In a recent posting a debate concerning Nabokov and the Symbolists was
encouraged.
Although we can often find references to the symbolists in
novels such as "Ada, or Ardor", I thought that there was a nice link with Donīs
recent subject concerning the "Englishman in Nice" - because
Kinbote noted that the said gentleman had been transmuted into someone
similar to the French symbolist, Verlaine...
Because the clinching example in the posting quoted VN, Iīd like to
bring up an apparently contrasting view, also by VN.
According to Stacey Schiff, who wrote the biography of Vera Nabokov, the
author's wife shared with her husband the same passion for details and
coincidences, seeking for the "substantial shadows behind the illusions of
existence". "We think not
in words, but in shadows of words", wrote Nabokov.
Although he was an admirer of James Joyce's Ulysses,
Nabokov was acutely disturbed by the Irish writer's "association between sex and
latrine" in Finnegans Wake and Nabokov
maintained that the defect "in those
otherwise marvelous soliloquies of his consists in that he gives too much verbal
body to thoughts".
Jansy