Hi Jansy,
Thanks very much for the questions. My answers are below...
1. What is a "portal" in literature?
Yes, I do want to use a wider definition of a portal than that suggested by its purely sci-fi associations. As far as I'm aware there is no existing literary definition, but I'm picking up not only on the sci-fi/fantasy idea of an object that transports you somewhere (Pullman's knife, J K Rowling's portkeys are both recent examples of this traditional use - other examples are Jack's beanstalk, Alice's rabbit-hole/mirror, and of course the painting in _Glory_) but also on more recent uses of the term in internet/gaming contexts. A portal is any object that transports someone - a character or perhaps the reader - to other realms, either within the fiction or outside the fiction. Within the worlds of Nabokov's fictions, portals allow magical-realist time transitions such as Fyodor's from winter in Berlin to the Russia of his childhood and back again (the trees on the pavement), or the "sinking into the history of" the pencil at the beginning of _Transparent Things_. These portals are akin to Proust's madeleine. There are also portals which are not temporal but spatial or metaphysical, as in _Glory_. Many of Nabokov's protagonists encounter a portal at the end of the novel: Luzhin's bathroom window is one; another example is the puddle in _Bend Sinister_, which Nabokov describes in his Foreword as "a rent in his [Krug's] world leading to another world of tenderness, brightness and beauty".
Clearly, widening the definition of the portal from the sci-fi context suggests that the text itself can and often does function as a portal for its reader - and this spatialisation of the relationship between reader and fiction is one of my interests in making these links.
2. Are Nabokov's objects indeed "animate" and if so who animates them?
There are two kinds of object I am calling "animate" in Nabokov's work, the fetish and the portal. Fetishes, as Freud and Marx both suggest in their definitions, are animated by those who believe in and use them. The fetishist uses the object to mask or to subsume relationships between people, and the objects thus become animate (i.e. in the mind of the fetishist - whom Freud imagines as a lone individual, unlike Marx, who sees people under capitalism as colluding in the fetishisation of consumer goods). As for the portal, Proust leads up to the madeleine with an explicit discussion of animism, and the idea that objects can somehow contain the life of the past. Although this isn't quite how all of Nabokov's portals work (some do), some of the same assumptions come into play - the portal can be seen as the surface (two- or three-dimensional) of the realm it leads to - and thus contains.
When the text is considered in the guise of fetish or portal, the reader is implicated in this "animating" process - ascribing various kinds of life to the text. Of course, these ways of reading are so common that it's almost intuitive to think of the text as an animate object - or, perhaps, one in suspended animation until we interpret it. But the dangers, in Nabokov's world, of animate objects, despite their attractions, may make us dissatisfied with some of these readings.
3. How do fetish and portal "over-determine the world, leaving no room for the true quiddity of things or people"?
I've suggested above some of what I mean by this: both worldviews, as acts of interpretation which animate objects, are ways of allowing objects to stand in for, or elide, people and the relationships between them. Both fetish and portal are superficially attractive - many of the beautiful things about Nabokov's style are related to them, and the magical objects in his worlds contribute to our sense of wonder and excitement when we're reading his novels. But the characters who are most invested in seeing the world in those terms are the characters who are most disconnected from human relationships: nasty or disturbed or both. Humbert's fetishisation of the objects surrounding Lolita is an integral part of what allows him to treat her the way he does: he attributes her life to things (in phrases like "her beautiful young bicycle") and tries to negotiate their relationship in terms of material objects, in a combination of Marxist and Freudian fetishisms. Luzhin's understanding of the material world as the visible, tangible surface of another realm is what causes his death - and whether or not he's right, he has irrevocably left the building.
As readers, we risk the same problems in fetishising the text or in making a portal of it - we can allow it to stand in for human issues in a fetishistic economy (this is the kind of reading John Ray sets up in _Lolita_, where the text becomes a status-object circulating among men) or we can attempt to move through it to what it "really" signifies. Perhaps both kinds of interpretation are necessary or desirable, to some extent, but I think Nabokov suggests their pitfalls at the beginning of _Transparent Things_, when his narrator warns that "the inexperienced miracle-worker will find himself... descending upright among staring fish" and later complains that "the solid pencil... still somehow eludes us!" That is, move through an object/text, treat it as animate, and you might: fail to enjoy yourself; drown; miss the reality.
Best
Emily
On 30/8/07 18:14, "jansymello" <jansy@AETERN.US> wrote:
Emily Collins sent us her abstract about "Nabokov's animate objects" where she wrote: "Both fetish and portal are problematic: they tend to over-determine the world, leaving no room for the true quiddity of things or people".
I selected the sentence quoted above as a representative of what surprised me in her text.
In the first place, what is "a portal" in literature? ( EC defined it as: "an object which magically transports someone to a different realm", but this seems to stamp it as something operative outside games and sci-fi unlike, say, Pullman's "Subtle Knife" for those that read about it in his novel.);
2. Who animates Nabokov's objects, or are they indeed "animate"? ;
3. How do fetish and portal over-determine the world... leave no room...etc?
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