Arnie Perlstein: "My guess...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...I really don't have an informed opinion as to what Nabokov meant by this term ("revealed story")...I merely decided to appropriate Nabokov's felicitous turn of phrase...(G)reat story tellers like Shakespeare, Austen and Nabokov all developed an acute sensitivity to their own unconscious creativity...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. 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."

 

JM: Indeed, great story tellers, even less gifted artists, have "an acute sensitivity to their own unconscious creativity". Their talents, as disciplined craftsmen, enable them to consciously shape what's happening in their unconscious into art of high quality... I obviously didn't mean to assert anything on the contrary, or that writers don't affect their reader's unconscious. I'm sorry to have expressed myself incorrectly. My observation is related to the dangers of extending too widely the meaning of specific terms, like the one you found in Nabokov, ie, the "revealed story" which you contrasted to.Austen's "shadow/overt stories," without a reference to the context in which they were employed. 

 

For a Freudian, every story is always a double story (like the report of a dream). Words are "a dangerous thing"... In Nabokov's case, the "doubling" (or "tripling") pertains to a secondary level of deliberate elaboration and part of a conscious process ( I assume Austen's to be similarly controlled.) There are other kinds of  "hidden stories" for the unconscious is a capricious force and often it's totally independent from an author's control.

Even readers, in their response to art, must be able in a certain way to distinguish between real authorial intentions (affecting their emotions, memories,aso) from what lies in their inaccessible (repressed) material always striving to find a channel of expression. 

 

Edmund Wilson, from the very start, tried to convince Nabokov to reduce the quantity of puns and games (although he enjoyed reciprocating them). For EW an overload of acrostics, anagrams and puns in a work of art may reveal an uncharitable childish attitude towards people and things, or a kind of superficiality. The label "logomaniac," for example, can be employed in a positive or a negative way. Most of the time (but not always) Nabokov's love of words was very far from the mere capricious creation of puzzles and pranks. Nevertheless I fail to place the spiritualistic message in "The Vane sisters" as representing anything more than the master at play. In "Pale Fire", though, the scrambling of the warnings that Hazel registered in the barn seem to aim at identifying their source (Shade's mentally afflicted aunt) or to indicate the hazards that constantly impede any fluent communication bt. the living and the dead - should you accept spiritualistic beliefs).