JM:
A correction: B.Boyd's delivery at
the BAL in Rio was enthusiastically received by presiding poet and translator,
Ivan Junqueira,and by the audience (in the original posting the
name was incorrectly set down).
In the smaller images, instead of Ivan Junqueira, we also
see Antonio Carlos Secchin and Claudio Soares , the latter is standing
close to Boyd in front of the old building of the "Academia Brasileira de
Letras" and a sculpture of Machado.
A query: In
an article by Shoshana Felman ( "Literature and Psychoanalysis", Ed. J.Felman.
The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1980), I found a sequence of
comments about Henry James' story,"The Turn of the Screw"
* concerning Edmund Wilson's application of a Freudian point
of view.
S.Felman observed that in EW's
article, "sexuality, valorized as both the foundation and the
guide-post of the critical interpretation, thus takes on the status of an
answer to the question of the text," when it pulls
"the answer from its hiding place."
The article by Wilson is "The Ambiguity of Henry James"
("The Triple Thinkers", Penguin, 1962).
I always felt that Nabokov's rejection of Freud was
too repeated, emotional and emphatic, but I was unable to place
his off-key mood.
After leafing through Felman's objections to Wilson's
freudianism, it occurred to me that, perhaps, Nabokov might have been acquainted
with "Wilson's Freud", beside his own reading experience.This might explain the
special "strain" in VN's mockery and rejection of the Viennese...
(btw:I was unable to get hold of Wilson's original
article, so my query is based more on "hear-say" than a direct
evaluation).
*among his VN strong opinions there is a favorable comment
about James' "turns" of a sentence...