On Oct 5, 2010, at 1:20 PM, piers smith wrote:
I would say that Nabokov was playing (emphasis on that word) with hermeneutics and the hermenauts (amongst whom Freud was captain), if that matters. What we should now ask is why codology matters so much, not so much to VN (though it does seem to matter a great deal to him) but to us.
PS
Why do interpretations matter?
Is this mere argumentativeness?
I was the shadow of the waxwing slain,
By the false azure in the window paneI was the smudge of ashen fluff, and I
Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky.
Arguably this passage has no sensible, literal meaning.
How can a smudge also be a shadow?
How can that smudge of ashen fluff be alive and fly?
Perhaps in our imaginations, but do you really think the passage is intended to convey that?
So there is at least the assemblage of extended meanings that serve to compose individual lines and passages, like the one just cited, into larger, more coherent, sensible, units.
Most people, dedicated dadaist excepted perhaps, don't enjoy reading nonsense.
Beyond that there arguably exists a greater sense of closure as more details are explained and related to each other.
Essentially more meaning, possessing greater certainty, equates to greater pleasure.
Frankly I find it a little odd, myself, to ask: Why does the meaning of a passage or a work matter?
I agree that Nabokov was playing... with hermeneutics,
suggesting meanings that may later turn out to be false, something that is the basis of a lot of storytelling, suspense and detective genre especially,
but does such play render the search for meanings valueless to the reader?
Probably a great deal of our sense of engagement along the lines of conjecture is as innate and automatic as reading itself.
Try to stop yourself from reading to the end of this sentence for instance.
It is a kind of wide belief that is, I think, constantly being reinforced: that we inhabit a meaningful world.
–GSL