Elephants, Knights & Commonsense

[Terrance]

Imagine a game of chess. 
You're white and I'm black. 
A little black monkey comes running by and grabs a black knight off the
board and runs away. 

"Not only a Knight, " Saussure says, "but even a figure shorn of any
resemblance to a knight can be declared identical provided the same
value is attributed to it." 


So, may we attribute any value to any object? 

Suppose I want to replace the missing knight with an elephant.

Will you object? 

Are all objects equally suitable? 

And if you object to my replacing my knight with a Loxodonta Africana by
what standard  are we to judge the degree of suitability? 

How about Pale Fire?  

In "The Art of Literature and Commonsense" Nabokov talks about being an
author. 
What is an author? And how does one go about being one? He gives some
not so very commonsense advice to would be authors. 

Nabokov says that an author should be a good mixer. But he must also get
an ivory tower, 

"provided of course it has a telephone and an elevator just in case one
might like to dash out and buy the evening paper of have a friend come
up for a game of chess, the latter being somehow suggested by the form
and texture of one's carved abode. ... But before building oneself an
ivory tower one must take the unavoidable trouble of killing quite a few
elephants. The fine specimen I intend to bag for the benefit of those
who might like to see how it is done happens to be a rather incredible
cross between and elephant and a horse. His name is common sense." 

"Common sense is fundamentally immoral, for the natural morals of
mankind are as irrational as the magic rites that they evolved since the
immemorial dimness of time."

Elephant horse sense and magic. 

"I am triumphantly mixing metaphors because that is exactly what they
are intended for when they follow the course of their secret
connections--which from a writer's point of view is the first positive
result of the defeat of common sense." 



Connections? 

You're a slow learner. 

2 and 2 don't make four

"Two and two no longer make four, because it is no longer necessary for
them to make four. If they had done so in the artificial logical world
we have left, it had been merely a matter of habit: two and two used to
make four in the same way as guests invited to dinner expect to make an
even number. But I invite my numbers to a giddy picnic and then nobody
minds whether two and two make five or five minus some quaint fraction." 

Alice in Wonderland, Lombroso, Pavlov, butterflies .... 

If you plan to do a PFPF how you set it up will be very important. 

In "AL&CS" Nabokov talks about why we read a book from left to right and
why writers write like painters paint, but of course we can't read
novels in the same way that we read paintings. Or can we? 

PS T, I'm the wrong guy to ask about film, but it's a good question for
the List. 

See PF.18-19 (that's Postmodernist Fiction). 

It might be a good idea to Among those who opt for the
 fundamental undecidability of the authorship are Alvin B. Kernan
(101-26) and Brian McHale (18-19). 

and 190-91  The Schizoid Text

In what order do we "read" ... 

And

206-209 Roman à clef



http://www.libraries.psu.edu/iasweb/nabokov/boydpf1.htm