Subject
Responses to query about Nabokov and synesthesia (also symbolists
& Rimbaud)
& Rimbaud)
From
Date
Body
Re N and Synaesthesia - here is a brief extract from my recent article in part of which I discuss some of N's (superficial) Symbolist traits ('The Word is not A Shadow. The Word is a Thing.': Nabokov as anti-Symbolist. European Journal of American Culture vol 25:1) . Hope this seems germane - a couple of the refs may not be familiar to all members of the forum many thanks
Michael Glynn
'Whilst Nabokov’s fictions are ready testament to his acute sensory awareness, he sometimes claimed to be prone to what might be termed paranormal perceptions. This aspect of Nabokov’s personality is perhaps suggestive of the Symbolists’ own assiduous cultivation of the super-rational. In Speak Memory, for example, Nabokov lays claim to hallucinatory bouts (‘some are aural, some are optical’)[i] a childhood clairvoyant episode and also a synaesthetic facility. Nabokov felt that his artistic sensibilities had been inherited from his mother, Elena Ivanovna, and in a lyrical passage he commemorates the fillip she gave to his inchoate creative imagination:
How many were the aquarelles she painted for me; what a revelation it was when she showed me the lilac tree that grows out of mixed blue and red! Sometimes … she would produce a mass of jewelry for my bedtime amusement. I was very small then, and those flashing tiaras and chokers and rings seemed to me hardly inferior in mystery and enchantment to the illumination in the city during imperial fetes, when … giant monograms, crowns, and other armorial designs, made of colored electric bulbs … glowed with a kind of charmed constraint above snow-lined cornices.[ii]
In addition to an openness to tangible phenomena, however, Elena appears also to have attempted to nurture in her son a susceptibility to a ghostly realm. Of the two, Elena appears to have been the more psychically attuned. In fact, Nabokov appears gently to satirize his mother’s enthusiasms:
‘Oh yes,’ she would say as I mentioned this or that unusual sensation. ‘Yes, I know all that,’ and with a somewhat eerie ingenuousness she would discuss such things as double sight, and little raps in the woodwork of tripod tables, and premonitions, and the feeling of the d*j* vu.[iii]
With regard to synaesthetic perception, however, which modern science suggests may in fact be hereditary,[iv] Nabokov was more ready to acknowledge an affinity with his mother:
I was using a heap of old alphabet blocks to build a tower. I casually remarked to her that their colours were all wrong. We discovered then that some of her letters had the same tint as mine and that, besides, she was optically affected by musical notes.[v]
Interestingly, in a recent examination of the case histories of some putative synaesthetes, among them such notables as Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Kandinsky and Huysmans, the research psychologist John Harrison argues that only Nabokov impresses as the genuine article.[vi] As Kevin T. Dann has observed, the voguishness of synaesthetic perception in fin-de-si*cle Europe was in part attributable to the existence of a Symbolist movement that sought a radical refinement of human sensibilities.[vii] Like her son, Elena was an avid reader of the Symbolist poets and it is probable that the synaesthetic sensitivity of mother and son was buttressed by such reading. Baudelaire famously celebrates a synaesthetic melding of the senses in his poem ‘Correspondences:
Like prolonged echoes mingling far away
in a unity tenebrous and profound,
vast as the night and as the limpid day,
perfumes, sounds, and colours correspond.[viii]
And in ‘Evening Harmony’ he writes that,
Each vibrating flower, like a censer, is breathing forth its scent
perfumes and sounds in the evening air are blent.[ix]
Again in Speak Memory Nabokov relates that, when recovering from a childhood illness, and still somewhat febrile, he visualized with immense clarity his mother, who he knew intended to buy him a present, entering a shop to purchase what appeared to be a pencil. Our young clairvoyant was at a loss to understand why, in his vision, his mother had her servant carry such a small parcel: ‘A few minutes later, she entered my room. In her arms she held … a giant polygonal Faber pencil, four feet long and correspondingly thick. It had been hanging as a showpiece in the shop’s window.’[x]
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[i] Speak Memory, p. 28.
[ii] Speak Memory, p. 30.
[iii] Speak Memory, p. 32.
[iv] Mark E.S. Bailey and Keith J. Johnson, ‘Synaesthesia: Is a Genetic Analysis Feasible?’, Synaesthesia: Classic and Contemporary Readings, ed. Simon Baron-Cohen and John E. Harrison (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), pp. 182–207.
[v] Speak Memory, p. 30.
[vi] John Harrison, Synaesthesia: The Strangest Thing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 140.
[vii] Kevin T. Dann, Bright Colours Falsely Seen: Synaesthesia and the Search for Transcendental Knowledge (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), p. 17.
[viii] MacIntyre, C.F. (trans.) (1964), French Symbolist Poetry, Berkeley: University of California Press. p. 13.
[ix] MacIntyre, p. 15.
[x] Speak Memory, p. 32.
Search the archive: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/archives/nabokv-l.html
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
Michael Glynn
'Whilst Nabokov’s fictions are ready testament to his acute sensory awareness, he sometimes claimed to be prone to what might be termed paranormal perceptions. This aspect of Nabokov’s personality is perhaps suggestive of the Symbolists’ own assiduous cultivation of the super-rational. In Speak Memory, for example, Nabokov lays claim to hallucinatory bouts (‘some are aural, some are optical’)[i] a childhood clairvoyant episode and also a synaesthetic facility. Nabokov felt that his artistic sensibilities had been inherited from his mother, Elena Ivanovna, and in a lyrical passage he commemorates the fillip she gave to his inchoate creative imagination:
How many were the aquarelles she painted for me; what a revelation it was when she showed me the lilac tree that grows out of mixed blue and red! Sometimes … she would produce a mass of jewelry for my bedtime amusement. I was very small then, and those flashing tiaras and chokers and rings seemed to me hardly inferior in mystery and enchantment to the illumination in the city during imperial fetes, when … giant monograms, crowns, and other armorial designs, made of colored electric bulbs … glowed with a kind of charmed constraint above snow-lined cornices.[ii]
In addition to an openness to tangible phenomena, however, Elena appears also to have attempted to nurture in her son a susceptibility to a ghostly realm. Of the two, Elena appears to have been the more psychically attuned. In fact, Nabokov appears gently to satirize his mother’s enthusiasms:
‘Oh yes,’ she would say as I mentioned this or that unusual sensation. ‘Yes, I know all that,’ and with a somewhat eerie ingenuousness she would discuss such things as double sight, and little raps in the woodwork of tripod tables, and premonitions, and the feeling of the d*j* vu.[iii]
With regard to synaesthetic perception, however, which modern science suggests may in fact be hereditary,[iv] Nabokov was more ready to acknowledge an affinity with his mother:
I was using a heap of old alphabet blocks to build a tower. I casually remarked to her that their colours were all wrong. We discovered then that some of her letters had the same tint as mine and that, besides, she was optically affected by musical notes.[v]
Interestingly, in a recent examination of the case histories of some putative synaesthetes, among them such notables as Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Kandinsky and Huysmans, the research psychologist John Harrison argues that only Nabokov impresses as the genuine article.[vi] As Kevin T. Dann has observed, the voguishness of synaesthetic perception in fin-de-si*cle Europe was in part attributable to the existence of a Symbolist movement that sought a radical refinement of human sensibilities.[vii] Like her son, Elena was an avid reader of the Symbolist poets and it is probable that the synaesthetic sensitivity of mother and son was buttressed by such reading. Baudelaire famously celebrates a synaesthetic melding of the senses in his poem ‘Correspondences:
Like prolonged echoes mingling far away
in a unity tenebrous and profound,
vast as the night and as the limpid day,
perfumes, sounds, and colours correspond.[viii]
And in ‘Evening Harmony’ he writes that,
Each vibrating flower, like a censer, is breathing forth its scent
perfumes and sounds in the evening air are blent.[ix]
Again in Speak Memory Nabokov relates that, when recovering from a childhood illness, and still somewhat febrile, he visualized with immense clarity his mother, who he knew intended to buy him a present, entering a shop to purchase what appeared to be a pencil. Our young clairvoyant was at a loss to understand why, in his vision, his mother had her servant carry such a small parcel: ‘A few minutes later, she entered my room. In her arms she held … a giant polygonal Faber pencil, four feet long and correspondingly thick. It had been hanging as a showpiece in the shop’s window.’[x]
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[i] Speak Memory, p. 28.
[ii] Speak Memory, p. 30.
[iii] Speak Memory, p. 32.
[iv] Mark E.S. Bailey and Keith J. Johnson, ‘Synaesthesia: Is a Genetic Analysis Feasible?’, Synaesthesia: Classic and Contemporary Readings, ed. Simon Baron-Cohen and John E. Harrison (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), pp. 182–207.
[v] Speak Memory, p. 30.
[vi] John Harrison, Synaesthesia: The Strangest Thing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 140.
[vii] Kevin T. Dann, Bright Colours Falsely Seen: Synaesthesia and the Search for Transcendental Knowledge (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), p. 17.
[viii] MacIntyre, C.F. (trans.) (1964), French Symbolist Poetry, Berkeley: University of California Press. p. 13.
[ix] MacIntyre, p. 15.
[x] Speak Memory, p. 32.
Search the archive: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/archives/nabokv-l.html
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