[lit-ideas] Re: Morc Huck Pump
- From: wokshevs@xxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx, Eric Yost <mr.eric.yost@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 7 Mar 2008 16:20:53 -0330
Would there be a proposition in all this that we could deliberate upon and
assess as to its truth or moral rightness?
(Some explication of the paradox inherent in Eric's final sentence below would
also help us to address it as an intelligible claim within "the space of
reasons.")
Valodsya Okshevsky
Russian by birth but not by philosophical orientation.
Quoting Eric Yost <mr.eric.yost@xxxxxxxxx>:
> Phil: ... it seems to me that whatever one experiences in the
> face of moral wrongdoings, it is necessarily 'non-rational.' Reason
> draws on these moral intuitions in order to arrive at norms, so they
> are necessarily distinct from moral reasoning. They are, as it were,
> the material for the operation of practical reason.
>
>
> This reminded me of Adam Krug, world famous philosopher, the central
> character in Nabokov's _Bend Sinister_. As the novel opens, Krug's wife
> has just died.
>
> The backstory is that Krug's vulgar high school classmate, Paduk, has
> become dictator of the imaginary European country, and is seeking Krug's
> signature on some propaganda. Paduk wants to use Krug's name to help
> legitimize his totalitarian regime. (Shades of Heidegger!)
>
> Much of the novel proceeds in an imagist or Russian Symbolist manner (as
> in Andrei Byely's _Petersburg_) through limited third-person narrative.
> Krug retreats into alcohol and memory, and the reader is given only
> hints of Krug's operant moral intuition. Through Nabokov's technique,
> the fictional world around Krug becomes increasingly unreal even as his
> moral clarity and resolve -- perhaps what Phil called "the material for
> the operation of practical reason" -- sharpen. Yet the reader doesn't
> really know for sure: Krug's rejection of the dictator may be purely
> aesthetic.
>
> In a beautiful and much-imitated ending, Nabokov plucks us from the plot
> and gives us a glimpse of his writing room in America in the late 1940s,
> where he lives as emigre from his lost country. Is it resentment? Is it
> feeling offended? Or is it the transfiguration of one or the other by
> art? After all, in offense or resentment seen through art, the
> irrational is held in an extremely rational container.
>
>
> Eric
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