J.Aisenberg:
1. Nabokov's literary texture is
so rich and varied that it seems like one could take anything and simply
word associate until one got where one thought one wanted to go [...]. I
don't recall him playing these sorts of cross-associative word games by which to
build up another story besides the one dramatized.
2. I'd never wondered about the
oddity of the phrase "Gory Mary"before.
3. I wonder about this method, which,
in Boyd, to my mind, does not seem thoroughly rooted in context. As I recall,
his theories about the Toothwort white butterfly [...] the character of Hazel
Shade and her psoriasis[...]
4.Nabokov
said in his letter to Katherine White about "The Vane Sisters" that he was
doing work where there was one obvious story, with behind it a hidden real one,
but I'm not sure a sound formula for literary exegesis it makes
Sandy Drescher: Brother Isaac arriving
in the US in the late 1890's would not have considered himself an "émigré"
- the term suggests an attachment and
continuity with his previous
identity in the "old country" [...]. Rather, he would have been called,
and called himself, an "immigrant"; his aim in life to assimilate as
quickly as possible and have his children [if not himself] become "real
Americans", a title rather than a description, translated from the Yiddish
equivalent.The old couple, escaping Germany just before the Holocaust,
would have been called, and called themselves, "refugees"[...]Cultured
Russians leaving their beloved country after the Revolution and after the Soviet
era identified with both what had been left behind and the activity
of their choice, distinguishing themselves from both immigrants
and refugees [in French] as émigrées.One of the beauties of "Signs and
Symbols" is how perfectly VN's captured this moment in
history.
JM: VN did play "cross-associative word games" when
he developped subplots in novels such as ADA.
There is almost a Gogol-style ghost-story to be followed after
isolating references to Bout-bouteille-butler-Blanche-Cinderella-Sores-Ben
Wright-Fartukov, plus mythological metamorphosis and down-to-earth
transformations.
Akiko Nakata investigated references to the French Revolution in
"Transparent Things"... BTW: Martin Amis, on Nicholson Baker, wrote
about Baker's psoriasis, and added: " a link with
Updike, who 'had the unfortunate fictional representative vacuuming out the
bed every morning'.)
Although Amis is well informed he didn't add VN's name
close to Baker's and Updike's at this point, so I doubt my recollection on
Nabokov's own skin troubles, psoriasis and those items that
linked Shade in his bath to Marat's stabbing, by Charlotte Corday.
Butterflies in Brazil enjoy litter and decaying matter, whereas
many VN readers think about butterflies
romantically associated to orchids and lovely flowers.
B.Boyd explored the dark recesses of Veen and peat bogs [ Nabokov
Studies (8,2004): Ada,
the Bog and the Garden: or, Straw, Fluff, and Peat:
Sources and Places in Ada
[Access
article in HTML] [Access article
in PDF] ] but I don't remember now how he explored "torf" and
the process whereby decaying stuff gives rise to colored, lush new
forms of life.
I think that Nabokov's "hidden real stories" are those that deal with
contrasts ( the alchemical nigredo-albedo stages) in much the same way as he
dealt with Pushkin ( “Pouchkine ou le vrai et le
vraisemblable,” one of the few texts Nabokov composed directly
in French, published in La nouvelle revue française in 1937
on the 100th anniversary of Pushkin’s death. I heard there is a
translation of it by Dmitri? Where was it published?) After all, for
Nabokov truth sometimes “sings in
passing”, as in a poem by Pushkin, and it is “the truth of art the only one he can aim to reach here
below.” ...
Sandy, what a wonderful presentation to distinguish
the subtetlies surrounding historical events and social classes or
groups through self-designations and specific terms ( refugee, emigré,
immigrant). Does the word "emigré" suggest something more cosmopolitan than the
newly rooted "immigrant"?