June 6, 2004
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Parallelisms
“I confess I do not believe in time.
I like to
fold my magic carpet,
after use, in such a way
as to superimpose
one
part of the pattern
upon another.”From a review of On the Composition of Images, Signs
& Ideas, by Giordano Bruno:Proteus in the House of Mnemosyne (which is the fifth chapter of the
Third Book) relies entirely on familiarity with Vergil’s Aeneid (even
when the text shifts from verse to prose). The statement, “Proteus is,
absolutely, that one and the same subject matter which is transformable into
all images and resemblances, by means of which we can immediately and
continually constitute order, resume and explain everything,” reads less clear
than the immediate analogy, “Just as from one and the same wax we awaken all
shapes and images of sensate things, which become thereafter the signs of all
things that are intelligible.”From an interview with Vladimir Nabokov published in Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature, vol. VIII, no. 2, Spring 1967:
When I was your student, you never mentioned the Homeric parallels in discussing Joyce’s Ulysses But
you did supply “special information” in introducing many of the
masterpieces: a map of Dublin for Ulysses…. Would
you be able to suggest some equivalent for your own readers?Joyce
himself very soon realized with dismay that the harping on those
essentially easy and vulgar “Homeric parallelisms” would only distract
one’s attention from the real beauty of his book. He soon dropped these
pretentious chapter titles which already were “explaining” the book to
non-readers. In my lectures I tried to give factual data only. A
map of three country estates with a winding river and a figure of the
butterfly Parnassius mnemosyne for a cartographic cherub will be the endpaper in my revised edition of Speak, Memory.
