EDNote: All contributors should be aware that the name of Nabokov's most famous heroine is a spam keyword, definitely when in subject lines, possibly also within the body of messages.  The effect is strengthened if other risque words are in proximity, like s...e....x without the dots [  ] Michael Juliar: Margaret Scully (Allison Janney) is in bed with "L**lita". Take a look at my blog posting at vnbiblio.com about s...x, book lies, and TV in the newest episode of "Masters of S...x".

Jansy Mello: Nabokov indignantly exclaimed twice: “Freudians, keep out!” or “Freudians, keep out, please” also because of the Freudian work with distortions by  dream symbolism - when “penis” under unconscious censorship became “a rifle” or a “sword” and “vagina” imaged as - a “purse” or “jewel box.” (euphemisms and poetic referrals, though, anteceded Freud for over a thousand years and one). Now his works are suffering under another kind of stifling control and the outcome are those uninspired dotty dots…What an irony.

I’m happy that Jacqueline Hamrit’s quote, related to bifurcations and forks, escaped such a fate [I had noticed the presence of bifurcations and forkings in _Lolita_. Remember: "When I try to analyze my own cravings, motives, actions and so forth, I surrender to a sort of retrospective imagination which feeds the analytic faculty with boundless alternatives and which causes each visualized route to fork and re-fork without end in the maddeningly complex prospect of my past." (Part1, chapter 4, p.13 of _The annotated Lolita_) ].  The example in Lolita takes up bifurcations as they occur in the realm of “retrospective imagination” (where memory and imagination work as allies when there are mnemic gaps of a recollected past to fill in). I ignore when Henri Bergson’s writings began to impress V.Nabokov but, in “Ada”, where his presence is directly perceived, “forks” acquire a new dimension related to “duration” (the blending of past and present sensual states, aiming at “timelessness”) and to a particular kind of parallel time. *

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* - Deleuze on Bergson offers the following literary example related to bifurcations:

Deleuze further elaborates on the structure of simultaneously branching paths with Borges’s short story, ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’ (1962) (Deleuze 1989: 49/47/68). It describes a Chinese monk’s unfinished manuscripts for a novel with this same title. The novel went unpublished because it was incomprehensible. The chapters did not proceed just sequentially. A following chapter would be like an alternate version of the same prior one: ‘in the third chapter the hero dies, in the fourth he is alive’ (Borges 1962: 24). Each of these variations is like one of the possible paths the chemical system can choose; however, in the case of the novel, the story chooses all possible lines of development at the same time: ‘the garden of forking paths’ was the chaotic novel [. . . ] forking in time, not in space. [. . . ] In all fictional works, each time a man is confronted with

several alternatives, he chooses one and eliminates the others; in the fiction of Ts’ui Pên, he chooses – simultaneously – all of them. He creates, in this way, diverse futures, diverse times which themselves also proliferate and fork.(Borges 1962: 26) Thus: all possible outcomes occur; each one is the point of departure for other forkings. Sometimes, the paths of this labyrinth converge: for example, you arrive at this house, but in one of the possible pasts you are my enemy, in

another, my friend. (Borges 1962: 26) For this reason, the structure of the novel is an infinite series of times, [. . . ] a growing, dizzying net of divergent,convergent and parallel times. This network of times which approached one another, forked, broke off, or were unaware of one another for centuries,embraces all possibilities of time. We do not exist in the majority of these times; in some you exist, and not I; in others I, and not you; in othes all possibilities of time. We do not exist in the majority of these times; in some you exist, and not I; in others I, and not you; in others, both

of us. (Borges 1962: 28) “Deleuze’s Phenomena of Motionless Time”, by Corry Shores.