JM "I was unaware ...that ... Vera ...
disencouraged her husband to write a novel about Siamese twins so that its first
chapter was turned into a short-story. Paulo Ghiraldelli Jr. departs from
...those two brothers who are inexorably tied together to develop in a
superficial way a couple of conjectures about Vladimir's conflictual
love-hate relationship with his homosexual brother..[ ]Has
anyone ever read about Vera's qualms and vetoes in this matter?."
Mary Efremov: "there were
other gays in the family and family members can always tell but maybe not talk
about it....both uncles from father's and mother's side were gay, and
embarassing...his father coined a proper russian word for homosexual and tried
to introduce legislation to de-criminalize homosexual
behaviors....ravopolniy."
JM: Like many
others, I feel uncomfortable with generalizations and broad
categorizations - and It seems to me that the term "gay" has been
applied to lots of different kinds of sexual choices, identities, feelings
and behaviors: how would "ravopolniy" be translated to the
English?
ME: homosexual is the
translation
SESweeney:For a psychoanalytic reading of this story, which
argues that it expresses various anxieties about VN's relationship with Sergei,
see my essay "The Small Furious Devil: Memory in 'Scenes from the Life of a
Double Monster,'" in A Small Alpine Form: Studies in Nabokov's Short Fiction,
ed. Charles Nicol and Gene Barabtarlo (New York: Garland, 1993), pp.
193-216). I have just discovered that a copy of my essay is available
online here.
Jansy Mello:
Thanks, Mary. You had me puzzled with "a proper russian word for [
]homoxexual behaviors...ravopolniy." The Russian word is stricter and more
to the point.
The opportunity to read SES's
paper about "the small furious devil" and "Doppelgänger" in Nabokov's work was
very enriching and stimulating. SES has answered all my queries in it.
Concerning Vera's
influence on the writing of "Scenes" we find her note 17, reporting an
anedocte by Andrew Field (VN 287) and a reference to B.BOyd's AY
170-171.
The reasons why the novel was
abandoned and only part of it used for "Scenes" are carefully explored with
personal elaborations and a wealth of academic research into the subject.
One of the sentences from Beth's paper
corrected my initial perspective. "Unlike 'Tyrants Destroyed,' however,
'Scenes' never evolved beyound this embryonic, metaphorical stage to become an
independent, fully realized work of fiction...'Scenes' like the Siamese twins
themselves, did not divide successfully." I had
failed to envisage the story as a grand metaphor!
Below I'll be bringing up various paragraphs extracted from
SES's article and I hope that I haven't distorted her arguments by my
tendentious pruning (as she informed in her posting quoted above, her paper
is avaliable on line for any further checking)
SES asks: "Why was Nabokov unable to finish this
particular work as he had planned? And what was the 'small furious devil' which
distorted its shape?" and she adds: "If physical and psychological aberrations 'nurtured Nabokov's
artistic fantasy,' as Dmitri Nabokov says, it was not by accident" [
] As "Phyllis Roth 'shows ...in his
autobiography, Nabokov sought artistic control over memories which were
particularly painful' [ ].'Scenes' might be one of the few instances
when he failed to transform those feelings into a transcendent
fiction...Discovering the reasons why he could not finish (it)...will illuminate
the ways in which he did achieve such artistic control in his other fictions
[ ] what painful feelings did the figure of Siamese twins, that
'rarest of freaks' suggest to Nabokov in
particular?"
According to her, Nabokov's fascination with doubles
"clearly demonstrate his familiarity with this literary tradition [the
Romantic 'Doppelgänger'], as well as with various psychological explanations
for it." To explore the latter, she works over articles by G Green, P.Roth
and Freud's "The Uncanny" and "Creative Writers", among others. She notes that
"Unlike Poe's William Wilson or Stevenson's Mr. Hyde,
Nabokov's doubles cannot be reduced to the dramatized conscience or unconscious
of his narrator...they remain completely separate individuals. The
conjoined twins epitomize this peculiarity...'a palpable
reflection of [a] corporeal self'."
According to SES "We may find
answers to our questions in the many similarities between 'Scenes' - Nabokov's
most graphic and grotesque depiction of duality - and his relationship with his
brother Sergei...his childhood relationship with this real-life
Doppelgänger who also resembled him in age and appearance but was a
completely separate person " ] and she poses new
questions: "What does Nabokov's relationship with his
brother have to do with the grotesque, or with the anxious memories it
evokes?"
SES acute probings isolate the two themes that had become
enravelled in other explorations: the grotesque monstrosity of VN's
fictional Siamese twins allied to VN's childhood conflicts with his
brother Sergei - and - VN's experiences with his family's homosexual
relatives. A most pertinent and total division of academic issues!
Continuing her investigation, SES concludes that,
given that: "Nabokov repeats,
corrects, and reinvents the 'miserable memories' of his relationship with Sergei
in the doublings which dominate his fiction... the memory of Sergei... is
that "small furious devil" which so distorts
"Scenes.." A convincing example on part
III in her work quotes VN's admission that Mademoiselle O and First Love
are 'true in every detail to the author's remembered
life' - "before he adds shrewdly," 'As
to the rest, I am no more guilty of imitating 'real life' than 'real life is
responsible for plagiarizing me' - "Besides identical narrative
situations, in which one brother recounts his shared childhood with
another, there are indeed suggestive similarities between the Siamese twins and
Nabokov's own childhood relationship with Sergei." When SES
examines "the way in which [Scenes] attempts to
transform, often very self-consciously, Nabokov's painful memories." she
notes that the important theme of " 'running away'
also functions, in this story, as the leimotif of Nabokov's relationship with
his brother - the kind of "thematic design" which Nabokov follows througout
Speak,Memory, and which he identifies as the purpose of autobiography. ,,,the
"abortive flight" of the twines (Scenes) attempts to express the cumulative
significance of all of these remembred escapes with Sergei." to
conclude that " 'Scenes' is not about
adult doubles like the other Doppelgänger fiction, but about the childhood
relationship between two brothers. It may also reflect Nabokov's feelings about
Sergei's homosexuality and his own guilt over discovering and revealing..."
since the "reworking of memory may be
the essential feature of Nabokov's art. His fiction not only demonstrtes
the mechanics of memory, but, more important, it reveals the resemblance between
remembering and fiction-making." * This is a very clear
and important point related to memory, imagination and fiction-making, the
workings of which can be followed an examined in VN's writings and according to
how successful he was in his transmutation of individual
remembrances into Art ..
In my opinion, when VN states "I was the coddled one, he [Sergey] the witness of coddling" (SM), he may
not have been absolutely truthful, because there are various other
sparsed observations of his that deny it. Sibling rivalry,
cruel jealousy and not only "embarassment" were distorted and fictionalized
in various ways.
VN carries "painful
and guilty memories," and he brings to light in his autobiography
one or two extremely significant examples. But there are
also other painful memories that'll remain secret, perhaps even
to himself. After all, Freud wrote extensively about perversions (he
never considered homosexuality as belonging to this category, as it was
classified in his time). He also wrote about human inborn "bisexuality"
so,why not admit that, like everyone else, Nabokov had homosexual
cravings that became extremely difficult for him to understand
and experience, because of the traumatic nature of his submission
to Uncle Ruka's caresses, or even any sort of sibling rompings
with Sergey (many traumatic experiences are only turned into "sexual
traumas" when the vistims is also excited and experiences
pleasure)?
........................................................................................
* - In part I and II of her fascinating paper, SES works
over the articles of several other Nabokov scholars. For example. she informs
that, for Carol T. Williams, "the Siamese twins embody 'in absolute
form' the 'monstrous truth about mortal unity'...Human that the narrator Floyd
is, he cannot recognize the intimations of ideal unity in his Siamese twinship
with Lloyd"...and that "Ellen Pifer concurs that the twins'
juxtaposition of 'physical duality and psychological isolation' ironically shows
'how fallacious a social and political ideal is an exaggerated faith in the
collective spirit of mankind" .A different argument is derived fromL.L Lee
for whom "the twins' symbiosis represents not 'ideal unity' but earthly
captivity..." For her, "these critics interpret it
[duality] no more convincingly than Field and Kecht" as.for example,
when ".Lee hesitates..'little Platonic half-eggs both seeking and
shunning our other halves...' Inspite of these author's differences, as she
observes, all of them agree about what the story exemplfies
"the essencial singularity of human life... a constant theme in Nabokov's
fiction..." and that "the unfinished 'Scenes' is itself an oddity,
'something' that 'had gone dreadfully wrong', like the accident of nature it
describes"...."the story was indeed a 'rahter unsuccessful experiment'
For Sweeney "the grotesque, and what it represented, was
an important part of that process. Dmitri Nabokov observed that 'aberrations in
general, both phusical and psychological, were among the diverse sources of raw
material that nurtured Nabokov's artistic fantasy'. " After quoting VN's
lines (the ones that inspired the title of her article:"I
was always ready to sacrifice purity of form to the exigencies of fantastic
content, causing form to bulge and burst like a sponge-bag containing a small
furious devil.") she reasserts that: "The grotesque, then, was an
essential part of Nabokov's process of composition: it often inspired his
fiction, and even determined its form.". and later
SES neatly closes her article with an expansion of just that conclusion by
approaching the grotesque, the doubles and fictionalized
recollections.