Stan Kelly-Bootle sent: http://lib.ru/NABOKOW/Rowe.txt "One may wonder if it was worth Mr. Rowe's time to exhibit erotic bits picked out of
Lolita and Ada-- a process rather like looking for allusions to aquatic mammals in Moby Dick..."* Stan added: "I'm not sure, Anthony, that the Greek etymology syn+ballein (to throw together) really helps in clarifying exactly which meaning of SYMBOL VN found abhorrent ...The Middle English, via Latin symbolum, meaning Creed ... has already drifted away from the everyday, uncontroversial, mathematical usage: we use SYMBOLS as convenient, short-hand marks for variables, constants, operators etc., making sure that the reader is fully pre-informed of our intentions. ..Mathematical ymbols...although arbitrarily chosen...must be pre-defined...when combined they can produce equations surpassing Keatsian Beauty (with provable Truth as an added bonus).Perhaps Jansy can tell us if this excursion into 'symbolism' helps her with Farmer's observations. It does seem a tortuous road, littered with semantic land-mines: of course, both Lolita and HH are fictional, so to distinguish between Lolita, the idealized nymphet lusted after by HH, an imaginary paedo, and a real incarnation, Dolores, shagged realistically from realistic school to realistic motel in a realistic first-person, stretches our analysis of meta-symbolist-narrative beyond usefulness. Perhaps this warning applies only to Rowe's excessive hunt for Freudian sexual 'symbols,' which certainly match Anthony's definition as the prefabricated symbol as reductive, deadening cliche..."

JM: One has to distinguish symbols related to indexes, signs and notations, from the various other uses of the word.

Nabokov's satire of Freud introduces "arbitrarily chosen" (conscious and willed) symbols, which he applies in a playful way,often related to puns and to his pleasure with sounds. Freudian "symbols" are as ancient as mankind (the contrived ones are found all over literature and Freud often quoted Goethe's images of "jewel box" and its fitting "key") - but their interest lies in their effectiveness to express repressed ideas (even a supposedly innocent young girl, fingering the lock of a purse, may be ellaborating under the force of these hidden, but obvious, spontaneous connections) and as revealing mental mechanisms of distorting reality to avoid mental pain. It is true that, in a general way, Freudian symbols are of the kind Nabokov abhors in poetry. But Freud was not intent on being a poet. If, in a dream, a snake or a staff stand for the phallus, what is of interest to the psychoanalyst is to discover what that person, in particular, is trying to express in relation to his sexual experience. When Freud discovers that a statistically significant number of people distort their sexual unconfessable sins using the same kind of image as the one that is favored by the poets, he is still not intent on poetic metaphors as they are made to resound and rebound in a verse.

Nabokov's accusation towards the "Viennese school" is unfair because he imagines that Freudian symbols, by being "generic" (A stands for B), imply
a "generic view" of language, communication, individual qualms. Freudian replicators (like Rowe) make this mistake (several psychoanalysts, too, particularly the Kleinian-school). However, Freud always stressed the importance of listening to every individual's one and only "voice" and his "subjective kernel of truth" ( a distant cry from obtaining a "universal truth").

Yesterday I took the trouble to leaf through "The Oxford Dictionary of Euphemisms" ** (when, in common usage, a word A stands for an unnameable object, or verb, B). A tedious procedure. There was only one entry that reminded me of something Nabokovian (and I discarded it for Clare Bishop didn't shake hands with V, only held a bunch of keys that belonged to Sebastian with her "blind fingers"). Here it is - Shake Hands with a Bishop: to urinate ( Of a male, whose uncircumsided penis may resemble the chessman..." (citing Theroux, 1979, quoting Borges). That's some bishop "symbol", eh?

* - VN: * "What I object to is Mr. Rowe's manipulating my most innocent words so as to introduce sexual "symbols" into them. The notion of symbol itself has always been abhorrent to me The symbolism racket ... destroys plain intelligence as well as poetical sense... It numbs all capacity to enjoy the fun and enchantment of art.... Pencil licking is always a reference to you know what. A soccer goal hints at the vulval orifice (which Mr.Rowe evidently sees as square). I wish to share with him the following secret: In the case of a certain type of writer it often happens that a whole paragraph or sinuous sentence exists as a discrete organism, with its own imagery, its own invocations, its own bloom, and then it is especially precious, and also vulnerable, so that if an outsider, immune to poetry and common sense, injects spurious symbols into it, or actually tampers with its wording ...its magic is replaced by maggots...The fatal flaw in Mr. Rowe's treatment of recurrent
words, such as "garden" or "water," is his regarding them as abstractions, and not realizing that the sound of a bath being filled, say, in the world of Laughter in the Dark, is as different from the limes rustling in the rain of Speak, Memory as the Garden of Delights in Ada is from the lawns in Lolita....(and) make every chapter a veritable compote of female organs... what I find unpardonable, and indeed unworthy of a scholar, is Mr. Rowe's twisting my discussion of prosody (as appended to my translation of Eugene Onegin) into a torrent of Freudian drivel, which allows him to construe "metrical length" as an erection and "rhyme" as a sexual climax...Mr. Rowe's preposterous and nasty interpretations. William Woodin Rowe: Nabokov's Deceptive World.(August 28, 1971, published in The New York Review on October 7 of the same year.)

All private editorial communications, without exception, are read by both co-editors.

Search the archive	Contact the Editors	Visit "Nabokov Online Journal"
Visit Zembla	View Nabokv-L Policies	Manage subscription options