Subject
Re: VN on allegory?
From
Date
Body
This is very interesting, and it points out that little statements N. sometimes made in interviews and forewords have to be understood in less than comprehensive terms. As JM shows Allegory and symbolism can have both very broad and very specific, contextual meanings. I would say that N.'s "general" stricture against allegory was well glossed by JM, and has something in common with Susan Sontag's essay Against Interpretation. For instance, a book and film like Invasion of The Body Snatchers is regularly understood to be an allegory about social paranoia of "The Other"; only it can also be seen as being a political allegory about having really good reasons to be afraid of subsversive groups who may look like the rest of us, but are just so much pod fluff. That's one problem with allegory. The author of the book, Jack Finney, claimed he had no symbolic idea in mind, just wanted to write what he hoped would be a really interesting story about things
from another world posing a fictional threat to a bunch of made up characters. Nabokov's notion of enchantment, style, and his emphasis on detail are pretty much a fancy version of the same thing, I think: Lolita is not about young America being seduced by Old Europe, or vice versa, as he said; nor is it about an ape drawing the bars of its own cage--it's about what happened when a thirty-seven year old nut case saw a twelve and a half year old girl with gray eyes and fell hard for her, so hard he started seeing symbols and allegories and doubles where there weren't any. The old question goes: if these two writers had wanted to write about all these things which have been imputed to their stories, then why didn't they just do it rather than going through the motions of some shadow show pointing readers behind a red velvet curtain to the real prize? I believe this is where Freud subconsciously steps into the picture and N debonairly bows
out. Amusingly, N. wanted us to keep in mind all the things his novels weren't about and didn't mean so that as readers we couldn't help but scratch our heads and say, hey Humbert really is like an ape trapped by his own obsessions, and his way of depicting things are kind of like the bars of a cage, symbolically that is. The critics are just too smart for these guys, if you ask me, pining for logical consistency when what they've got are showmen.
--- On Thu, 11/27/08, jansymello <jansy@AETERN.US> wrote:
From: jansymello <jansy@AETERN.US>
Subject: Re: [NABOKV-L] VN on allegory?
To: NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU
Date: Thursday, November 27, 2008, 3:53 AM
L. Durantaye [ to J.Studdard): "I didn't mean to imply that the statements were identical. That said, the remarks in Strong Opinions tend to be quite thoughtful. In any event, they're both a little beside the point of "allegory as a literary mode" (as Nabokov is clearly not thinking of works like the Divine Comedy or the Faerie Queene)."
JM: In the novel Ada, Darkbloom's notes on "Carte du Tendre" explain that it constitutes "a sentimental allegory of the seventeenth century", in a sympathetic vein. In the same spirit, in the literary body of LATH, Botticelli's Primavera is brought up ( with no irony, it seems) as an allegory of Spring: "wear,in propitious sign, the Florentine hat that looks like a cluster of wild flowers. I want you to celebrate your resemblance to the fifth girl from left to right, the flower-decked blonde with the straight nose and serious gray eyes, in Botticelli's Primavera, an allegory of Spring, my love, my allegory." This mood invites us back to Lolita, for Lolita herself has also been compared to Boticelli's rust-colored Venus. As I see it, allegory is here being employed together with "a propitious sign".
Nevertheless, also in Lath, when dealing directly with literary modes we read:"I disliked him for his daring to question my teaching Ulysses, my way - in a purely textual light - without organic allegories and quasi-Greek myths and that sort of tripe."
Among the many definitions of "allegory" the one that VN seems to focus, when he objects to Freud's psychoanalytic theories or to standard literary interpretations, is not indicative of its more ancient meaning as "a veiling function of language". It relies mainly on allegory used as a deliberate "inversion of speech whereby, in saying one thing a person conveys or understands something else ( Isidore of Seville ,Etymologiae I, 47.22) or Saint Augustine's “a mode of speech in which one thing is understood by another,” (Cf.Angus Fletcher's online "The Dictionary of the History of Ideas.")
In his article "Nabokov and Freud, or a Particular Problem" L.Durantaye notes that Nabokov "saw Freud as standing for many things he did not like and, conversely, as representing what he most vehemently disliked: the generalizing of the rich particularities of which life is made up.[...]The seeker of symbols [...]will inevitably conflate the dissimilar and miss the distinctiveness of the detail." According to LD, Freudian theories, in the eyes of VN, "Like allegory and symbolism...granted conceptual license to interpret everything in terms of something else and this he could not stand."
Nevertheless, literary "symbolism" cannot be extented to encompass the normal process of "symbol-formation" and language, nor the rendering of a (forbidden or painful) thought, under the guise of a "symbol", stands for the entire process of a dream-formation. Besides, a dreamer's "allegories" cannot be produced by an act of will, as it happens in the ordinary artistic process of "allegorization" ( something gross or refined, following the artist's abilities) - and this is one of the problems!*
*As I understand it, in the strictly Freudian ( ie, not "Kleinian") interpretation of dreams, a particular image is only focused as a generic symbol in order that it may be re-inserted, through speech, as an expression of that particular dreamer's constellation of wishes, talents, history and forgotten experiences - in this case it recovers its lost status as a living metaphor and is now free to evolve in a healthy, now untrammeled process of abstract thinking and decision-making ( this is, of course, an oversimplified exposition).
Search the archive
Contact the Editors
Visit "Nabokov Online Journal"
Visit Zembla
View Nabokv-L Policies
Manage subscription options
< .span>All private editorial communications, without exception, are read by both co-editors.
Search archive with Google:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
Visit "Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
Manage subscription options: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/
from another world posing a fictional threat to a bunch of made up characters. Nabokov's notion of enchantment, style, and his emphasis on detail are pretty much a fancy version of the same thing, I think: Lolita is not about young America being seduced by Old Europe, or vice versa, as he said; nor is it about an ape drawing the bars of its own cage--it's about what happened when a thirty-seven year old nut case saw a twelve and a half year old girl with gray eyes and fell hard for her, so hard he started seeing symbols and allegories and doubles where there weren't any. The old question goes: if these two writers had wanted to write about all these things which have been imputed to their stories, then why didn't they just do it rather than going through the motions of some shadow show pointing readers behind a red velvet curtain to the real prize? I believe this is where Freud subconsciously steps into the picture and N debonairly bows
out. Amusingly, N. wanted us to keep in mind all the things his novels weren't about and didn't mean so that as readers we couldn't help but scratch our heads and say, hey Humbert really is like an ape trapped by his own obsessions, and his way of depicting things are kind of like the bars of a cage, symbolically that is. The critics are just too smart for these guys, if you ask me, pining for logical consistency when what they've got are showmen.
--- On Thu, 11/27/08, jansymello <jansy@AETERN.US> wrote:
From: jansymello <jansy@AETERN.US>
Subject: Re: [NABOKV-L] VN on allegory?
To: NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU
Date: Thursday, November 27, 2008, 3:53 AM
L. Durantaye [ to J.Studdard): "I didn't mean to imply that the statements were identical. That said, the remarks in Strong Opinions tend to be quite thoughtful. In any event, they're both a little beside the point of "allegory as a literary mode" (as Nabokov is clearly not thinking of works like the Divine Comedy or the Faerie Queene)."
JM: In the novel Ada, Darkbloom's notes on "Carte du Tendre" explain that it constitutes "a sentimental allegory of the seventeenth century", in a sympathetic vein. In the same spirit, in the literary body of LATH, Botticelli's Primavera is brought up ( with no irony, it seems) as an allegory of Spring: "wear,in propitious sign, the Florentine hat that looks like a cluster of wild flowers. I want you to celebrate your resemblance to the fifth girl from left to right, the flower-decked blonde with the straight nose and serious gray eyes, in Botticelli's Primavera, an allegory of Spring, my love, my allegory." This mood invites us back to Lolita, for Lolita herself has also been compared to Boticelli's rust-colored Venus. As I see it, allegory is here being employed together with "a propitious sign".
Nevertheless, also in Lath, when dealing directly with literary modes we read:"I disliked him for his daring to question my teaching Ulysses, my way - in a purely textual light - without organic allegories and quasi-Greek myths and that sort of tripe."
Among the many definitions of "allegory" the one that VN seems to focus, when he objects to Freud's psychoanalytic theories or to standard literary interpretations, is not indicative of its more ancient meaning as "a veiling function of language". It relies mainly on allegory used as a deliberate "inversion of speech whereby, in saying one thing a person conveys or understands something else ( Isidore of Seville ,Etymologiae I, 47.22) or Saint Augustine's “a mode of speech in which one thing is understood by another,” (Cf.Angus Fletcher's online "The Dictionary of the History of Ideas.")
In his article "Nabokov and Freud, or a Particular Problem" L.Durantaye notes that Nabokov "saw Freud as standing for many things he did not like and, conversely, as representing what he most vehemently disliked: the generalizing of the rich particularities of which life is made up.[...]The seeker of symbols [...]will inevitably conflate the dissimilar and miss the distinctiveness of the detail." According to LD, Freudian theories, in the eyes of VN, "Like allegory and symbolism...granted conceptual license to interpret everything in terms of something else and this he could not stand."
Nevertheless, literary "symbolism" cannot be extented to encompass the normal process of "symbol-formation" and language, nor the rendering of a (forbidden or painful) thought, under the guise of a "symbol", stands for the entire process of a dream-formation. Besides, a dreamer's "allegories" cannot be produced by an act of will, as it happens in the ordinary artistic process of "allegorization" ( something gross or refined, following the artist's abilities) - and this is one of the problems!*
*As I understand it, in the strictly Freudian ( ie, not "Kleinian") interpretation of dreams, a particular image is only focused as a generic symbol in order that it may be re-inserted, through speech, as an expression of that particular dreamer's constellation of wishes, talents, history and forgotten experiences - in this case it recovers its lost status as a living metaphor and is now free to evolve in a healthy, now untrammeled process of abstract thinking and decision-making ( this is, of course, an oversimplified exposition).
Search the archive
Contact the Editors
Visit "Nabokov Online Journal"
Visit Zembla
View Nabokv-L Policies
Manage subscription options
< .span>All private editorial communications, without exception, are read by both co-editors.
Search archive with Google:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
Visit "Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
Manage subscription options: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/