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Re: S Drescher--Dreams, lorgnons and tuberal nightmares
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Sandy Drescher: One has neither to praise nor mock Freud to posit a dream's communicative purpose. Presuming that the dream-recaller is attempting to convey something to the dream-listener does require that each has some reasonable interest in the other. Something like the "good writer" and the "good reader"...Years ago I wondered that a Nabokov dream [New Yorker VVN Centenial] was ignored by the List, but the subject passed and was forgotten, like a bad dream.
JM: Nabokov's insomnias are famous, likewise his fears that "le grand peut-être" might open unto tormenting vistas of Hell... German philosopher, Kant, "appears to have been troubled with dreams beyond most men's imagination: for Wasianski informs us that they were absolutely appalling; and that single scenes or passages in those dreams were sufficient to compose 'the whole course of mighty tragedies.' They alarmed him, however, so greatly, sometimes, that his servant often caught him out of his bed, endeavouring to escape to some other part of his house." (Charles Bucke, On the Beauties, Harmonies and Sublimities of Nature, 1831) Epigraph in: Brown, "Philosophical View of the Gothic Novel"(Paris:Conard, 1938)II: 563/4 .www.english.upenn.edu/Projects/knarf/Articles/brown.html
Sandy Drescher's observation that "dreams have a communicative purpose" is very apt, even more so when he included the clause about the fundamental relationship between "dream-recaller and dream-listener".
The criticism against Freud's theories on dreams often departs from a mistaken assumption about the sexual nature of the repressed wishes that try to gain expression in dreams ( and are granted!). Many believe that "sexual" is always "genital", or "oedipal". They forget that oral, anal, urethral wishes may also be satisfied and gain representation.Besides, Freud distinguished neurotic dreams and nightmares, from a borderline dream-state in psychotics and the recurrent nightmares linked to traumatic experiences ( when the symbolic, "communicative purpose" is absent). Even traumatic dreams can be rendered artistically, but they often burden the listener emotionally because of the excess of anxiety that they still retain and transmit.
Perhaps SD could post again Nabokov's words that might have become a bad dream to the List?
CHW: The return of the ending of the verse to its beginning does actually echo Finnegans Wake...James Joyce spent his life slowly going completely mad and... Finnegans Wake is the work of a madman, nearing his end.
JM: Charles reminded us, indirectly, of Joyce's interest in Vico and in circular time, and linked this to Kinbote when he described Pale Fire's return of the ending to its beginning and the "spirals from the tuber's eye" leading to...Paradise? Heaven? Rebirth as Somebody-toad?
We can see, from VN's comments in SO, how enchanted he'd been by the coincidence between his choice (a "point-de-repère") for the day of Kinbote's decease and his having approached both Kinbote and Swift ( who also died in Oct. 19) in one of his - Kinbote's? No! In SO VN's satisfaction is so obvious that, by it, he almost confesses they were his own - notes.
VN's pleasure made me feel more inclined to accept William C. Dowling's hypothesis about "Who's The Narrator of Nabokov's Pale Fire?" (www.rci.rutgers.edu/~wcd/palenarr.htm )
DBJ: E.A. Popova. "Episode with a Lorgnette.": A curious piece noting VN's comments on certain literary heroines who are associated with a lorgnette . In "Speak, Memory" it is Louise Poindexter...then the motif thru Emma Bovary and Anna Karenina... who then passes the lorgnette to Chekhov's "Lady with the Lap Dog" who loses it on the Yalta pier. The strange thing is, as Popova points out, is that there is no lorgnette in Anna K. (I did a quick computer search of the Russian text that seemed to confirm this--although some synonym might have been used.) Popova asserts that this apparent lapse must be a deliberate motif....Popova may (or may not) have something there, but she goes too far in suggesting that when Chekhov's heroine loses her lorgnette on the Yalta pier, it symbolizes the loss of the Motherland (as well as their virtue). Females birdwatchers should perhaps take note...
JM : Lorgnons and Lorgnettes, are these (bi)(mon)ocles different for male or female birdwatchers leavesdroppings? Confusing. But I remember being also fascinated by these serial intertextual connections, in SM, to the point of imagining that the coin VN followed intratextually in his "Lectures on Ulysses" belonged to the same travel-agency ( the coin began its tragectory in the Lectures already in VN's initial one about Dickens, where a coachman flipped it in the air...).
The lorgon myst have been recovered from the Yalta pier, if I can trust an old posting at the List with a description of Nabokov's museum in St. Petersburg: "Charme de l'exil. Un lorgnon, une boîte de Scrabble, un poème inédit, Papillon, recopié sur un livre offert à un ami, des reproductions de dessins de lépidoptères que Nabokov avait accompagnés de tendres dédicaces à son épouse Vera... C'est à peu près tout ce que le musée a réussi à récupérer auprès du fils de l'écrivain ou de collection" ( NABOKV-L Archives -- February 2004 (#39) listserv.ucsb.edu/lsv-cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0402&L=nabokv-l&T=0&P=4393
( It was posted by Sandy Drescher.)
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JM: Nabokov's insomnias are famous, likewise his fears that "le grand peut-être" might open unto tormenting vistas of Hell... German philosopher, Kant, "appears to have been troubled with dreams beyond most men's imagination: for Wasianski informs us that they were absolutely appalling; and that single scenes or passages in those dreams were sufficient to compose 'the whole course of mighty tragedies.' They alarmed him, however, so greatly, sometimes, that his servant often caught him out of his bed, endeavouring to escape to some other part of his house." (Charles Bucke, On the Beauties, Harmonies and Sublimities of Nature, 1831) Epigraph in: Brown, "Philosophical View of the Gothic Novel"(Paris:Conard, 1938)II: 563/4 .www.english.upenn.edu/Projects/knarf/Articles/brown.html
Sandy Drescher's observation that "dreams have a communicative purpose" is very apt, even more so when he included the clause about the fundamental relationship between "dream-recaller and dream-listener".
The criticism against Freud's theories on dreams often departs from a mistaken assumption about the sexual nature of the repressed wishes that try to gain expression in dreams ( and are granted!). Many believe that "sexual" is always "genital", or "oedipal". They forget that oral, anal, urethral wishes may also be satisfied and gain representation.Besides, Freud distinguished neurotic dreams and nightmares, from a borderline dream-state in psychotics and the recurrent nightmares linked to traumatic experiences ( when the symbolic, "communicative purpose" is absent). Even traumatic dreams can be rendered artistically, but they often burden the listener emotionally because of the excess of anxiety that they still retain and transmit.
Perhaps SD could post again Nabokov's words that might have become a bad dream to the List?
CHW: The return of the ending of the verse to its beginning does actually echo Finnegans Wake...James Joyce spent his life slowly going completely mad and... Finnegans Wake is the work of a madman, nearing his end.
JM: Charles reminded us, indirectly, of Joyce's interest in Vico and in circular time, and linked this to Kinbote when he described Pale Fire's return of the ending to its beginning and the "spirals from the tuber's eye" leading to...Paradise? Heaven? Rebirth as Somebody-toad?
We can see, from VN's comments in SO, how enchanted he'd been by the coincidence between his choice (a "point-de-repère") for the day of Kinbote's decease and his having approached both Kinbote and Swift ( who also died in Oct. 19) in one of his - Kinbote's? No! In SO VN's satisfaction is so obvious that, by it, he almost confesses they were his own - notes.
VN's pleasure made me feel more inclined to accept William C. Dowling's hypothesis about "Who's The Narrator of Nabokov's Pale Fire?" (www.rci.rutgers.edu/~wcd/palenarr.htm )
DBJ: E.A. Popova. "Episode with a Lorgnette.": A curious piece noting VN's comments on certain literary heroines who are associated with a lorgnette . In "Speak, Memory" it is Louise Poindexter...then the motif thru Emma Bovary and Anna Karenina... who then passes the lorgnette to Chekhov's "Lady with the Lap Dog" who loses it on the Yalta pier. The strange thing is, as Popova points out, is that there is no lorgnette in Anna K. (I did a quick computer search of the Russian text that seemed to confirm this--although some synonym might have been used.) Popova asserts that this apparent lapse must be a deliberate motif....Popova may (or may not) have something there, but she goes too far in suggesting that when Chekhov's heroine loses her lorgnette on the Yalta pier, it symbolizes the loss of the Motherland (as well as their virtue). Females birdwatchers should perhaps take note...
JM : Lorgnons and Lorgnettes, are these (bi)(mon)ocles different for male or female birdwatchers leavesdroppings? Confusing. But I remember being also fascinated by these serial intertextual connections, in SM, to the point of imagining that the coin VN followed intratextually in his "Lectures on Ulysses" belonged to the same travel-agency ( the coin began its tragectory in the Lectures already in VN's initial one about Dickens, where a coachman flipped it in the air...).
The lorgon myst have been recovered from the Yalta pier, if I can trust an old posting at the List with a description of Nabokov's museum in St. Petersburg: "Charme de l'exil. Un lorgnon, une boîte de Scrabble, un poème inédit, Papillon, recopié sur un livre offert à un ami, des reproductions de dessins de lépidoptères que Nabokov avait accompagnés de tendres dédicaces à son épouse Vera... C'est à peu près tout ce que le musée a réussi à récupérer auprès du fils de l'écrivain ou de collection" ( NABOKV-L Archives -- February 2004 (#39) listserv.ucsb.edu/lsv-cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0402&L=nabokv-l&T=0&P=4393
( It was posted by Sandy Drescher.)
Search the archive: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/archives/nabokv-l.html
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