Julian W. Connolly ["The first lines in 'Ada or
Ardor' are more or less similar to Tolstoy's: " 'All happy families are
more or less dissimilar[...]the first part of which is, perhaps, closer to
another Tolstoy work, Detstvo i Otrochestvo (Childhood and Fatherland, Pontius
Press, 1858)..." to which work was Nabokov referring?] :
Early in his career Tolstoy wrote three works with the titles "Detstvo,"
"Otrochestvo," and "Iunost'", which translate as "Childhood," "Boyhood," and
"Youth." Nabokov deliberately mistranslates the word "otrochestvo"
[boyhood] as "fatherland," which, in Russian, is "otechestvo" a word that is
phonetically close to "otrochestvo." He may be getting in a subtle dig at poor
translators.
JM: Thank you. I felt there was a "subtle dig"
but could not find my way to understand what it was.
Yesterday I received the long awaited new issue of "Nabokov
Studies" (vol. 11- 2007/2008).
Its opening article, by Monica Manolescu-Oancea ( "Humbert's Arctic
Adventures: Some Intertextual Explorations"), deals with "the controversial and
ambiguous nature of Nabokovian intertextuality." (p.5,n.3) among other lucidly
researched items concerning the poles and polar bears in "Lolita".
Monica M-O mentions the pitfalls when an ingenuous reader follows a false
"allusion" (as the one with a false quote about Corneille's El
Cid) but, inspite of the risks, it might be interesting to explore
involuntary associations which might have been present in the author's
mind, but which he suppressed.
In one of his letters ( Nov.24,1942, No.55) Nabokov describes "a little man, with mild watery eyes" who was often "dismally silent." And yet, while showing VN the Lincoln
Monument, he volubly and excitedly reacted to a flagpole.
Nabokov ends his report with: " And next day I
noticed him tingle for a moment when I happened to mention Poland and
Poles. Good case for the Viennese Wizard (who might also observe
that "pol" means "sex" in Russian)."
Inspite of the jab against freudians who would find meaning in "pol" when
the matter was "natives of Poland" and "flagpoles," Nabokov himself
revealed his associative contamination by the words (in English & in
Russian), related to the arctic "poles."
Trained in the "viennese" tradition, I couldn't avoid reading
it into other Nabokov references - as those quoted by Monica M-O in
connection to this disquieting theme (SM: "those
companionable phantoms of ships in polar waters", on the "mirage"
theme; the Scott polar exploration in which "He sought for the secret
of the Pole but found God" ; "the awkward screen meant to dissimulate
his desire, a veil..." when the "teller and the listener are momentarily
embraced in a scene that stages a tremulous intimacy between words and bodies,
behind the verbal and sensual texture of Humbert's arctic adventures".) They may
have some bearing on VN's explicit writings and offer another perspective into
reading them, but this is very difficult to ascertain. Nevertheless,
besides "ambiguous allusions," it is undeniable that "unconscious allusions" are
inevitable.
..........................................................................................................................................
J.Aisenberg [...I would, however, like to explain why
I made such a "gross overstatement"... jansymellow queried a quote from Speak
Memory, which, resourceful as ever, she cross-referenced with something from the
Nabokov-Wilson correspondence, letter 123, page 173 of the paperback.... all I
know is how much "gayness" fringes just about everyone of his books.]
J.M: After I began to question (in the N-List) my own
ignorance about Sergey Nabokov's life, I received several rich bibliographic
indications, most of them from J.Twiggs. I took the trouble to copy them for the
benefit of those who share my curiosity from:
Steven Belletto "The Zemblan Who Came in From the Cold, or
Nabokov's Pale Fire, Chance, and the Cold War" ELH 73 (2006) Johns Hopkins
University Press: http://ww2.lafayette.edu/~belletts/73.3belletto.pdf
Belletto's article demands a
more careful examination than the one I'm able to present here. It's sufficient
to say that Belletto argues that Nabokov, chiefly through Pale Fire 's
puns and wordgames, could "engage cultural narratives that prescribed the limits
of mid-century reality." For him "In Pale Fire the politics of late 1950s
America look enough like the 'containment narrative' familiar to Cold War
scholars ( and Kinbote's invented Zembla looks enough like a Soviet satellite
state) that we ought to ask to what end Nabokov is refracting real-world
politics through the prism of his aesthetics." Belleto sees that "the
pervasive practice of eliding differences among the so-called enemies of
democratic freedom to read homosexuals as political threats on par with
Communists. For Nabokov, the logic of what I will refer to as the homophobic
narrative was as tragically absurd as the logic of Kinbote's tale of Zembla"
[underlined by me].
In Bellotto's controversial article
we read that "the genesis of the Zembla narrative is Kinbote's pariah
status as a homosexual in the New Wye (New York) community of 1958-1959, the
engine driving much of the tale - the assassination plot - exists to convert
Shade's accidental death from a freak chance event to an effect explicable by
clear causal progression. In short, through Kinbote's narrative, Shade's death
paradoxically becomes both cause and effect of the Zembla story."
For him Nabokov "links the
potential for real-life coincidences to textual or linguistic
coincidences."
Bellotto also quotes the
sentence in SM which has been the starting point of this discussion ( in note 12
to his article). He observes that "...can neither replace or
redeem"... "reads to me like a man who - with the benefit of a
half-century's reflection - is publicly resisting the homosexual 'type' he
dropped in a private letter."[ib.] Before writing this down, he'd
quoted Steven Bruhm's words about Hermann , Sergey's husband [
following another reference by B.Boyd (RY,396)]: "What we have here is the
epistemology of a closet that is both homophobic and queer, one that sees the
gay man as a 'type" yet that ostentatiously dissociates him from that
typology".
Bibliography:
a. General readings with items related to the
issue (homophobia, homosexuality, Kinbote, Sergey):
Mary McCarthy: "A Bolt from the Blue" in The
Writing on the Wall and Other Literary Essays ( New York:Harcourt,
1970)
Dwight Macdonald, "Virtuosity Revarded, or Dr.Kinbote's
Revenge" Partisan Review 29 (Summer 1962)
Andrew Field: Nabokov, His Life in Art (
Boston: Little,Brown, 1967)
David Walker, "The Viewer of the View'; Chance and
Choice in Pale Fire,"; Studies in American Fiction 4 (
1976)
Priscilla Meyer, Find What the Sailor Has Hidden:
Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire (Middleton:Wesleyan Univ.Press,
1988)
Brian Boyd, Nabokov's Pale Fire. The Magic of
Artistic Discovery (Princeton:Princeton Univ.Press, 1999)
Brian Boyd, VN:The Russian Years
Stacy Shiff, Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov), New
York, Random House, 1999
Dana Dragunoiu "Vladimir Nabokov's Ada: Art,
Deceptions, Ethics," Contemporary Literature 46 (Summer
2005)
b. More specific articles:
Frank Kermode, "Zemblances," The New Statesman
( 9 November 1962)
Jean Walton: "Dissenting in an Age of Frenzied
Heterosexualism: Kinbote's Transparent Closet in Nabokov's Pale Fire":
College Literature, Vol. 21, 1994.
Steven Bruhm, "Queer, Queer Vladimir," American
Imago,53 , 1996
Phyllis Roth, "The Psychology of the Double in
Nabokov's Pale Fire," Essays in Literature 2 (1975)
Kevin Ohi, "Narcisism and Queer Reading in Pale
Fire," Nabokov Studies 5 (1998/1999)
Brian Boyd "Reflections on Narcissus" Nabokov
Studies 5 (1998/1999)
Paul Allen Miller, "The Crewcut
Homoerotic Discourse in Nabokov's Pale Fire" in Discourse and Ideology in
Nabokov's Prose, ed. David H.J.Larmour (London: Routledge, 2002).