Claudio Soares: "Machado de Assis  [...]also burnt (himself) all his correspondences and, probably, unfinished works [...]
JM: I agree that this issue (burn or not burn ) is a very controversial subject and its solution depends on a very subjective, personal, decision. 
Nabokov and John Shade themselves burnt some of their work, as you pointed out of Machado.
Nabokov allowed a manuscript to be rescued from the fire and I have the impression that he seemed to count on it, as regards Lolita.
 
Borges' story about Pierre Ménard focuses on Spain and, like VN in Pale Fire, he mentions the inquisitorial "auto-de-fé" before he produces a marvellously allegorical "invisible masterpiece" of which there were only a few lines left. 
Osberg may have written "mystico-allegoric anecdotes", whereas Borges was sufficiently successfull when  he created other (mental) structural devices to succintly describe almost impossible matters, such as to what kind of readings and readers an author may expect and what is the destiny of one's writings.
 
From the list of quotes I  almost randomly assembled for "VN on allegory" it is clear that VN was mainly irked and prejudiced against freudians, or with Freud's choice related to the "Oedipus complex" (and he was  profetically right in as many ways...*)
His comments about "symbols" should be registered with the same grain of salt as those on "allegories": it is clear that he demanded precision in a writer's (almost) inevitable use of analogies and metaphors, while he also made space for non-scientific playful concoctions in art (the"crossbreeding casual fancies just for the fun of the contour and color").
 
 
 
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* And so was Freud! He complained that people  at first didn't understand that unconscious wishes interfere with conscious thoughts and, next, that those who did, mostly psychoanalysts themselves, started to explain everything focusing only on the unconscious...
"When I look at a rennaissance painting I begin to look for the unconscious; when I look at a surrealist painting I start to look for the conscious," he once said. Already in his "The Interpretation of Dreams", vol.V, he asserted, in a vein similar to Buffon's: "it's not the conscious, it's not the unconscious that is what one should mainly examine in a dream! It is the dreamwork itself." ( ie: the dreamer's style!)    
 
 
 
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