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[Idle thoughts] Pathetic fallacy
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While examining Anna Karenin's plot, during a scene in which Anna is fighting the force of the wind and struggling against her incipient affection for Vronski, Nabokov (in an aside to his students) points to "the pathetic fallacy about the wind: emotions ascribed to objects by man in distress" (LRL 158). He is applying the term coined by Ruskin to personifications (one of the favorite resources in his stories and novels, together with animation).
However, I have the impression that Nabokov usually applies this literary effect to achieve a poetic expression, with no "sentimentality" nor any personal involvement. This contrasts with his quick definition in Tolstoy's lecture, referring to a man's unconscious projection of his distress onto the objects of the world (a basic mechanism that Nabokov will later push to its persecutory extremes, in "Signs and Symbols.")
In Tolstoy's story it is Anna who is being tossed about by emotions, hot/cold and wind - and not the narrator, whose novelistic ability and control he praises in short asides to his class such as the link between Anna's environment and her "feeling of shame ...intensified, as though some inner voice, just at that point when she thought of Vronski, were saying to her,'Warm, very warm, hot.[ In a game where you hide an object and hint at the right direction by these termal exclamations - and mark that the warm and the cold are alternating in the night coach too.]"
When the artist gains control over his anxieties he can play rather freely with his personal demons by isolating two voices (at least): the narrator's, with his ability to express his character's inner turmoil in a tempestuous scene, for example, and what must be happening with the character himself. At least, this is what I find in Nabokov's description of Anna Karenin's plot. I suppose that Nabokov chose a more complicated kind of split by his use of unreliable narrators, making the "sane control" disappear from the novel itself together, entrusting the reader, or nudging him on, to find a "sane" response.
A psychoanalyst (W.R.Bion) once described a sculpture whose structure was built in such a way as to "trap the light." The spectator would have to forget the structure to be able to see the luminous shapes which were the actual object of his art work. For me, at times, the same thing happens when I read Nabokov. I have to forget the written scaffolding to find what its shadows and lights allow me to see, inspite of all the devilish enjoyment that his verbal exposition and fireworks yield to me, to encounter the fleeting instant when "a clown develops wings."
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