Jansy Mello: Searching through parts
of the L-Archives I came to Sarah Funke's "Mirages and Nightmares”:
The Narrative Lessons of Lolita from Novel to Script to Screen
(in a link posted again a few days ago). "Using chapter eight
of his memoir, entitled "Lantern Slides," as the definitional example of
Nabokov's favored narrative device-the verbal translation of visual memories – I
will show that the power of language to recreate images in the reader's mind
dominates Lolita, as well. However, the evolution of Speak, Memory
from Conclusive Evidence to Other shores, to the proposed
Speak, Mnemosyne, to the final Speak, Memory illustrates a shift
in the perceived narrative role of both the concrete images used as mnemonic
devices and the mental images of memory. The first suggest that a story can be
derived from visual evidence; the second, that one is alternately inspired and
dictated by verbally recreated visual memories. The narrative authority
similarly shifts with the transfer of visual memories – and visual devices which
often stand in for memories, even if false or faded [...] Cf. https://listserv.ucsb.edu/lsv-cgi-bin/wa?A3=ind0209&L=NABOKV-L&E=quoted-printable&P=836895&B=------%3D_NextPart_001_0001_01C
I don't think I fully grasped what she
intends to demonstrate, concerning the verbal translation of visual memories,
when she distinguishes the "concrete images used as mnemonic devices" and "the
mental images of memory" and their "perceived narrative role." I understand that the "concrete images" refer to actual perceptions
of objects and scenes or "visual evidences," but I've not the
slightest inkling of how they work as "mnemonic
devices" while the "mental images of memory" are involuntary.
Her ideas related to the process of writing and
movie-making are exciting when one stops right at the beginning: for her,
Nabokov's favorite narrative device uses "the power of language to recreate
images in the reader's mind."( I wonder who the other authors who
favor it are).
According to Freud a dreamer undergoes various kinds of
regression during sleep: thoughts are disrupted and their distortions
follow a pattern of "condensation and displacement," later considered to
correspond to metaphors and metonimies as they occur in language (by the urge
to unburden the mind from the excess of stimuli that disturb
sleep), or their transformation into "symbols." However, the type of regression that interested me in relation to
S.Funke's propositions is the transformation of verbal thoughts into images
(thinking in images is considered by Freud to be more primitive
than the verbal domain from which they'd be derived), after she
distanced them from the dreams and pointed out their power
over the reader's mind. Nevertheless, what is it that happens with
Nabokov's ways of enchantment and that S.Funke's formulations
encompass only in a very general way? How does Nabokov's writing
specifically fit into this picture? How does VN's memory
speak to ours?
In "Strong Opinions" Nabokov vehemently denies thinking
in words. About "Lolita" being turned from novel into movie script, he affirms
that it "is rather like making a series of sketches for
a painting that has long ago been finished an framed."(p.6); "I don't think in any language. I think in images. I don't believe
that people think in languages."(p.14); "Nobody will ever discover how clearly a
bird visualizes, or if it visualizes at all, the future nest and the eggs in it.
When I remember afterwards the force that made me jog down the correct names of
things, or the inches and tints of things, even before I actually needed the
information, I am inclined to assume that what I call, for want of a better
term, inspiretion, had been already at work, mutely pointing at this or that,
having me accumulate the known materials for an unknown structure (this
must correspond to S.Funke's "mnemonic devices") [ ] There comes a moment when I am informed from within that the
entire structure is finished. All I have to do now is take it down in pencil or
pen.(p.31,32). He states that "the greatet happiness
I experience in composing is when I feel I cannot understand [ ]how
or why that image or structural move or exact formulation of phrase has just
come to me",61 (this moust probably correspond to S.Funke's "mental
images of memory")
Unfortunately VN's formidable and
contradictory testimony of having to write down, in a rush, his
finished mental images, is lost somewhere amidst the interviews
- but they are familiar to all nablers, I'm sure .
I have been puzzling over the years about why Nabokov's
characters and their cruel and perverse actions, when they move in the
scenery of a story, affect me more like bogeymen or witches than as real
life criminals (what they do is real life crime after all!) and about why, at
the end of a book, it hovers in my memory as a lovely ethereal painting
("I would say that of all my books"Lolita" has left me with
the most pleasurable afterglow - perhaps because it is the purest of all, the
most abstract and carefully contrived"). This is certainly something that
only VN can achieve in my mind, the extent of his effect and influence over
me. But how does this come about? Perhaps part of the secret
lies in what S.Funke has outlined (in other words: the dreamlike regression
from words into images), when we accept that this is the true realm of childhood
fairy tales when humanity's terrors and wonders gain a verbal, thinkable and
emotionally bearable, structure.