Stan Kelly-Bootle sent:
http://lib.ru/NABOKOW/Rowe.txt "One may wonder if it was worth Mr. Rowe's time to
exhibit erotic bits picked out of
Lolita and Ada--
a process rather like looking for allusions to aquatic mammals in Moby
Dick..."* Stan added: "I'm not sure, Anthony, that
the Greek etymology syn+ballein (to throw together) really helps in clarifying
exactly which meaning of SYMBOL VN found abhorrent ...The Middle English, via
Latin symbolum, meaning Creed ... has already drifted away from the everyday,
uncontroversial, mathematical usage: we use SYMBOLS as convenient, short-hand
marks for variables, constants, operators etc., making sure that the reader is
fully pre-informed of our intentions. ..Mathematical ymbols...although
arbitrarily chosen...must be pre-defined...when combined they can produce
equations surpassing Keatsian Beauty (with provable Truth as an added
bonus).Perhaps Jansy can tell us if this excursion into 'symbolism' helps her
with Farmer's observations. It does seem a tortuous road, littered with
semantic land-mines: of course, both Lolita and HH are fictional, so to
distinguish between Lolita, the idealized nymphet lusted after by HH, an
imaginary paedo, and a real incarnation, Dolores, shagged realistically from
realistic school to realistic motel in a realistic first-person, stretches our
analysis of meta-symbolist-narrative beyond usefulness. Perhaps this warning
applies only to Rowe's excessive hunt for Freudian sexual 'symbols,' which
certainly match Anthony's definition as the prefabricated symbol as reductive,
deadening cliche..."
JM: One has to distinguish
symbols related to indexes, signs and notations, from the various other uses
of the word.
Nabokov's satire of Freud introduces
"arbitrarily chosen" (conscious and willed) symbols, which he applies in a
playful way,often related to puns and to his pleasure with sounds. Freudian
"symbols" are as ancient as mankind (the contrived ones are found all over
literature and Freud often quoted Goethe's images of "jewel box" and its
fitting "key") - but their interest lies in their effectiveness to
express repressed ideas (even a supposedly innocent young girl, fingering the
lock of a purse, may be ellaborating under the force of these hidden, but
obvious, spontaneous connections) and as revealing mental mechanisms of
distorting reality to avoid mental pain. It is true that, in a general way,
Freudian symbols are of the kind Nabokov abhors in poetry. But Freud was not
intent on being a poet. If, in a dream, a snake or a staff stand for the
phallus, what is of interest to the psychoanalyst is to discover what that
person, in particular, is trying to express in relation to his sexual
experience. When Freud discovers that a statistically significant number of
people distort their sexual unconfessable sins using the same kind of image as
the one that is favored by the poets, he is still not intent on poetic
metaphors as they are made to resound and rebound in a verse.
Nabokov's accusation towards the "Viennese
school" is unfair because he imagines that Freudian symbols, by being
"generic" (A stands for B), imply
a "generic view" of language,
communication, individual qualms. Freudian replicators (like Rowe) make this
mistake (several psychoanalysts, too, particularly the Kleinian-school).
However, Freud always stressed the importance of listening to every
individual's one and only "voice" and his "subjective kernel of truth" ( a
distant cry from obtaining a "universal truth").
Yesterday I took the trouble to leaf through
"The Oxford Dictionary of Euphemisms" ** (when, in common usage, a word A
stands for an unnameable object, or verb, B). A tedious procedure. There was
only one entry that reminded me of something Nabokovian (and I discarded it
for Clare Bishop didn't shake hands with V, only held a bunch of keys that
belonged to Sebastian with her "blind fingers"). Here it is - Shake
Hands with a Bishop: to urinate ( Of a male, whose uncircumsided penis
may resemble the chessman..." (citing Theroux, 1979, quoting Borges).
That's some bishop "symbol", eh?
.............................................................................................................
* - VN: * "What I object to is Mr.
Rowe's manipulating my most innocent words so as to introduce sexual "symbols"
into them. The notion of symbol itself has always been abhorrent
to me The symbolism racket ... destroys plain intelligence
as well as poetical sense... It numbs all capacity to enjoy
the fun and enchantment of art.... Pencil licking is always a
reference to you know what. A soccer goal hints at the vulval
orifice (which Mr.Rowe evidently sees as square). I wish to share with him the
following secret: In the case of a certain type of
writer it often happens that a whole paragraph or sinuous sentence
exists as a discrete organism, with its own imagery,
its own invocations, its own bloom, and then it is especially precious, and
also vulnerable, so that if an outsider, immune to
poetry and common sense, injects spurious symbols into
it, or actually tampers with its wording ...its magic is
replaced by maggots...The fatal flaw in Mr. Rowe's treatment
of recurrent
words, such as "garden" or "water," is his regarding them as
abstractions, and not realizing that the sound of a bath being
filled, say, in the world of Laughter in the Dark, is as
different from the limes rustling in the rain of Speak, Memory as
the Garden of Delights in Ada is
from the lawns in Lolita....(and) make every chapter a
veritable compote of female organs... what I find
unpardonable, and indeed unworthy of a scholar,
is Mr. Rowe's twisting my discussion of
prosody (as appended to my translation of Eugene
Onegin) into a torrent of Freudian drivel, which allows him to construe
"metrical length" as an erection and "rhyme" as a sexual climax...Mr.
Rowe's preposterous and nasty interpretations. William
Woodin Rowe: Nabokov's Deceptive World.(August 28, 1971, published
in The New York Review on October 7 of the same year.)
** - "A Dictionary of Euphemisms (How not to say what you mean),
R.W.Holder, Oxford U.P.,1995, p.330.