Jim Twiggs recently mentioned Nabokov's detestation of
general ideas while he emphatically denied any allusion to Barthes in "Pale
Fire" and its two dead authors. Although I wouldn't have thought about it as
related to VN's avoidance of general ideas in this sense. He writes, in SO (p.7)
"As an artist and scholar I prefer the specific detail to the generalization,
images to ideas, obscure facts to clear symbols, and the discovered wild fruit
of the synthetic jam."
While reading about GM Hopkins I found an
interesting commentary by Desmond Egan related to what I understand to be
Nabokov's preference for details. The comparison is beween Hopkins and the
Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa:
"The great Portuguese poet, Fernando Pessoa (1888 -
1935), said it was his custom, to think with the emotions and feel with the mind
(text 131 The Book of Disquiet) and in another entry (298) he marvellously
dramatises the psyche of the creative writer, one caught up by life so totally
that a ride on a streetcar, leading him to experience vicariously the lives of
passengers, clothes, their factories, workers,managers trying to stay calm',
their private lives, The whole world opens up before my eyes merely because in
front of me - on the nape of a dark-skinned neck whose other side has I don't
know what face - I see a regularly irregular dark-green embroidery on a
light-green dress. (p. 290) and from that, the loves, secrets, souls of all who
helped make the dress; and then the seats in the tram take him to distant
places, workers, houses, lives, realities, everything ... so that, I get off the
streetcar dazed and exhausted. I've just lived all of life. Hopkins was no different. Time and again, too, we can notice that,
like Pessoa, he invokes the concrete rather than any abstraction: the instinct
of a genuine poet."
On a different track, but still quoting Desmond Egan,
I'd like to compare now the pleasure Nabokov extracted from technical terms and
dictionary words (as, for example, in his play with the word "tits") and what
has been ascribed to Hopkins (although Nabokov often favored words that might
indicate Hopkins, such as "stipled" and "dappled", I only found a direct mention
to this Jesuit poet in "Lolita.").
"This image includes an example of Hopkins's excited use
of a technical term (I think of Shakespeare's 'know a hawk from a handsaw'. a
hawk being a large trowel for cement; of Emily Dickenson's 'valves' of
attention, referring to the valves or half-doors; or of Hopkins's own 'rung on
the rein' in "The Windhover' of the same year where 'ring' means 'to rise
spirally'. Poets enjoy such precise, technical words). 'Bow' means the sound-bow
of a bell - the lower part, where the hammer strikes and where the note finds
its greatest amplification. So: every hanging bell, whenstruck, throws out
('broad' is an adverb meaning 'abroad') its special sound or 'name'."
So the
word "ring" also means "to rise spirally"...I wonder if Nabokov knew
that.