J.Aisenberg: You did not mean literal ghosts. I thought this because Boyd
is/was convinced that ...Yes, I know exactly what you mean, each time I
read the book I feel I can see more and more of the lives of the servants,
who seem to know more about what's going than Van and Ada do. [Van
...comes upon Blanche ...attempts to seduce her and she reels off
a curious French speech...Van thinks it sounds stiff and bookish
and it dampens his ardor.Later that day...he and Ada come
across a cheap romantic novel ...that belongs to one of the servants--the
novel Blanche got her speech from? ]
JM: Yes, that was my point: there are
hidden independent, but sustained, operatic plots to follow
in gesture, sound and fury.
And there are surprises with myriads of
"ancillary" patches, important by themselves for they are mainly
"living words" more than theyn are lost dream-state chains of
ideas. It is as if VN, vying with Freud, invented a "literary
unconscious" all of his own.
Stan Kelly-Bootle: Is Nabokov "claiming more than the
existence of a deeper 'real' reality lurking below a layer (mask) that we can
penetrate with the proper effort and discernment? [...] Gogol's masks
(whether deliberate or not) do not necessarily hide deeper
"truths" [...] Attentive re-readers must distinguish the "clues," good, bad
and entirely imagined. The anagrammatical paper-chase, for example, has been
rendered less creative by computer programs that can mix'n'match character
strings in all known languages. Remarkably, "To be or not to be, that is the
question. Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of
outrageous fortune ... " is an anagram of "In one of the Bard's
best-thought-of tragedies, our insistent hero, Hamlet, queries on two fronts
about how life turns rotten." Does this alter your views on spooky
anagrammatical significations?"
JM: Stan questioned those "deeper
realities". I have the impression that in a former message he mentioned
multiple "dimensions" and "parallel simultaneous
realities": perhaps, instead of reasoning in "depth", we might follow
"time-forks" to aim at a "symphonic-syntonic" effect, instead
of attribute more weight to one information over
another? "Simultaneous truths"?
The "anagrammatical" paper-chase was
a cryptographed one,to boot: is one level more "real" than the
others? VN confessed he interspersed false clues and wrong
leads...can we trust his word? Why not be simply
spooked by "coincidental", "random" or "fateful"anagrammatical
significations which have run out of control to obey the
elusive workings of language and signification?
"What is truth said gesting Pilate and didn't wait for
an answer...?" = when I said that "Lacan...considered
material reality as pertaining to the imaginary register" I forgot to
specify that I mean "material reality as perceived by our senses". I'd rather search after some kind of general "truth"
than chase after someone else's specific
"reality" ...