BtZ42: on the road to Greenwich

Mon Mar 28 04:32:53 CDT 2016

I have read *The Nose; *read during some great Russian Lit classes back
before the revolution hit my world. (which one, you ask?) I had Mrs. Rene
Wellek teaching it (although she wasn't that yet, all of which I only
learned later); I was lucky since Rene was at Yale, probably teaching
Laura, and I wasn't at Yale. .

Anyway, it is a delightful, playful story, all about class and its effects,
Gogol's deep theme, although I can't much remember any snotty details. But
I think I do remember, or have created a critical memory, that sez this
'dream' thing in reverse is just the way Gogol, akin to other writers,
tried to suggest *reality itself *on the page (again. see my previous post
and Collected Works) just as when
Swift had Gulliver bring back a hanky (I think) from Lilliput found when
Home.

Anchoring satiric works in *reality is *a long tradition in literature.
Otherwise, someone might not get "the point",  just the supposed joke.

By the way, speaking of rubber dummies and sex, I also recommend a story by
one Landolfi called *Gogol's Wife,* in which she is
a kind of balloon and hijinks ensue very controlledly. Only an idealist can
write satire---and love high-mindedly an 'ideal' woman?

Gogol’s Grandson
Susan Sontag <http://www.nybooks.com/contributors/susan-sontag/>
JANUARY 23, 1964 ISSUE <http://www.nybooks.com/issues/1964/01/23/>
Gogol's Wife and Other Stories
<http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0811200809?ie=UTF8&tag=thneyoreofbo-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0811200809>
by Tommaso Landolfi, translated by Raymond Rosenthal and John Longrigg and
Wayland Young
New Directions, 183 pp., $4.00

Several years ago, *Encounter* published an extraordinary story by an
Italian writer, quite unknown in English, named Tommaso Landolfi. The story
was called “Gogol’s Wife.” It purports to be the account, told by a
hanger-on of the great Russian writer, of Gogol’s marriage to an inflatable
rubber dummy, with whom he has a mysterious, exalted, and shameful
relation. It was Landolfi’s clean, deliberate style that was so striking:
that, combined with a lovely freedom of invention, allowed him to bring off
this incredibly pure potion of the grotesque and the ludicrous. It is
difficult to praise “Gogol’s Wife” too highly. On the basis of this story,
one instantly and gratefully acknowledged Landolfi as a writer of the first
rank.

On Fri, Mar 25, 2016 at 4:09 PM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Yes -- and I hadn't known until reading that Wikipedia entry that an early
> version of The Nose did frame the story as Kovalyov's dream.
>
> Thanks to Mark Kohut for helping me think through the timeline and the
> status of the Adenoid. GR has so many dreams, fantasies, and more or less
> explicit hallucinations that the question "Did X 'really happen' or did
> character Y imagine it?" doesn't carry the binary implications it does for
> most fiction. Still, Pynchon puts so much into the fine shading and grading
> among them that it seems worth tracing.
>
>
>
>
> <https://www.avast.com/sig-email?utm_medium=email&utm_source=link&utm_campaign=sig-email&utm_content=webmail&utm_term=oa-2115-v2-b> Virus-free.
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>
> On Fri, Mar 25, 2016 at 12:56 PM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:
>
>> > And Gogol's Nose:
>> >
>>
>>
>> Critics note that the story's title in Russian (Нос, "Nos") is the
>> reverse of the Russian word for "dream" (Сон, "Son").
>>
>> > On Mar 25, 2016, at 12:22 PM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>> >
>> > After the banana breakfast, Pirate sets out for the V-2 impact site on
>> p. 11, but won't get there and collect his mail until p. 20. In between, we
>> get mostly -- but not entirely -- flashbacks:
>> >
>> > (11) Rumanian royalist's fantasy: Wartime London was home to Eastern
>> European governments-in-exile from the Baltic states south to the Balkans,
>> and it was not clear in late 1944 which might be re-installed after the
>> war, or at least used as bargaining chips with the Soviets who were
>> overrunning that territory. This seems to be more or less "real time"
>> >
>> > (13) memory (date indeterminate) of the tramp, Girl Guides, and
>> "sizzling night"
>> >
>> > (13-14) memory from 1935 of Loaf's fantasy, the Moslem Messiah -- which
>> alerted the Firm to Pirate's talent
>> >
>> > (14-16) "At last, one proper Sherlock Holmes London evening" -- date
>> after 1935, but indeterminate -- the Adenoid, an outgrowth of Foreign
>> Office Balkan specialist Blatherard Osmo. This sequence ends with Osmo's
>> mysterious death in 1939, so the "2 1/2 years" Pirate spent in daily visits
>> to the Adenoid were within the 1935-1939 span... IF, that is, this
>> recollection is of "real time" rather than of Pirate taking part in an
>> ongoing Osmotic fantasy, which strikes me as more likely in context.
>> >
>> > I doubt it's coincidence that this sequence goes from the Rumanian hint
>> at "what will happen after WWII" to the senior diplomats' fears of "Balkan
>> Armageddon," i.e. a replay of WWI's origin in Serbia (cf. also Against the
>> Day).
>> >
>> > So... why an adenoid (i.e. a tonsil), rather than an appendix or spleen
>> or hypothalamus? Why human tissue at all, rather than some other stand-in
>> for Osmo's fears? Its slimy protoplasmic aspect led me on first reading to
>> think of SF movies:
>> >
>> > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blob
>> > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Master_X-7
>> > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quatermass_II
>> >
>> > And its _sshhlop_ing of the troops is parodically close to a scene of
>> the Martian death ray in Wells' The War of the Worlds.
>> >
>> > All I got -- not much -- is a vague association of the "adenoidal"
>> voice with a nasal drawl allegedly common among the UK twits and toffs who
>> might have populated the Foreign Office in those days. Still around under
>> new management:
>> >
>> >
>> http://singletrackworld.com/forum/topic/that-adenoidal-nasally-geek-voice
>> >
>> > And Gogol's Nose:
>> >
>> > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nose_(Gogol_short_story)
>>
>> -
>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>>
>
>
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