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Fw: [NABOKV-L] [NABOKOV-L] Eric Naiman's "Nabokov,
Perversely": fun in parallels
Perversely": fun in parallels
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Naiman quotes Krug's words on Shakespeare & the miracle of translation: "Nature had once produced an Englishman whose domed head had been a hive of words (...) Three centuries later, another man, in another country, was trying to render ..." (BS,119-20) and how, while Ember discusses details of his own, he is interrupted by Krug's exclamation about two organ grinders that he could see from his window (BS 121): "There is something familiar about the whole thing, something I cannot quite disentangle - a certain line of thought." For Naiman " 'the line of thought' is the tangle of the novel itself, entwined with multiple references to homosexuality." (p.53). I differ from his conclusion, in part, because of its putative link to Nabokov's appropriatory translation of Khodasevich's poem "The Monkey," in which organ grinders-monkeys are brought together* and Krug/Nabokov's show of surprise by undesired recollections.
The link with Shakespeare and monkey is also present in Pnin (7): "[H]e began rather impressively with that great brown dome of his..apish upper lip, thick neck..."
There is another surprising transposition, related to Bend Sinister, Khodasevich's "Ballada" and Nabokov's New Yorker's 1950 poem "The Room."
Nabokov wrote: "Perhaps my text is incomplete/A poet's death is, after all,/ a question of technique, a net/enjambement, a melodic fall... ", while in "Bend Sinister" we read:"Krug...understands that he is in good hands: nothing on earth really matters, there is nothig to fear, and death is but a question of style, a mere literary device, a musical resolution" (xviii-xix).
A psychotic once, while he was attending a violin concert, exclaimed: "Why, the violinist is masturbaring in public!" Wilfred Bion uses this example to describe his concept of "binocular vision", ie: the ability to discern both the upper and the underside of a weave simultaneously, or to enjoy the manifest content and the latent unconscious line of thought together, and, in the present example, this person's incapacity to enjoy the music due to his excess of "underside vision." Tracing parallels which might (or not) connect Nabokov's "manifest sentences" among themself is insufficient to inform about their "latent unconscious links," although they certainly offer important clues (always be a matter of academic conjectures and theory).
Naiman wrote (N,P p.73): "Were I a Freudian, I might suggest that Bend Sinister is the work of the anal stage in our émigré author's aesthetic development, something a boy even younger than David might write were he so lexically precocious as to have read all of Shakespeare and the entire dictionary" (I suppose he refers to a dictionary of Shakespearean bawdy terms). Although Naiman wrote his Freudian conjectures in full while disclaiming them, I'm glad that he is not a Freudian (there's more to psychoanalysis than decyphering hidden bawdy clues.) Naiman develops his theories about Nabokov's association between toilets, "the sites of artistic creativity and excretion," and art's "uselessness" (Lacan refers to "poubellication", ie, publishing and garbage. In English, by doubling a consonant, we get "litter/ature"). The anal imagery is present in the Christian term for a soul's sojourn in "Purgatory," or in the "cathartic" effect of Greek drama (catharsis/purgation), but it belongs to the context of "desintoxication" and "cleansing discharges," which belongs to the natural and artistic "recycling" processes.
Nabokov, as I see it, successfully managed to rein-in his scatological thoughts or masturbatory "violin playing" (?), while producing a most accomplished music. Although to explore an author's "perversity" - and the verbal domain is not "natural" - is, in fact, important to acquire a full picture of a writer's funs and games in art, but I hesitate about ascribing them to a Freudian "anal phase" which next will evolve into a verbal "mature genitality." My conclusions, therefore, are less categorical than Naiman's: "Bend Sinister is not about the salvational poder of literature. On the contrary, it is about literature's power to waste" and, also, in relation to other critics who have "have pointed out, Lolita is partly about what happens when a person lets his aesthetic impulses run away with him." Naiman's concludes: "Just as Krug is undone by his interpretative practices, so Bend Sinister shows us a world undone by art, two principal features of which are authorial control and uselessness, here take to their extremes as totalitarianism and excrement."(N,P 69/70)
I have not by me now Umberto Eco's presentation of ancient philosophies, related to religion and profanity ("Sulla Leteratura" 2002, ?) and translation ("Dire Quasi la Stessa Cosa,"2003), but I'll try to come back to them presently. And to Nabokov's commentary and rejection of James Joyce's toilet-scenes in "Strong Opinions".
......................................................
* Zholkovsky on Nabokov's "first poem" and Khodasevich's "Monkey" noting that in both "the time and, in a sense, the place coincide, as does the monkey-cum-barrel-organ motif.." As also mentioned in a former posting, "monkeys and translation" are present in Nabokov's poem "To Pushkin" "What is translation? On a platter... a parrot's screech, a monkey's chatter..."
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The link with Shakespeare and monkey is also present in Pnin (7): "[H]e began rather impressively with that great brown dome of his..apish upper lip, thick neck..."
There is another surprising transposition, related to Bend Sinister, Khodasevich's "Ballada" and Nabokov's New Yorker's 1950 poem "The Room."
Nabokov wrote: "Perhaps my text is incomplete/A poet's death is, after all,/ a question of technique, a net/enjambement, a melodic fall... ", while in "Bend Sinister" we read:"Krug...understands that he is in good hands: nothing on earth really matters, there is nothig to fear, and death is but a question of style, a mere literary device, a musical resolution" (xviii-xix).
A psychotic once, while he was attending a violin concert, exclaimed: "Why, the violinist is masturbaring in public!" Wilfred Bion uses this example to describe his concept of "binocular vision", ie: the ability to discern both the upper and the underside of a weave simultaneously, or to enjoy the manifest content and the latent unconscious line of thought together, and, in the present example, this person's incapacity to enjoy the music due to his excess of "underside vision." Tracing parallels which might (or not) connect Nabokov's "manifest sentences" among themself is insufficient to inform about their "latent unconscious links," although they certainly offer important clues (always be a matter of academic conjectures and theory).
Naiman wrote (N,P p.73): "Were I a Freudian, I might suggest that Bend Sinister is the work of the anal stage in our émigré author's aesthetic development, something a boy even younger than David might write were he so lexically precocious as to have read all of Shakespeare and the entire dictionary" (I suppose he refers to a dictionary of Shakespearean bawdy terms). Although Naiman wrote his Freudian conjectures in full while disclaiming them, I'm glad that he is not a Freudian (there's more to psychoanalysis than decyphering hidden bawdy clues.) Naiman develops his theories about Nabokov's association between toilets, "the sites of artistic creativity and excretion," and art's "uselessness" (Lacan refers to "poubellication", ie, publishing and garbage. In English, by doubling a consonant, we get "litter/ature"). The anal imagery is present in the Christian term for a soul's sojourn in "Purgatory," or in the "cathartic" effect of Greek drama (catharsis/purgation), but it belongs to the context of "desintoxication" and "cleansing discharges," which belongs to the natural and artistic "recycling" processes.
Nabokov, as I see it, successfully managed to rein-in his scatological thoughts or masturbatory "violin playing" (?), while producing a most accomplished music. Although to explore an author's "perversity" - and the verbal domain is not "natural" - is, in fact, important to acquire a full picture of a writer's funs and games in art, but I hesitate about ascribing them to a Freudian "anal phase" which next will evolve into a verbal "mature genitality." My conclusions, therefore, are less categorical than Naiman's: "Bend Sinister is not about the salvational poder of literature. On the contrary, it is about literature's power to waste" and, also, in relation to other critics who have "have pointed out, Lolita is partly about what happens when a person lets his aesthetic impulses run away with him." Naiman's concludes: "Just as Krug is undone by his interpretative practices, so Bend Sinister shows us a world undone by art, two principal features of which are authorial control and uselessness, here take to their extremes as totalitarianism and excrement."(N,P 69/70)
I have not by me now Umberto Eco's presentation of ancient philosophies, related to religion and profanity ("Sulla Leteratura" 2002, ?) and translation ("Dire Quasi la Stessa Cosa,"2003), but I'll try to come back to them presently. And to Nabokov's commentary and rejection of James Joyce's toilet-scenes in "Strong Opinions".
......................................................
* Zholkovsky on Nabokov's "first poem" and Khodasevich's "Monkey" noting that in both "the time and, in a sense, the place coincide, as does the monkey-cum-barrel-organ motif.." As also mentioned in a former posting, "monkeys and translation" are present in Nabokov's poem "To Pushkin" "What is translation? On a platter... a parrot's screech, a monkey's chatter..."
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/