Sally McHale: "I am sending this
message because this book fulfills the "relevant to Nabokov studies"
description. It may require dialing your Naboko-scopes to a low magnification.
Forgive me for recycling if it has already come to your attention. The
book- Fort
Da is published by FC2, ( www.fc2.org) an imprint ( ?)
of the University of Alabama Press, 2009. Notations are: 1.
Neurologists-Fiction; 2. Americans-Germany- Fiction; 3.
Boys-Fiction; 4. Cypriots-Germany-Fiction; 5. Psychological fiction;
6. Experimental Fiction.
Elizabeth Sheffield, the author,
teaches at The Creative Writing Program at The University of Colorado in
Boulder. The book ( Finally!) - Fort Da has bold, perhaps crude,
Nabokov (ian) style and content. I found it wildly imaginative
( blind waiters, Schlafzentrum) and absurdly funny. I
am no scholar, but do have aspirations of understanding and enjoying Nabokov.
Enjoying comes more naturally to me. Fort Da was enjoyable. I wonder what
you all will think of and will find in this book. I think it worthy, which
is what emboldened me to actually "participate" in this listserv."
JM: Freud
again? "Fort Da" is a famous pair of words which were first mentioned by
S.Freud, in "Beyond the Pleasure Principle."
His baby grandson was playing in his crib
with a spool of thread that his mother Sophie had attached to a
ribbon. He would throw the spool out from the crib and scream
OOOOOOOO, next he would pull it back and, happily yell: AAAAAAA.
Freud understood the sounds he
made to mean "Fort (gone)" and "Da (here it/she is)".
He related it to an attempt to overcome
traumatic situations ( mother's absence) by acquiring control over her
disapparances, through symbolization ( the spool and the words). The story
is more elaborate, but worth reading it in Freud. His daughter died a few years
later and he mentions this fact in the saddest little footnote I ever read (also
in BPP).