-------- Original Message --------
Thanks to Jansy for her very detailed and insightful reply to my blog
post, I will respond to some of her comments, and hopefully seed more
fruitful discussion.
"Shakespeare's hidden jewels are the hidden acrostic... (Gosh, would
Pale
Fire's crown be similarly bedecked by acrostics?)"
My guess, from what Nabokov wrote to White, and also from what I have
read
in and about Pale Fire, Lolita, and Ada, they are all "riddled" (ha ha)
with acrostics, anagrams, and all sorts of word play. It is clear that
Nabokov was a logomaniac, both as a writer and also a connoisseur of the
wordplay of other writers, and part of the appeal that Austen's writing
held for him was surely that she was another one, and a very subtle
one--he makes this pretty clear in his chapter on Mansfield Park, how he
loves the way Jane Austen chooses the perfect word to fulfill her
complex
authorial goals.
"The expression "Austen's Shadow Story" is a happy coinage and it arises
in my eyes as a delicate black and white profile in a cameo."
What a lovely compliment, all I can say to Jansy is thanks. A good
friend
who also knows Nabokov well but is not a member of this group read my
latest blog entry, and similarly responded that he finds my concept of a
shadow story extremely valuable--and now I know I am in good company,
after reading Nabokov's own description of what I'd call a shadow story.
What I would give to be able to have a brief chat with him on this
subject--maybe if I am lucky his ghost will visit me in my dreams and
share his thoughts! ;) (of course, "shades" of "The Vane Sisters")
"Congratulations to Arnie Perlstein for his dedicated sleuthing and the
results he detailed to share with the Nab-L. It is also very practical
to
set Nabokov's "The Vane Sisters" acrostic close to his correspondence
with
K.White."
Thanks to Jansy once again, and I agree, we are fortunate to have both,
as
a rare window into Nabokov's creative process and goals.
"Would Nabokov be alluding to Freud, in a covert way, when he used the
term "revealed story"? (If he'd intended to contrast it to the "shadow
story", a procedure he outlined in "Signs and Symbols" - but in a
different, mainly literary, context)."
I was inadvertently unclear about this--I really don't have an informed
opinion as to what Nabokov meant by this term, you might well be correct
in your suggestion. I merely decided to appropriate Nabokov's felicitous
turn of phrase, and use it for my own purpose, because it is more
elegant
than "overt story". Some personal history here--I did not coin the term
"shadow story" until 2007--for the two years before then, I referred to
it
as the "secret subtext"--much clunkier.
"If Perlstein's "Trojan horse" refers to an "infiltration of an idea
into
the mind of the reader" which "may suddenly bubble to the surface and be
recognized consciously," we may find that he is implicitly accepting
that
there is a hidden line of reasoning taking place outside of the
conscious
mind, i.e, that what is unconscious may follow rules that are similar to
what is consciously expressed by an ordinary language (such as
condensation/metaphor, displacement/metonymy), instead of remaining
like a
jumble of images and sounds."
Of course I believe that Freud gave us a great gift with his
schematization and metaphorization of these different mental processes.
But I distinguish between the mind of the author and the mind of the
reader.
I think that great story tellers like Shakespeare, Austen and Nabokov
all
developed an acute sensitivity to their own unconscious creativity, and
generated a flood of material in that way, but were also skilled and
disciplined craftsmen who took the production of their unconscious minds
and then very consciously shaped it into finished art of extraordinarily
high quality.
And the best part of their literary art is that it has the ability to
unleash the unconscious of their readers, to trigger in US a parallel
process of decoding---I can't tell you how many times I have woken up
knowing something that I went to bed not (consciously) knowing. The
more I
have trained my unconscious faculties, the more I have seen, but I have
also learned how to consciously shape my insights and to place them in
the
richest possible context. The uniting of imagination and reason is
synergistic.
The "Trojan Horse Moment" is my description of a reader who seems to
have
unconsciously registered some shadow story element in a work of fiction,
but who does not consciously realize it (often because of a dogmatic
conscious rejection of the very idea of shadows), and who then reacts
in a
way that shows that the "horse" got inside their head nonetheless! I
have
gathered some of my best "leads" about Austen's (and Shakespeare's)
shadow
stories from the Trojan Horse Moments of other Janeites who did not
realize the shadowy implications of their insights.
"The "revealed story" is "the manifest content of a dream," whereas the
"shadow story" ( the true one!) is "the latent content of a dream. "
Well, I would say that they're both true, but in different ways. I think
Jane Austen was saying that life is ambiguous and we need to look both
on
the surface and beneath the surface, in search of "truth". Perhaps
others
in this group can comment on what Nabokov's goals were in creating
double
stories.
Also, and more important for this discussion, I claim that Freud's
principal inspiration for much of his theory of dreams and the
unconscious
was from Shakespeare in general, and Hamlet in particular.
I have an interpretation of the shadow story of Hamlet which I hope to
bring to the world in my second book, which will be of special interest
to
those interested in Freud's ideas.
"Taking into consideration Nabokov's manifest avowals, I prefer to think
that he was not yielding to Freud's concepts about the "unconscious
processes," but to an author's diverse very deliberate and conscious
ploys directed to a reader's equally conscious ability to unravel them.
This is why I prefer to exclude, from the list of Nabokov's intentions,
the project of "infiltrating ideas into the mind of the reader" that
would
later be consciously accessible to him following literary games."
I respectfully disagree, and claim that Nabokov was a sly dog, and, in
his
public pronouncements, he was not going to give away his whole game.
Reread what he said to Katherine White about "automatically"--that is
exactly what he was doing in "The Vane Sisters"---to throw not one but a
half dozen Trojan Horses at the reader, expecting that at some point the
light bulb would turn on in the reader's mind, and he would begin to
search for the acrostic in the story.
Cheers,
Arnie
sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com
P.S.: I was checking some more online into Titania's "jewels from the
deep", and was surprised NOT to see any literary critics responding to
its
metaphorical resonance, i.e., it is a lovely and apt metaphor for the
kind
of hidden meaning in words that great authors embedded in them. Perhaps
it
is because the Titania acrostic itself is still not widely known.
The only comment I saw online was, ironically, in an online screed at a
fundamentalist Christian webpage, where the preacher referred to the
"jewels from the deep" that lie hidden in Scripture, unseen by
unbelievers.