Jansy,
Maar uses the medusa metaphor in two ways, the latter of which bears some resemblance to Freud's conception, as I understand it. The first kind of medusa experience is as you've described it, a feeling of oneness with the universe, a sense of perfect purpose and order (the universe filtered through the individual, as light through a jellyfish). But Maar's point is that in VN's books, this "shimmer" doesn't last and is replaced by the Medusa experience, "the connection between the self and the world has been severed" (8). Maar doesn't mention it, but I think of John Shade's fits where he feels distributed through time and space, but then reawakens with a sense of shame and disgust. He gives several other examples.
 
As an aside, I have noticed a similar effect used repeatedly in Anna Karenina, which I've been reading this summer--the moment of clear perception, quickly followed by the scales falling from the disillusioned person's eyes. Is this a particular feature of Russian lit in general, or just in Tolstoy and VN?
 
Matt
 

 
JM: What I find strange in Maar's title and Banville's commentary about the "Medusa" theme is that although both mention Freud and his work "The Uncanny" (Das Unheimliche)*, they fail to mention Freud's "The Medusa head" (1922/1940, Das Medusenhaupt).  Maar's conceptualization couldn't be more distant from Freud's remarks ( for Maar speaks of "harmony with the universe" and "pantheistic bliss'!!!) The quote from TOoL he selects from Maar and expands, adds another strange slant to his comments:
"What is most striking,” Maar writes, “is not even that Lolita has forerunners—it’s that she has successors.” ... “There is, there was, only one girl in my life, an object of terror and tenderness[...]…” Thus Phillip Wild, “Lecturer in Experimental Psychology, University of Ganglia,” stoutly confesses in The Original of Laura... And what about this passage, in which Wild in a dream encounters Aurora Lee, a revenant from Poe via Lolita?

"I lifted the hem of your dress—something I never had done in the past—and stroked, moulded, pinched ever so softly your pale prominent nates, while you stood perfectly still as if considering new possibilities of power and pleasure and interior decoration. At the height of your guarded ecstasy I thrust my cupped hand from behind between your consenting thighs and felt the sweat-stuck folds of a long scrotum and then, further in front, the droop of a short member."


From the wikipedia: "Freud argues that decapitation equals castration. The terror of Medusa is thus a terror of castration that is linked to the sight of something. Numerous analyses have made us familiar with the occasion for this: it occurs when a boy, who has hitherto been unwilling to believe the threat of castration, catches sight of the female genitals, probably those of an adult, surrounded by hair, and essentially those of his mother...If Medusa's head takes the place of a representation of the female genitals, or rather if it isolates their horrifying effects from the pleasure-giving ones, it may be recalled that displaying the genitals is familiar in other connections as an apotropaic act. What arouses horror in oneself will produce that same effect upon the enemy against whom one is seeking to defend oneself. We read in Rabelais of how the Devil took to flight when the woman showed her vulva."
 
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