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Stan Kelly-Bootle wrote:
"Apart from a few onomatopoeic words, sounds and meanings have
no innate connection. Recall Saussure¹s key notion that the mapping from
signifier to signified is quite arbitrary, a point that VN and some
Nabokovians choose to ignore."
Maybe Nabokov chose to ignore it because he believed, as
you and I don't, that something supernatural was involved,
that the players of some game above our world shaped the
evolution of "stranger" and "danger" to provide a convenient
rhyme at our period of history.
Maybe this belief is something we have to "give" him, as
non-religious people like me have to give Dante and Tolstoy
and many others the religion in their books in order to
enjoy them.
Though Nabokov certainly said he believed in the supernatural,
I don't know what he believed about similarities between words,
and I have to resist thinking he believed what Shade believed.
So I'll just turn to a quotation from Robertson Davies.
(Davies admired /Pnin/ and /Lolita/, though few of us would
agree with his interpretation of the latter. He was not
conventionally religious--more of a Jungian.)
"What then do I mean by a religious novelist? Somebody who
writes as if his characters were responsible to law and
society, but /above all else/, to a divine ruling power, and
were in danger also of falling under the sway of the constant
and implacable enemy of that power. In short, a novelist
who is conscious of God and the Devil."
[...]
"The novelists whose Kingdom is of This World may be artists
of subtlety and depth of perception, and they often touch
our hearts (if I may be permitted to speak of such an
indecency to a modern audience). But they do not sound
the deepest or the highest strings. Those are reserved
for writers whose own gamut of feeling extends both above
and below the Kingdom of This World."
--from "Phantasmagoria and Dream Grotto", a lecture
reprinted in /One Half of Robertson Davies/
Davies doesn't mention Nabokov in this lecture, and I
wouldn't care to speculate about Nabokov's views on
"God and the Devil" (though he was sometimes clear
on what he saw as go(o)d and( )evil), but I think we can
read him as saying that what you and I see as a mistake is
part of how Nabokov's novels touched the cosmic and
the comic.
Jerry Friedman