Posted by Joffre on 19/4/2009, 13:23:20, in reply to "Re: Petersburg"
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I confess I normally just pass over such high-sounding phrases without thinking about them much. Okay, so he thinks Remembrance of Things Past is better than Lolita. I suppose I do too, though I find Lolita more immediately enjoyable. Since you ask, I'll try to answer this for my sake as well as yours. First of all, I checked my understanding of the terms sublime, pathos, parody, and cunning. I felt I understood temporal and a well enough.
Wikipedia has this remark about parody: Blank parody, in which an artist takes the skeletal form of an art work and places it in a new context without ridiculing it, is common. I think we want that sense, though we want the other too. Nabokov certainly wants to ridicule Freud and Eliot.
So here we go. A sublime temporal pathos is an awe inspiring study of the feelings of sorrow caused by the passing of time, or an awe inspiring feeling of sorrow caused by the passing of time, or an awe inspiring study of the power of the passing of time to cause sorrow. A parodistic cunning is a high degree of skill in transplanting motifs into new contexts for purposes of mockery sometimes affectionate, sometimes caustic. In Nabokov's case, one might say a supreme skill in playing with other people's toys.
I welcome any ammendations.
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