Thanks, Anthony: I never tire of re-reading and re-relishing VN’s blast against William Woodin Rowe’s Nabokov’s Deceptive World (NYU Press, 1971) See http://lib.ru/NABOKOW/Rowe.txt
A tad unfair of me since I’ve not read any of Rowe’s books, and Time’s flapping wings seem to preclude that dubious, future pleasure.
How could Rowe (pronounced as in argument or as in regatta?) survive such deflation? Or did he? We know poor Bunny Wilson was never the same after incurring VN’s sarcasm. One of VN’s legitimate hot-buttons was casting doubt on his knowledge of the Russian language (Wilson) or manglng VN’s Russian words (Rowe). Another was making assumptions about VN’s choice of words and allusions (especially when nonesuch was intended!). These, alas, endure alive’n’kicking beyond VN’s vituperation.
I’m not sure, Anthony, that the Greek etymology syn+ballein (to throw together) really helps in clarifying exactly which meaning of SYMBOL VN found abhorrent (see citation below). The Middle English, via Latin symbolum, meaning Creed (as in Symbolum Nicaenum = Nicene Creed) has already drifted away from the everyday, uncontroversial, mathematical usage: we use SYMBOLS as convenient, short-hand marks for variables, constants, operators etc., making sure that the reader is fully pre-informed of our intentions. You write
What he (VN) detested was the prefabricated symbol as reductive, deadening cliche, where A "really means", or "stands for" B, which "lies behind" A.
Now, VN was TOTALLY non-mathematical (choose your weapons!). In spite of dropping the odd references to surds, relativity, symmetries, Zeno, the ONLY-number-one, cycloids and infinity, he confused real mathematics with dull, clerical arithmetic. This does not detract from VN the scientist/philosopher (see S H Blackwell’s The Quill and the Scalpel.) But, even so, I doubt if VN could have mistaken algebraic symbols as reductive, deadening clichés. Mathematical symbols are certainly prefabricated (although arbitrarily chosen, they must be pre-defined) but when combined they can produce equations surpassing Keatsian Beauty (with provable Truth as an added bonus).
So what kind of symbols did VN detest? There are clues in the comments cited by Anthony. It’s what happens to many words when you add the sneering –ISM, -IST, -ISTICAL! Thus, Symbolism comes to mean the MISUSE of Symbols, incurring VN’s wrath:
What I object to is Mr. Rowe's manipulating my most innocent words
so as to introduce sexual "symbols" into them. The notion of
symbol itself has always been abhorrent to me, and I never tire
of retelling how I once failed a student-- the dupe, alas, of
an earlier teacher-- for writing that Jane Austen describes
leaves as "green" because Fanny is hopeful, and "green" is the
color of hope. The symbolism racket in schools attracts
computerized minds but destroys plain intelligence as well as
poetical sense. It bleaches the soul. It numbs all capacity to
enjoy the fun and enchantment of art. Who the hell cares, as
Mr. Rowe wants us to care, that there is, according to his
italics, a "man" in the sentence about a homosexual Swede who
"had embarrassing manners" (p. 148), and another "man"
in "manipulate" (passim)? "Wickedly folded moth"
suggests "wick" to Mr. Rowe, and "wick," as we Freudians know,
is the Male Organ. "I" stands for "eye," and "eye" stands for
the Female Organ. Pencil licking is always a reference to you
know what. A soccer goal hints at the vulval orifice (which Mr.
Rowe evidently sees as square).
Perhaps Jansy (are you safely back home?) can tell us if this excursion into ‘symbolism’ helps her with Farmer’s observations. It does seem a tortuous road, littered with semantic land-mines: of course, both Lolita and HH are fictional, so to distinguish between Lolita, the idealized nymphet lusted after by HH, an imaginary paedo, and a real incarnation, Dolores, shagged realistically from realistic school to realistic motel in a realistic first-person, stretches our analysis of meta-symbolist-narrative beyond usefulness. To cite our favourite author: It bleaches the soul. It numbs all capacity to enjoy the fun and enchantment of art
Perhaps this warning applies only to Rowe’s excessive hunt for Freudian sexual ‘symbols,’ which certainly match Anthony’s definition as the prefabricated symbol as reductive, deadening cliche, where A "really means", or "stands for" B, which "lies behind" A. This is the Symbolism (capital S) related to Poetic Schools, where one object indirectly represents another with much mystical hand-waving.
Stan Kelly-Bootle
PS: I did find a review of Rowe’s book at http://www.jstor.org/pss/1207486 by Andrew Field (is that name allowed on the list? Perhaps I should write A****w F***d to reduce the shock?) reminding us of VN’s claimed indifference to literary criticism, whether pro or con. (I recognize that pro and con each have naughty meanings under Rowe’s sym-bollick gaze.)
On 13/07/2010 20:02, "Anthony Stadlen" <STADLEN@AOL.COM> wrote:
Perhaps start with Nabokov's fine short protest against "Rowe's Symbols" in Strong Opinions. He was a master of metaphor, of simile, and of symbolism in the authentic sense he expounds in "Rowe's Symbols" and in his Lectures on Literature. What he detested was the prefabricated symbol as reductive, deadening cliche, where A "really means", or "stands for" B, which "lies behind" A.’
Nabokov's "symbolism" is true to the original meaning of "sym-ballein".
Anthony Stadlen
In a message dated 13/07/2010 17:18:58 GMT Daylight Time, jansy@AETERN.US writes:
Some time in April I started a message which was interrupted and misplaced in my archives. It was related to a review sent to the Nab-List by someone named Farmer (which I couldn't locate), dated from April 13,2010.
I selected the following from it:
Farmer notes that " 'Lolita' is the spiritual ideal of The Nymphet; Dolores Haze is a temporary manifestation. To love the spiritual ideal through Dolores's bodily reality, Humbert must discard Dolores as a real individual."
I tried to compare Farmer's comment with another, from ADA, using Nabokov's words: "the lewd, ludicrous and vulgar mistake of the Signy-Mondieu analysts consists in their regarding a real object, a pompon, say, or a pumpkin as a significant abstraction of the real object," but I got nowhere.
Farmer's comment seems clear enough to me: the girl Dolores was an icon through which Humbert could access the "spiritual ideal of the nymphet." A living fetish.
Nabokov's, on the contrary, remains puzzling, also because VN often returned to these two "real objects" (pompom, pumpkin) in various novels, in a figurative sense (particularly in KQKn) like the red and white camelias in the movie (perhaps also in Dumas' novel).
Could anyone help me to figure out what Nabokov intended as a criticism of "Signy-Mondieu" (Freud, I presume)?