Naiman quotes Krug's words on
Shakespeare & the miracle of translation: "Nature
had once produced an Englishman whose domed head had been a hive of words (...)
Three centuries later, another man, in another country, was trying to
render ..." (BS,119-20) and how, while Ember discusses details of his
own, he is interrupted by Krug's exclamation about two organ grinders
that he could see from his window (BS 121): "There is
something familiar about the whole thing, something I cannot quite disentangle -
a certain line of thought." For Naiman " 'the line of
thought' is the tangle of the novel itself, entwined with multiple references to
homosexuality." (p.53). I differ from his conclusion, in part, because
of its putative link to Nabokov's appropriatory translation
of Khodasevich's poem "The Monkey," in which organ grinders-monkeys
are brought together* and Krug/Nabokov's show of surprise
by undesired recollections.
The link with Shakespeare and monkey is also
present in Pnin (7): "[H]e began rather impressively with
that great brown dome of his..apish upper lip, thick neck..."
There is another surprising transposition,
related to Bend Sinister, Khodasevich's "Ballada" and Nabokov's
New Yorker's 1950 poem "The Room."
Nabokov wrote: "Perhaps my text is incomplete/A poet's death is, after all,/ a
question of technique, a net/enjambement, a melodic fall... ", while
in "Bend Sinister" we read:"Krug...understands
that he is in good hands: nothing on earth really matters, there is nothig to
fear, and death is but a question of style, a mere literary device, a musical
resolution" (xviii-xix).
A psychotic once, while he was attending a
violin concert, exclaimed: "Why, the violinist is masturbaring in public!"
Wilfred Bion uses this example to describe his concept of "binocular vision",
ie: the ability to discern both the upper and the underside of a weave
simultaneously, or to enjoy the manifest content and the latent
unconscious line of thought together, and, in the present example, this person's
incapacity to enjoy the music due to his excess of "underside vision."
Tracing parallels which might (or not) connect Nabokov's "manifest sentences"
among themself is insufficient to inform about their "latent unconscious
links," although they certainly offer important clues (always be
a matter of academic conjectures and theory).
Naiman wrote (N,P
p.73): "Were I a Freudian, I might suggest that Bend Sinister is the
work of the anal stage in our émigré author's aesthetic development, something a
boy even younger than David might write were he so lexically precocious as to
have read all of Shakespeare and the entire dictionary" (I suppose he
refers to a dictionary of Shakespearean bawdy terms). Although Naiman
wrote his Freudian conjectures in full while disclaiming them, I'm glad
that he is not a Freudian (there's more to psychoanalysis than decyphering
hidden bawdy clues.) Naiman develops his
theories about Nabokov's association between toilets, "the sites of artistic
creativity and excretion," and art's "uselessness" (Lacan refers
to "poubellication", ie, publishing and garbage. In
English, by doubling a consonant, we get "litter/ature").
The anal imagery is present in the Christian term for a soul's sojourn
in "Purgatory," or in the "cathartic" effect of Greek drama
(catharsis/purgation), but it belongs to the context of "desintoxication" and
"cleansing discharges," which belongs to the natural and artistic
"recycling" processes.
Nabokov, as I see it, successfully managed to
rein-in his scatological thoughts or masturbatory "violin playing"
(?), while producing a most accomplished music. Although to
explore an author's "perversity" - and the verbal domain is
not "natural" - is, in fact, important to acquire a full picture
of a writer's funs and games in art, but I hesitate about ascribing them to a
Freudian "anal phase" which next will evolve into a verbal "mature
genitality." My conclusions, therefore, are less categorical than Naiman's:
"Bend Sinister is not about the salvational poder of literature. On
the contrary, it is about literature's power to waste" and, also, in
relation to other critics who have "have pointed out, Lolita is partly
about what happens when a person lets his aesthetic impulses run away with
him." Naiman's concludes: "Just as Krug is undone by his interpretative
practices, so Bend Sinister shows us a world undone by art, two principal
features of which are authorial control and uselessness, here take to their
extremes as totalitarianism and excrement."(N,P 69/70)
I have not by me now Umberto Eco's
presentation of ancient philosophies, related to religion and profanity
("Sulla Leteratura" 2002, ?) and translation ("Dire Quasi la Stessa Cosa,"2003),
but I'll try to come back to them presently. And to Nabokov's
commentary and rejection of James Joyce's toilet-scenes in "Strong
Opinions".
......................................................
*
Zholkovsky on Nabokov's “first poem” and Khodasevich's “Monkey” noting
that in both "the time and, in a sense, the place coincide, as does the
monkey-cum-barrel-organ motif.." As also mentioned in a former posting,
"monkeys and translation" are present in Nabokov's poem "To
Pushkin" "What is translation? On a platter... a
parrot's screech, a monkey's chatter..."