-------- Original Message --------
**
*JM*: Indeed, great story tellers, even less gifted artists, have "an
acute sensitivity to their own unconscious creativity". Their talents,
as disciplined craftsmen, enable them to consciously shape what's
happening in their unconscious into art of high quality... I
obviously didn't mean to assert anything on the contrary, or that
writers don't affect their reader's unconscious. I'm sorry to
have expressed myself incorrectly. My observation is related to the
dangers of extending too widely the meaning of specific terms, like the
one you found in Nabokov, ie, the "revealed story" which you contrasted
to.Austen's "shadow/overt stories," without a reference to the context
in which they were employed.
Fair enough, I think we are clear now that I am using the term
differently than Nabokov did.
"For a Freudian, every story is always a double story (like the report
of a dream). Words are "a dangerous thing"... In Nabokov's case,
the "doubling" (or "tripling") pertains to a secondary level of
deliberate elaboration and part of a conscious process ( I assume
Austen's to be similarly controlled.) There are other kinds of "hidden
stories" for the unconscious is a capricious force and often
it's totally independent from an author's control. "
Just to be clear, when I am speaking about JA's or Shakespeare's shadow
stories, I am talking about their stories being completely anamorphic,
i.e., two parallel fictional universes, with all the same characters,
but where, in the shadow story, there is all sorts of "offstage" action
involving important characters of which the reader/audience is never
explicitly made aware.
So to give a simple example, in Austen's Emma, in the revealed
or overt
story, Harriet Smith is a foolish, naive girl who suffers from Emma's
intrusive meddling influence. However, in the shadow story of the
novel,
I claim that Harriet Smith is only playing the role of a foolish naive
girl, appealing to Emma's narcissistic grandiosity, but the shadow
Harriet has her own very clear agenda for what she wants, of which Emma
has no clue whatsoever. And I am claiming that this was not a Freudian
unconscious authorial artifact, it was something that Austen did quite
deliberately. That is what I mean by a shadow story.
My guess is that at least some of Nabokov's fiction has this sort of
separate parallel fictional universe, but since I know his fiction so
scantily, I must at the moment rely on the reactions of experienced
Nabokovians like yourself to point me toward anything in his fiction
that you think fits my above definition of a shadow story.
"Even readers, in their response to art, must be able in a certain
way to distinguish between real authorial intentions (affecting their
emotions, memories,aso) from what lies in their inaccessible
(repressed) material always striving to find a channel of expression. "
Of course Austen, like any other author, was not entirely immune from
UNintentionally expressing repressed feelings in her stories, both the
revealed/overt and the shadow stories. But I claim that she
intentionally created the double structure I have described. I had a
long fascinating chat about this very subject last year with the
brilliant Freudian literary scholar Grant Holly.
"Edmund Wilson, from the very start, tried to convince Nabokov to
reduce
the quantity of puns and games (although he enjoyed reciprocating
them).
For EW an overload of acrostics, anagrams and puns in a work of art may
reveal an uncharitable childish attitude towards people and things, or
a kind of superficiality. The label "logomaniac," for example, can be
employed in a positive or a negative way. Most of the time (but not
always) Nabokov's love of words was very far from the mere capricious
creation of puzzles and pranks. "
Samuel Johnson famously damned Shakespeare with faint praise 2 1/2
centuries ago, when Johnson pronounced Shakespeare's logomania (Johnson
called the puns "quibbles") a terrible defect in the Master's work,
which diminished his achievement.
In the case of Johnson, that was Johnson's own cluelessness, because
with Shakespeare all the punning appears to be frivolous and
unthematic,
but it never really is in Shakespeare, I have found, there is always a
connection, usually to the shadow story. Shakespeare anticipated the
kind
of response that Johnson gave, and hoist Johnson et al on their own
judgmental petards, in my opinion.
I don't know Nabokov's writing well enough to know if he was out of
control in his punning, but my guess is that he was not, i.e., I take
your word that Nabokov was not a capricious punster, either.
Wilson was, in my view, a kind of literary critical Forrest Gump. By
this I mean that he was just on the edge of glimpsing the shadows of
Shakespeare's Hamlet, and Austen's Emma, he knew there was something
(in
his words) "just outside the picture frame" that was not being
recognized by most readers, but Wilson was unable to make the leap to
there being shadow stories. Whereas Nabokov, to me, breathing the same
critical breezes as Wilson, intuitively grasped much more, being
himself
a kindred creative spirit with those dead Masters.
Cheers, ARNIE
sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com