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Monday, May 21, 2007

Nabokov on Certain Postulates Concerning the Reality of the World

Posted by John Holbo on 05/21/07 at 02:22 AM

In 1940 Nabokov wrote a book review (for the New York Sun 10 Dec.) entitled “Prof. Woodbridge in an Essay on Nature Postulates the Reality of the World”. The book was An Essay On Nature , by Frederick J.E. Woodridge (1940).

A very brief selection from the review appears in Nabokov’s Butterflies:

That philosophers are essentially diurnal creatures (no matter how late into the night their inkpots and spectacles glitter) and that space would not be space if color and outline were not primarily perceived are suppositions that transcend the author’s “naïve realism” just at the point whre he seems to be most securely hugging the coast. But is visibility really as dominant as that in an all imaginable knowledge of Nature? Though I personally would be satisfied to spend the whole of eternity gazing at a blue hill or a butterfly, I would feel the poorer if I accepted the idea of there not existing still more vivid means of knowing butterflies and hills. (pp. 237-8)

I have collected another, single sentence from a review, by Zoran Kuzmanovich, of the Julian W. Connolly, ed. Nabokov and His Fiction: New Perspectives volume: “language is not applied to Nature but is really made in Nature.”

At this rate, in another 20 years or so I will have enough puzzle pieces to begin assembling the review. As in that fond passage from Speak, Memory, on the imponderable potentialities of beach glass and such:

I do not doubt that among those slightly convex chips of majolica ware found by our child there was one whose border of scrollwork fitted exactly and continued the pattern of a fragment I had found in 1903 on the same shore, and that the two tallied with a third my mother had found on that Mentone beach in 1882, and with a fourth piece of the same pottery that had been found by her mother a hundred years ago—and so on, until this assortment of parts, if all had been preserved, might have been put together to make the complete the absolutely complete, bowl, broken by some Italian child, God knows where and when, and now mended by these rivets of bronze.

But perhaps someone can spare me the wait, and the rivets, and just - I dunno - tell me where I can find the thing. Or send it to me. I dunno.

You see: I am writing about philosophy, and Nabokov. And would be fascinated to read what promises to be an at least moderately serious venture forth, by him. Also, the line about Nature is perfect, for polemical purposes I nurture. But it would be very imprudent of me to run forth hollering, sure that Nabokov is right behind me. Without inquiring into context more closely.

Comments

I don’t have a copy of the Nabokov article, but here’s some William Carlos Williams for ya: “Poetry has to do with the crystallization of the imagination—the perfection of new forms as additions to nature --”

By Ray Davis on 05/21/07 at 09:34 AM | Permanent link to this comment

That’s good! thanks!

By John Holbo on 05/21/07 at 07:59 PM | Permanent link to this comment

Stumbled across your lovely site in a bid to find bits of that same Nabokov review. Glad to be able to offer another puzzle piece, which I tracked down in Vladimir Alexandrov, Nabokov’s Otherworld, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), p. 29.
I’ve kept it in Alexandrov’s context for sense. Double quotes mark out Nabokov’s words:

The creative writer’s “trying to set down his sentence in the best possible state--of conservation rather than creation--is but an effort to materialize the perfect something which already exists in the somewhere which [the philosopher in question] obligingly terms ‘Nature’”.

Not sure what element of philosophy you’re looking at, but this seems to suggest a somewhat Meinongian conception of fictional objects. More fun to be had, too, with Nabokov and Kendall Walton, perhaps? Mimesis… make-believe… mmm.

By on 09/26/07 at 10:51 AM | Permanent link to this comment

Thanks very much! This is hilarious. I’ll bet it will only take me 15 years to track down the rest!

By John Holbo on 09/26/07 at 12:04 PM | Permanent link to this comment

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Monday, May 21, 2007

Nabokov on Certain Postulates Concerning the Reality of the World

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