Re: the abstract of Michael Glynn's article, I searched for the
quotation in his title ('The word is not a shadow. The word is a
thing.') and it comes from Victor Shklovsky's Theory of Prose,
in Benjamin Sher's translation. I don't have a page number.
Jansy Mello's points are all very valuable. I imagine that Zoran
Kuzmanovich would remind us of VN's article "Professor Woodbridge in an
Essay on Nature Postulates the Reality of the World", where he states
(approximately) that "words are not applied to nature but are made in
nature". But of course such oracular comments only obscure the matter
further.
Also very relevant here is VN's fascination with Bely's "experiment in
lyric poetry" --those shaded diagrams based on identifying and
connecting all the missed stresses in a poem (more common in Russian
than English), something of a graphic "shadow" of the poems. These are
discussed in his letters to Wilson and to his sister Elena, with whom
he worked on many in 1918 in the Crimea. As he describes in Speak,
Memory, Nabokov even tried composing poetry starting from
certain interesting shadowgrams--a process that, in tacit conformity
with Bely's thesis, did not work very well. Except perhaps in
"Bol'shaia medveditsa" (The Great Bear, Ursa Major): see Boyd, RY,
150-51.
Stephen Blackwell