... the poet's perspective: "what matters is not the human pain or joy at all but, rather, the play of shadow and light on a live body, the harmony of trifles assembled on this particular day, at this particular moment, in a unique and imitable way." Whilst this stand distinctly echoes Bergson's privileging of an artistic vision, whereby 'man glimpses reality through the film of familiarity and conventionality that obscures it', it also deploys the Russian Formalist process of ostranenie, or 'making strange', whereby art serves to reveal the aesthetic and hyper-real qualities of ordinary objects by disrupting habitual modes of visualization and confounding perceptual expectations. Nabokov's emphasis on 'making strange' is also suggestive of the presence of 'other' worlds, or an 'anterior reality', reminiscent of the Russian Symbolist impulse, which sought to reveal a transcendent essence that lay beyond 'the concrete presence of an object'.
Barbara Wyllie, Vladimir Nabokov (2010) | Chapter 1. Hyper-reality underlying/behind/beyond/alongside the mundane. The eternal and transcendent in the aesthetic. On "other worlds", they go on to highlight Nabokov's use of reflections in water and glass. Fits well with my concurrent reading of Walker Percy's The Moviegoer: Binx being abstracted from doing research by motes in sunlight.
