Subject
Re: Nabokov's Symbols
From
Date
Body
Stephen Blackwell Re: SKB's post, see Eric Naiman's new Nabokov, Perversely (Cornell UP, currently about $25 on Amazon), in which the author partially rehabilitates W.W. Rowe, reassessing many of his finds and calling him "the heroic Pnin of my book" (an approximate quotation). The book challenges all readers of Nabokov to some mind-bending thought experiments and self-reflection.
JM: Mind-bending thought experiments and self-reflection are fine and, in fact, some of Naiman's wonderful challenges. However, qua W.W.Rowe in connection to Freud, the width of links Naiman encounters bt. words and sexual innuendoes is not really something Freudian (it is more for the sake of "bawdiness", more gratuitous and literary). I hope to find time to return to Anthony and Stan Kelly later on, both deserve some pondering treads before I rush in as usual.
One more item sent by James Twiggs, relates to our present themes ("reality" and "real object" versus "Freudian symbols."): "'The word is not a shadow. The word is a thing' - Nabokov as anti-Symbolist." by Glynn, Michael ( michael.glynn@btinternet.com ) European Journal of American Culture; 2006, Vol. 25 Issue 1, p3-30, 28p ABSTRACT: This article seeks to counter a contemporary critical orthodoxy that presents Nabokov as a transcendental or Symbolist writer. This Symbolist version of Nabokov has been promoted by such eminent Nabokovians as Brian Boyd and D. Barton Johnson but is a reading that perhaps misrepresents the man and his work. I suggest that Nabokov's early poetic output manifests an anti-Symbolist impulse and proceed to argue that his fundamental epistemology was anti-Symbolist. This antipathy is starkly revealed when we consider Nabokov's attitude to language: for the Symbolist, the word was a barrier that interposed itself between man and ultimate reality. The Symbolist imagination was therefore intent upon finessing a limited and limiting language so that it became capable of adumbrating the ineffable. To this end, the Symbolists seized upon the verbal symbol which was prized for its obliquity and its transcendent potential. To value the word as symbol, however, was in Nabokov's view to detract from the intrinsic value of both word and world and I suggest instead that Nabokov enjoyed an epistemological affinity with Russian Formalism. I conclude the article by arguing that in his Lolita, Nabokov seeks to explore the pernicious effects of symbolatry.
Samples: "This article argues that a critical emphasis on the otherworldly is unhelpful...What many value in Nabokov, however, is his expressive power, his attention to detail, his loving presentation of a strangely beautiful world./ This is what makes his work Nabokovian. Whilst Nabokov needs concrete phenomena with which to engage, the transcendental realm is definitively abstract and devoid of particularity. In a sense, Nabokov's otherworld is everyone's otherworld whilst his material world is startlingly sui generis... When reading Nabokov, not everyone will necessarily find the work to be eloquent of a fundamental concern with the metaphysical in the way that Alexandrov and others suggest...The Symbolist valued a language of indirection then, and this is antithetical to Nabokov's own aesthetic and fictional practice. Nabokov valued both word and world for their own sakes. He himself believed that 'in high art and pure science detail is everything' and that 'the artist should know the given world'. In his fiction he eschews adumbration of an abstract otherworld in favour of an intensely vivid rendering of immediate physical reality. Nabokov values the world for its own sake and he makes that world strange by detailing it with hyperrealistic clarity...Nabokov, however, remains open to the world. He celebrates the strangeness of the human mind and the material world, and yet he does not wish them other than they are. He enters sympathetically into the deluded and aberrant consciousness although he himself was neither deluded nor aberrant. His fictions explore the collision between the individual creative consciousness and the strange, surprising world in which that consciousness is situated...Nabokov's own art reveals a kindred sense that the word, and the world, should be valued for their own sakes, not as mere surrogates"
btw: Nabokov's "otherworld" fascinates me. His descriptions of the "oceanic feeling" and other states, such as we find in some of his early short-stories ("Sounds", "Benevolence",aso), are incredibly enriching. However, from the literary point of view, I often find myself in agreement with Michael Glynn, ie, that "critical emphasis on the otherwordly is unhelpful..."
PS to Stan: I'm safely back, thanks for asking. It was lovely to meet you - one of the highlights of my trip abroad!
Search archive with Google:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
Visit "Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
Manage subscription options: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/
JM: Mind-bending thought experiments and self-reflection are fine and, in fact, some of Naiman's wonderful challenges. However, qua W.W.Rowe in connection to Freud, the width of links Naiman encounters bt. words and sexual innuendoes is not really something Freudian (it is more for the sake of "bawdiness", more gratuitous and literary). I hope to find time to return to Anthony and Stan Kelly later on, both deserve some pondering treads before I rush in as usual.
One more item sent by James Twiggs, relates to our present themes ("reality" and "real object" versus "Freudian symbols."): "'The word is not a shadow. The word is a thing' - Nabokov as anti-Symbolist." by Glynn, Michael ( michael.glynn@btinternet.com ) European Journal of American Culture; 2006, Vol. 25 Issue 1, p3-30, 28p ABSTRACT: This article seeks to counter a contemporary critical orthodoxy that presents Nabokov as a transcendental or Symbolist writer. This Symbolist version of Nabokov has been promoted by such eminent Nabokovians as Brian Boyd and D. Barton Johnson but is a reading that perhaps misrepresents the man and his work. I suggest that Nabokov's early poetic output manifests an anti-Symbolist impulse and proceed to argue that his fundamental epistemology was anti-Symbolist. This antipathy is starkly revealed when we consider Nabokov's attitude to language: for the Symbolist, the word was a barrier that interposed itself between man and ultimate reality. The Symbolist imagination was therefore intent upon finessing a limited and limiting language so that it became capable of adumbrating the ineffable. To this end, the Symbolists seized upon the verbal symbol which was prized for its obliquity and its transcendent potential. To value the word as symbol, however, was in Nabokov's view to detract from the intrinsic value of both word and world and I suggest instead that Nabokov enjoyed an epistemological affinity with Russian Formalism. I conclude the article by arguing that in his Lolita, Nabokov seeks to explore the pernicious effects of symbolatry.
Samples: "This article argues that a critical emphasis on the otherworldly is unhelpful...What many value in Nabokov, however, is his expressive power, his attention to detail, his loving presentation of a strangely beautiful world./ This is what makes his work Nabokovian. Whilst Nabokov needs concrete phenomena with which to engage, the transcendental realm is definitively abstract and devoid of particularity. In a sense, Nabokov's otherworld is everyone's otherworld whilst his material world is startlingly sui generis... When reading Nabokov, not everyone will necessarily find the work to be eloquent of a fundamental concern with the metaphysical in the way that Alexandrov and others suggest...The Symbolist valued a language of indirection then, and this is antithetical to Nabokov's own aesthetic and fictional practice. Nabokov valued both word and world for their own sakes. He himself believed that 'in high art and pure science detail is everything' and that 'the artist should know the given world'. In his fiction he eschews adumbration of an abstract otherworld in favour of an intensely vivid rendering of immediate physical reality. Nabokov values the world for its own sake and he makes that world strange by detailing it with hyperrealistic clarity...Nabokov, however, remains open to the world. He celebrates the strangeness of the human mind and the material world, and yet he does not wish them other than they are. He enters sympathetically into the deluded and aberrant consciousness although he himself was neither deluded nor aberrant. His fictions explore the collision between the individual creative consciousness and the strange, surprising world in which that consciousness is situated...Nabokov's own art reveals a kindred sense that the word, and the world, should be valued for their own sakes, not as mere surrogates"
btw: Nabokov's "otherworld" fascinates me. His descriptions of the "oceanic feeling" and other states, such as we find in some of his early short-stories ("Sounds", "Benevolence",aso), are incredibly enriching. However, from the literary point of view, I often find myself in agreement with Michael Glynn, ie, that "critical emphasis on the otherwordly is unhelpful..."
PS to Stan: I'm safely back, thanks for asking. It was lovely to meet you - one of the highlights of my trip abroad!
Search archive with Google:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
Visit "Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
Manage subscription options: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/