There is a book by Lisa Zunshine with the
title " Why we read fiction: a theory of mind and the novel",
edited by the Ohio State University Press, Columbus, in 2006. I'm
afraid it is old news but for the less Freudian-minded multitude of
Nabokovians this cognitive approach to literature might be of interest.
A sample: " And if we can do it with Lolita,
what about Nabokov's other novels, such as The Eye, The Real Life
of Sebastian Knight, and Pale Fire? For it seems that by
endlessly probing and teasing and stretching our tendency to monitor
sources of our representations, Nabokov made the cultivation of a
mental vertigo in his readers into his trademark as a writer."
And... Zunshine did it with Lolita by
applying to it the cognitive-evolutionary discourse and teaching us
"how to source tag unreliable narrator's sentences" to "exploit a
particular niche in our cognitive makeup." She illustrates that
advantages of studying ToM ( Theory of
Mind) and metarepresentational ability. Main
information comes on page 100 under the subtitle "Nabokov's Lolita: The
Deadly Demon Meets and Destroys the Tenderhearted Boy"
American culture baffles me in many ways.
I bought Anita Barrows' and Joanna Macy's "finalist for the Pen/West
Translation award" work on Rainer M. Rilke and was sorely disappointed
by their traduttori tradittori self-indulgencies...
In one of the poems I came
across Rilke's description of trees and it reminded me of
Nabokov's early "Gods" I'd been carrying with me at the same time ( and
quoting here again and again). But it
shall be Barrows& Macy's translation I'll now quote: "The trees
flee. Their flight/ sets the boulevards streaming. And you know;/ he
whom they flee is the one/ you move toward. All your senses/ sing him,
as you stand at the window". ( Rilke's 1905 Book of Hours, The book of
Pligrimage)
Nabokov: All the trees in the world are
journeying somewhere...All trees are pilgrims. They have their Messiah, whom
they seek...Today some lindens are passing through town. There was an
attempt to restrain them. Circular fencing
was erected around their trunks. But they move all the same. . .
Obviously the spirit is not the same in VN's
early raptures and Rilke's. There is humour in VN's recurrent use of
personifications and it seems to me that they arise from his experience
of train voyages and watching lamp-posts, trees and signs stream past.
In "Gods" there is a reference to such a trip and in the first chapter
of KQK we find other good examples.
In "Gods": Remember, when we were on our way here,
to this city, the trees traveling past the windows of our railroad car?
Remember the twelve poplars conferring about how to cross the river?
Earlier, still, in the Crimea, I once saw a cypress bending over an
almond tree in bloom. Once upon a time
the cypress had been a big, tall chimney sweep with a brush on a wire
and a ladder under his arm. Head over heels in love, poor fellow, with
a little laundry maid, pink as almond petals. Now they have met at
last, and are on their way
somewhere together. Her pink apron balloons in the breeze; he bends
toward her timidly, as if still worried he might get some soot on her.
First-rate fable.
In KQK: "The clock face
will slowly turn away, full of despair...as one by one the iron pillars
will start walking past, bearing away the vault of the station like
bland atlantes; the platform will begin to move past...not only did the
station depart removing its newsstand, its luggage cart, and a
sandwich-and-fruit vendor with such nice, plum,lumpy, glossy red
strawberries... There was no stopping the world now...
Is it my impression or VN did in fact mainly
resort to this kind of visual-play in his early works, as if he'd felt
torn apart from familiar visions and wished to imagine they were the
ones that left him behind in a world of infinite mirror images?