Arnie Perlstein: "...Wilson did _NOT_ discern Jane
Austen's shadow stories... too entranced with the Freudian aspects of the
novel to realize that the Freudian sexual experience of Emma was only a
piece of the whole....Nabokov was smart enough to realize that Jane Austen's
literary allusions were there ...for reasons other than to show off her own
erudition, but I don't think he realized that these were actually important
clues to the shadow story...As for your final comment, can you explain what you
mean [ "Nabokov's eye for detail and the unexpected 'life' bubbling up,
is shown at the end of his CD lecture when..."] Austen went even
further--she deliberately created the impression in her novels that the minor
characters were there for nothing...but covertly, she gave each of them an
important thematic purpose, pointing to the shadow story."
JM: Touché, Arnie! I've been using the
expression "shadow story" under the illusion that I knew what you
meant.
Although I concur with you that Wilson was excessively entranced by
some kind of Freudian "symbolism," I also cannot
understand your words that the "Freudian sexual experience of
Emma was only a piece of the whole," ..."one small 'tile' in the very
complex 'mosaic' of the full shadow story of Emma, involving _all_ the major
characters," so it'll be wise of me to stop engaging in
even wider tesselations.
btw: In his lecture on Charles Dickens Nabokov
refers to an example of "oblique description
of speech...sometimes used to speed up or to concentrate a mood...Esther is
persuading secretly married Ada to go with her to visit Richard..."
which, in turn, reminds me of the paragraph in which Nabokov
introduces Jane Austen's introductions... Would Jane Austen's insertion in
"Ada," with that particular example, be just a coincidence?
Bend Sinister's "delicious death"in Thula ultimately led me
to Zembla, and to Peter Lubin's "Kickshaws and Motley." Lubin
details several syntactic tics (Wow! what a marvellous example
for timely tropes...) derived
from Nabokov's fondness of tmesis, such as the English
phrasal tmesis, when an "expression rather than a word is ruptured by an alien
verbal insertion. The original phrase may range from adjective-plus-noun to
complete sentence. 'Ultimate dim Thule' qualifies as phrasal tmesis since
'Ultima Thula' and its variant 'ultimate Thule' are
recognized expressions." No piece of cake, at all!
According to Lubin "Nabokov manipulates, remanipulates, obmanipulates
the smallest details as well as the 'themes and motifs.' Isn't phrasal tmesis a
syntactic equivalent of those 'specious lines of play' his books are filled
with?" ... Tmesis is "the greater deception writ small. The mind
apprehends the terminal words which it expects to find juxtaposed, and then must
accommodate the alien phonemes thrust between...(W)e should not forget that rare
brand of "anticipatory" or "proleptic" tmesis which Nabokov has induced in
other, earlier writers. Here a phrase is perceived as being tmetically cleaved
only in retrospect, for remote reasons the original author could hardly have
guessed..."
In fact, one can only truly read Nabokov when we
become re-readers.
Alexey
Sklyarenko [answering "Who wrote a short-story about a father who
climbed into a tree and disappeared in it?"] sends The Ballad
of Longwood Glen ( That Sunday morning, at half past ten,/ Two cars crossed
the creek and entered the glen./ In the first was Art Longwood, a local
florist,/With his children and wife (now Mrs. Deforest.../...And the tree was
suddenly full of noise,/ Conventioners, fishermen, freckled -boys. /Anacondas
and pumas were mentioned by some,/And all kinds of humans continued to
come").
JM:
Thank you!