After Arnie Perlstein's enthusiastic recommendations concerning Shakes', Austen's and Nabokov's "Jewels from the Deep"* I decided to explore the indicated links and found Stan Kelly-Bootle's appraisal nicely embedded in them**.  For Perlstein, not only Austen's "Emma" (ch.9) hides two charades, but they offer strong hints that Austen had cracked Shakespeare's from Midsummer Night's Dream on "Titania."***.   As he explains: " ...the narration does not explicitly reveal.Austen is in part looking backward to Milton, and some other great writers who wove thematic acrostics into some of their most famous poetry and prose. But perhaps the most significant example that I assert was on Austen's radar screen is the so called "Titania acrostic" from Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, which was discovered about 60 years ago by a British cryptic crosswords maven, in a very famous speech by the Queen of the Fairies." 

 

Shakespeare's hidden jewels are the hidden acrostic... (Gosh, would Pale Fire's crown be similarly bedecked by acrostics?) and, as AP states: "This is no coincidence, it was Shakespeare's winking confirmation to the reader, the "x" that "marks the spot", so to speak, to search for the acrostic right there in that very speech. A Midsummer Night's Dream is a major subtextual allusive source for the romantic snafus of Emma itself. Just a coincidence with the Titania acrostic? Jane Austen was demonstrating in a host of ways that she knew all about it, 130 years before the discovery was announced publicly. So I suggest that at the very least the above suffices to establish that hidden acrostics were a big deal for Jane Austen qua fiction writer. I have argued repeatedly that all of her wordgames in Emma are very consciously  placed there by JA not only to give clues to secret answers about the real world, or about the progression of the shadow story of the novel, but most of all as a symbol for the novel itself-i.e., she is implicitly likening Emma to a charade."

 

The expression "Austen's Shadow Story" is a happy coinage and it arises in my eyes as a delicate black and white profile in a cameo. Perlstein's next step shows that "history repeated itself 134 years later, when Vladimir Nabokov walked in Jane Austen's literary footsteps..." thanks to Prof. Stephen Blackwell's alert that AP "should take a close look at the short story by Nabokov entitled "The Vane Sisters" which was published about 60 years ago in a literary magazine." where VN "embedded a hidden acrostic in the following final lines of the story: "I could isolate, consciously, little. Everything seemed blurred, yellow-clouded, yielding nothing tangible. Her inept acrostics, maudlin evasions, theopathies-every recollection formed ripples of mysterious meaning. Everything seemed yellowly blurred, illusive, lost." ("Icicles by Cynthia, meter from me, Sybil.").  Perlstein observes that when "you reread the story, you can see that Nabokov has been obliquely hinting at this acrostic during the entire story, seeding it with at least a half dozen inobtrusive, winking 'bread crumbs' , the final one being the sly reference to 'inept acrostics' in the very paragraph that contains that acrostic (just like Titania's 'jewels' line pointing to the acrostic buried in that same speech), which collectively would lead the suspicious reader to search for and find an acrostic somewhere in the story-and what better place for it than the last paragraph of the story itself!," and he coins "the term 'Trojan Horse Moment' to describe this infiltration of an idea into the mind of the reader, where at some mysterious moment it may suddenly bubble to the surface and be recognized consciously."

 

Would Austen and would Nabokov have expected readers to tease the items out?  Perlstein investigated Nabokov's correspondence to Katharine A. White, the editor of The New Yorker, the magazine he had submitted the story to in early 1951, which refused to publish the story and he highlights the relevant portions of Nabokov's reply to that rejection:

"I am sorry the New Yorker rejected my story. It has already been sent elsewhere, so that I feel free to discuss certain points without being suspected of trying to persuade the New Yorker to reconsider their decision:First of all, I do not understand what you mean by 'overwhelming style', 'light story', and 'elaboration'. All my stories are webs of style and none seems at first blush to contain much kinetic matter..For me, 'style' _is_ matter.
Let me explain a few things: the whole point of the story is that my French professor, a somewhat obtuse scholar and a rather callous observer of the superficial planes of life, unwittingly passes (in the first pages) through the enchanting, and touching 'aura' of dead Cynthia, whom he continues to see. .At the end of the story, he seeks her spirit in vulgar table-rapping phenomena, in acrostics and then he sees a vague dream (permeated by the broken son of their last meeting), and now comes the last paragraph which, if read straight, should convey that vague and sunny rebuke, but which for a more attentive reader contains the additional delight of a solved acrostic." "You may argue that reading downwards, or upwards, or diagonally, is not what an editor can be expected to do; but by means of various allusions to trick-reading, I have arranged matters so that the reader almost automatically slips into this discovery, especially because of the abrupt change in style.
[...he is relying on precisely the same techniques that Jane Austen did!] Most of the stories I am contemplating (and some I have written in the past.) will be composed on these lines, according to this system wherein a second (main) story is woven into."

 

Perlstein concludes that Nabokov reveals that by 1951 "... he was going to be writing double stories, apparently of the same kind as... Austen's shadow stories. VN... uses a term for the story that everyone can access easily which I actually prefer to my own term for it. I've been calling it the 'overt story', but he came up with the much more elegant 'revealed  story'. Therefore, henceforth, I intend to use his term, in his honor. " In that context, my earlier posts about Nabokov's playing a complex game in his comments to his friend Edmund Wilson.http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2010/12/jane-austen-mark-twain-and-vladimir.html and http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2010/12/jane-austen-mark-twain-and-vladimir_31.html

 

JM: Congratulations to Arnie Perlstein for his dedicated sleuthing and the results he detailed to share with the Nab-L. It is also very practical to set Nabokov's "The Vane Sisters" acrostic close to his correspondence with K.White. 

 

The discipline of naming our horses as AP has named, facilitates things but, sometimes, it may be misleading, also when Perlstein decides to use Nabokov's expression "revealed story" (against his, AP's,  former "overt story" designation), in homage to VN. Although Nabokovites and Janeites have no need to read Freud, Nabokov certainly did (for why else would he be constantly referring to the "Viennese quack" if he didn't seriously consider his theories?). Would Nabokov be alluding to Freud, in a covert way, when he used the term "revealed story"? (IF he'd intended to contrast it to the "shadow story", a procedure he outlined in "Signs and Symbols" - but in a different, mainly literary, context).

 

If Perlstein's "Trojan horse" refers to an "infiltration of an idea into the mind of the reader" which "may suddenly bubble to the surface and be recognized consciously," we may find that he is implicitly accepting that there is a hidden line of reasoning taking place outside of the conscious mind, i.e, that what is unconscious may follow rules that are similar to what is consciously expressed by an ordinary language (such as condensation/metaphor, displacement/metonimy), instead of remaining like a jumble of images and sounds.

However, long before Nabokov (apud AP) and Perlstein's coinages, in his book on dreams Freud had already named these two different procedures. The "revealed story" is "the manifest content of a dream," whereas the "shadow story" ( the true one!) is "the latent content of a dream." Taking into consideration Nabokov's manifest avowals, I prefer to think that he was not yielding to Freud's concepts about the  "unconscious processes," but to an author's diverse very deliberate and conscious ploys directed to a reader's equally conscious ability to unravel them. This is why I prefer to exclude, from the list of Nabokov's intentions, the project of "infiltrating ideas into the mind of the reader" that would later be consciously accessible to him following literary games.  

 

 

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*Friday, January 14, 2011;Fetching Jewels From The Deep: Acrostics in Austen, Nabokov..and in Mythology and The Ghost Writer, too!