for Duchamp's notes are reused and thus renewed by the novel. In this respect, Josipovici's fiction tackles rewriting as a dialectics of tension with the source of inspiration: a process of existing both on a par with and aloof from the hypotext, continuously hesitating between dependence and autonomy. On the other hand, the novel shows signs of intersemiotic transposition, drawing on Duchamp's work and imitating it with literary techniques. Both thematic intertextuality and formal intermediality contribute to the construction of a specific philosophy of time: the concept of "delay in glass" and the idea of chance are tokens of an intertextual as well as interartistic repetition. But then, the source of inspiration also serves as a prism through which the work of art comes into being. Staging prismatic patterns that Duchamp's work symbolizes permits to tinge the notion of rewriting in the novel with the idea of filtering or perceiving through. Hence repetition is that through which works of art are channelled. Indeed, the palimpsest seems to be akin to the delayed reception The Big Glass calls for. The protagonist of the novel, Goldberg, transcribes the notes of an artist, Harsnet. Repetition becomes as much a gesture of taking back as an act of redoing. From the very beginning Goldberg's scriptural activity hovers between reliable transcribing of a text and annotating, glossing, and interpreting it. The protagonist transcribes, but he also makes commentaries, and he even writes in a separate notebook, constructing yet another text. In this respect, rewriting becomes a practice consisting in writing through (filter, intermediacy) but also writing beside (Goldberg's notebook) or writing upon (margin, palimpsest). I wish to highlight this prismatic dynamics in Josipovici's novel by first examining the philosophy of time adumbrated with the help of the hypotext. Second, I focus on several degrees of repetition underlying the palimpsest activity, and ranging from the act of taking back (repossession) to the act of retouching or reconstructing (axiological level, hermeneutic level). Finally, I examine the idea of repetition as a stylistic device involving constant return, intermediacy or overlapping of narrative voices.
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature, 1998
Within contemporary prose, one distinct mode or paradigm that can be discerned is constituted by the texts that daringly tackle the dark, suppressed, erased parts of our history and mentality; however, they approach this task not by way of self-righteous denunciatory investigations, but by provocatively problematizing the most established everyday facts, by depriving the reader of the possibility of even conceiving any firm ground of the stable construct of an origin or a self-identification-historically and culturally. Their irreverent and playful deconstruction of the all-pervasive national cultural mythologies has mounted a powerful challenge to ideological constructs big and small. This article considers two representative examples of texts of this kind, which the author proposes to call heterotopic: Patrick Modiano's Rue des Boutiques Obscures and Mikhail Kuraev's Kapitan Dikshtein. It offers an attempt at defining this paradigm through a reading of these two novels, drawing upon Michel Foucault's usage of the term "heterotopia" for the purpose of designating the "other" cultural spaces of our civilization, as well as on Deleuze and Guattari's concept of "minor literature" and the work of several other theorists. The texts of the kind exemplified by these two novels are considered as an instance of successful partaking in the project of cognitive mapping, which has been proposed by Fredric Jameson and others as the positive political edge of postmodern culture.
NABOKOV’S DUELS WITH LITERATURE
In her essay “Nabokov’s Duels with Literature”, Violeta Stojmenovic traces the duel motif in two of Nabokov’s early stories (“Podlets” and “Lebeda”), The Real Life of Sebastian Knight and Ada, or Ardor, analyzing its transformation from a literary into a meta-literary and meta-narrative motif. While in Nabokov’s stories from the 1930s the motif gave the narrator occasion to concentrate on the internal world of his characters and on issues of (in)authenticity, in the novels, the duels are presented as symbolic encounters between remote moments in time and, eventually, as a model for the relationship of human consciousness with time. The different duels in Nabokov’s oeuvre, in step with the changes in his work and relations toward literary and cultural traditions, draw this motif out of a culturally recognizable context. It loses its referential function and serves as a nostalgic and metatextual commentary, as well as a means of shifting from representation of specific cultural phenomena to representations of representations.
The Serialized Novel as Rewriting: The Case of Ladino Belles Lettres
Jewish Social Studies: History, Culture, and Society, 2003
he last third of the nineteenth century through the first third of the twentieth century witnessed the emergence and bloom of Ladino secular literature, mainly represented by theater plays and narrative fiction. By the outbreak of World War II, a few hundred texts of this kind had been produced, many of which are not available to us now. The leading role in the literary market belonged to the new genre of secular fiction that was referred to as the romanso (novel). The Ladino novel was a story in the vernacular, its length varying from 16 to a few hundred pages (though most of them did not go beyond 100) and typically appearing in serialized form in periodicals or as chapbooks.