ENG328Y1 Lecture 34: Lecture 34
Cat in the Rain
Lodge
Poetics of fiction amplify the narratological model
•
Plot does not often have to be chronological, and it will always have
emissions
You can never give every single detail
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•
Focalizer and verbaliser
Who looks and who talks
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•
Rhetorical analysis
What looks like redundant details are functional
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But in Nabokov, they can often be actually redundant
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Because we come into a story expecting the details to mean something,
Nabokov breaks the implicit contract between reader and writer
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•
Carlos Baker
Assumes that the cat is the same
Reversal is a happy one
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•
Cat is the object, maid is the subject
•
For Baker, the reversal isn't ironic
The actual is the irrational yearnings
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•
John Hagopian - Lodge
Cat is the symbol of the wanted child
Man in the rubber cave is a symbol of contraception
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•
Reason why the story can produce such different interpretations is because
the primary action is not the primary vehicle of meaning
Rift between husband and wife but we don't know the reason
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•
Plot of revelation
Minimal at best
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Not that there is no plot, but rather that it is an intricate puzzle
○
Nothing really changes from the beginning to the end
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Relationship remains as problematic
○
•
Enigma gives way to revelation
Usually we assume the plot will answer the question posed at the start
○
Rather state of affairs is revealed
Displaying what is there from the beginning
§
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•
Hills like White Elephants
White elephant in the colloquial sense
Emperors giving you a gift of a white elephant is a gift on the surface
but actually makes your life harder
○
•
Banal pleasantries seem unnatural and forced•
Weight of monotony descending makes the dialogue even more strenuous•
More immediately concerned with the girl's anxieties than the man's
euphemisms
•
American imagines her anxiety is about the operation itself, but she is more
concerned about the future
•
Incongruous when the girl comments again on the hills looking like white
elephants
Her creativity and youth are in peril in this relationship
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•
Figures of speech have no meaning for him, they are beyond his limited
mindset
•
Say things like "I don't care about me" but you know goddamn well all he
cares about is himself - nvm it's her
•
The girl is beginning to gather the tragedy of her situation
Not only unloved, but misunderstood
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•
American offers her everything, but it's unwittingly inappropriate
Moment of lucidity, she is simply seeing her own delusions being
offered back to her
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She recoils from this
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"I just know things"
Insincerity of her boyfriend
§
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•
The child is the anyone else he doesn't want
The child is the white elephant
○
•
As it moves towards it's crisis, no one can reconcile the dilemma
Drama truncated by the obtuseness of the American
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Literary cul-de-sac
Nothing has changed in the dialogue except its tone
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Would you please please please please please please stop talking
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Seemingly reaching an anticlimax but is effectively annulled
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•
Her self deception and his duplicity is revealed
Nothing more to say
○
•
Even she knows that there's nothing left to say•
He's a slave to convention•
No restoration or revolution•
The hills may resemble white elephants but they don't have the meaning for
her anymore
•
Her final words offer little confirmation and less clarity
Possiblity of reversal and recognition
○
•
Completely understated subject matter and the nihilism is underhanded•
Signs and Symbols - Nabokov
Sign consists of a given slice of sound which is arbitrarily connected with a
slice of meaning
•
But in symbol, the link between sound and meaning is motivated•
Everything for the boy is symbolically motivated•
Number of details in which we can find symbolic meaning increases rapidly•
Readers attempt to find meaning reinforced by parent's attempt to find a
present
Ten different fruit jellies in ten different jars??
○
Encryptology is everything - you've got to decipher the signs
○
•
But the author doesn’t seem to make any significant overtures to solve the
enigma
Reversal of reader-ly and writerly roles is where the metaphysical irony
is
○
Emblematic of all searches of meaning
○
•
We're trying to build consistencies•
Significance of the events that take place around an individual are dependent
on what that individual perceives and believes
Let to us to interpret as we see fit
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Invite and refuse interpretation
○
•
Not arguing that expectations should be fulfilled predictably, but the
obstacles here overwhelm the meaning
•
Alien associations•
The mother and father are under-readers - they don’t assign significance to
any of the events
The son is an over-reader
The world around him is full of signs and symbols
§
Dense tangle of logically intertwining solutions
§
○
Everything goes wrong that Friday, you could reasonably assign
significance
Subway loses its life current
§
○
•
Foreshadowing of events to come
Half-dead bird helplessly twitching in a puddle under a swaying tree
○
Unsuccessful attempts to fly out of the puddle parallel the boy's
attempt
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The parents don't even see the bird, just like they don't see their son
○
•
Passive acceptance of life in the mother
Accepting the loss of one joy after another
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Not even joys, mere possibilities of improvement
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Amazing coincidence of reaching the same wrong number 3 times
O = 6, 666??
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Refraining from seeing significance in the calls is to ignore the signs and
symbols that seek interpretation
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•
Insanity for his over-reading seems like a reasonable enough explanation
Then is not every reader a referential maniac
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This is all a joke at our expense
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•
The use of signs and symbols are what allow us to navigate our world
It's what makes us human beings
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Ability to alter the metalingual code makes us unique
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•
We make symbols of animals (misuse/use animals)•
Craving for unity
We LOVE conspiracy theories
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We also like catastrophe theories
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•
Unrelenting search for meaning becomes neurotic at best, psychotic at worst•
Sets the story up to make it impossible to tell what is symbolic, accidental,
significant, etc.
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Gnostic universe created by an imperfect demiurge
Nihilistic conclusion focalised through the woman's perspective
○
Everything is meaningless
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We are all insane simply by thinking it is not
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Lecture 34
Wednesday, February 15, 2017
1:13 PM
Document Summary
Plot does not often have to be chronological, and it will always have emissions. But in nabokov, they can often be actually redundant. Because we come into a story expecting the details to mean something, Nabokov breaks the implicit contract between reader and writer. Cat is the object, maid is the subject. Cat is the symbol of the wanted child. Man in the rubber cave is a symbol of contraception. Reason why the story can produce such different interpretations is because the primary action is not the primary vehicle of meaning. Rift between husband and wife but we don"t know the reason. Not that there is no plot, but rather that it is an intricate puzzle. Nothing really changes from the beginning to the end. Usually we assume the plot will answer the question posed at the start. Emperors giving you a gift of a white elephant is a gift on the surface but actually makes your life harder.
