Subject
Re: VN and Freud
From
Date
Body
Jim Twiggs:Jansy is wrong in thinking that I share Boyd's views about the importance of VN's personal and metaphysical beliefs. Quite the contrary. But because Boyd is VN's biographer and best-known interpreter, his views on the matter have to be considered in any discussion. Because the problem is so beautifully and concisely stated by D. Barton Johnson, it's worth quoting again the passage that Boyd was responding to:"Much of Nabokov’s work is best understood in terms of the possible survival of the individual consciousness (personality and memory) after death. Death is, speculatively, merely the dividing line between levels of consciousness. These levels (or worlds), one exercising a degree of influence over the events in the other, form the basic conceptual categories underlying most, if not all of Nabokov’s work[...]Apart from whatever heuristic value they may have, our reigning paradigms should be regarded with scepticism, lest they deflect attention from the area of Nabokov’s greatest originality--the brilliance of his style and wit." --Johnson and Boyd, “Prologue: The Otherworld,” in Nabokov’s World, Vol. 1: The Shape of Nabokov’s World (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2002), p. 23.
JM: Boy, am I glad I was in the wrong when I missed Jim's irony and was led astray by the "Johnson and Boyd" reference. I should have known better! Johnson's words JT quoted again are, in fact, beautiful and extremely concise.
I'd been re-reading the exchange between James Woods and Richard Lamb (Slate, April 26,1999), when the first one observes that Nabokov is a writer hes loves "ambivalently" ( and I intimately substituted "ambivalently" for the etymologically unsound "polivalently" for my own kind of Nablove). Now, after encountering Johnson's overview of the "various levels of consciousness...exercising a degree of influence over the events in the other... form the basic concecptual categories...," various suspended incongruities settled down all of a sudden. Johnson's clarification helped me to extricate conflitcting ethical, metaphysical, religious and literary threads and dismiss, after that, a host of musings about N's actual beliefs in a hereafter, or actual sources, as if they mattered when one is enjoying Nabokov's literary creations and strategies. Considered retrospectively this conclusion implies a sort of "elementary, my dear Watson" mood, but it was inaccessible to me until now.
Search archive with Google:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
Visit "Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
Manage subscription options: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/
JM: Boy, am I glad I was in the wrong when I missed Jim's irony and was led astray by the "Johnson and Boyd" reference. I should have known better! Johnson's words JT quoted again are, in fact, beautiful and extremely concise.
I'd been re-reading the exchange between James Woods and Richard Lamb (Slate, April 26,1999), when the first one observes that Nabokov is a writer hes loves "ambivalently" ( and I intimately substituted "ambivalently" for the etymologically unsound "polivalently" for my own kind of Nablove). Now, after encountering Johnson's overview of the "various levels of consciousness...exercising a degree of influence over the events in the other... form the basic concecptual categories...," various suspended incongruities settled down all of a sudden. Johnson's clarification helped me to extricate conflitcting ethical, metaphysical, religious and literary threads and dismiss, after that, a host of musings about N's actual beliefs in a hereafter, or actual sources, as if they mattered when one is enjoying Nabokov's literary creations and strategies. Considered retrospectively this conclusion implies a sort of "elementary, my dear Watson" mood, but it was inaccessible to me until now.
Search archive with Google:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
Visit "Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
Manage subscription options: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/