Sandy Drescher: One has neither to praise nor mock Freud
to posit a dream's communicative purpose. Presuming that the dream-recaller is
attempting to convey something to the dream-listener does require that each has
some reasonable interest in the other. Something like the "good writer" and the
"good reader"...Years ago I wondered that a Nabokov dream [New Yorker VVN
Centenial] was ignored by the List, but the subject passed and was forgotten,
like a bad dream.
JM: Nabokov's insomnias are famous, likewise his fears that "le grand
peut-être" might open unto tormenting vistas of
Hell... German philosopher, Kant, "appears to have
been troubled with dreams beyond most men's imagination: for Wasianski informs
us that they were absolutely appalling; and that single scenes or passages in
those dreams were sufficient to compose 'the whole course of mighty tragedies.'
They alarmed him, however, so greatly, sometimes, that his servant often caught
him out of his bed, endeavouring to escape to some other part of his house."
(Charles Bucke,
On the Beauties, Harmonies and Sublimities of Nature,
1831) Epigraph in: Brown, "Philosophical View of the Gothic Novel"(Paris:Conard,
1938)II: 563/4
.www.english.upenn.edu/Projects/knarf/Articles/brown.html
Sandy Drescher's observation that "dreams have a
communicative purpose" is very apt, even more so when he included the clause
about the fundamental relationship between "dream-recaller and
dream-listener".
The criticism against Freud's theories on dreams
often departs from a mistaken assumption about the sexual nature
of the repressed wishes that try to gain expression in dreams ( and are
granted!). Many believe that "sexual" is always "genital",
or "oedipal". They forget that oral, anal, urethral wishes may also be
satisfied and gain representation.Besides, Freud
distinguished neurotic dreams and nightmares, from a borderline
dream-state in psychotics and the recurrent nightmares linked to traumatic
experiences ( when the symbolic, "communicative purpose" is absent). Even
traumatic dreams can be rendered artistically, but they often burden the
listener emotionally because of the excess of anxiety that they still retain and
transmit.
Perhaps SD could post
again Nabokov's words that might have become a bad dream to the
List?
CHW: The return of the ending of the verse to
its beginning does actually echo Finnegans Wake...James Joyce spent his life
slowly going completely mad and... Finnegans Wake is the work of a madman,
nearing his end.
JM: Charles reminded us, indirectly, of
Joyce's interest in Vico and in circular time, and linked this to
Kinbote when he described Pale Fire's return of the ending to its beginning
and the "spirals from the tuber's eye" leading to...Paradise? Heaven?
Rebirth as Somebody-toad?
We can see, from VN's comments in SO, how enchanted he'd been by the
coincidence between his choice (a "point-de-repère") for the day
of Kinbote's decease and his having approached both Kinbote and Swift
( who also died in Oct. 19) in one of his - Kinbote's?
No! In SO VN's satisfaction is so obvious that, by
it, he almost confesses they were his own - notes.
VN's pleasure made me feel more inclined to accept William C.
Dowling's hypothesis about "Who's The Narrator of Nabokov's Pale Fire?" (
www.rci.rutgers.edu/~wcd/palenarr.htm
)
DBJ: E.A. Popova. “Episode with a
Lorgnette.”: A curious piece noting VN’s comments on certain literary
heroines who are associated with a lorgnette . In “Speak,
Memory” it is Louise Poindexter...then the motif thru Emma Bovary and
Anna Karenina... who then passes the lorgnette to Chekhov’s “Lady with the
Lap Dog” who loses it on the Yalta pier. The strange thing is, as Popova
points out, is that there is no lorgnette in Anna K. (I did a quick computer
search of the Russian text that seemed to confirm this--although some
synonym might have been used.) Popova asserts that this apparent
lapse must be a deliberate motif....
Popova may (or may not) have something
there, but she goes too far in suggesting that when Chekhov's heroine loses her
lorgnette on the Yalta pier, it symbolizes the loss of the Motherland (as well
as their virtue). Females birdwatchers should perhaps take note...JM : Lorgnons and Lorgnettes, are these (bi)(mon)ocles
different for male or female birdwatchers leavesdroppings?
Confusing. But I remember being also fascinated by these serial
intertextual connections, in SM, to the point of imagining that the coin VN
followed intratextually in his "Lectures on Ulysses" belonged to the same
travel-agency ( the coin began its tragectory in the Lectures already in VN's
initial one about Dickens, where a coachman flipped it in the air...).
The lorgon myst have been recovered from the Yalta pier, if I can
trust an old posting at the List with a description of Nabokov's museum in
St. Petersburg:
"Charme de l'exil. Un lorgnon, une boîte
de Scrabble, un poème inédit, Papillon, recopié sur un livre offert à un ami,
des reproductions de dessins de lépidoptères que Nabokov avait accompagnés de
tendres dédicaces à son épouse Vera... C'est à peu près tout ce que le musée a
réussi à récupérer auprès du fils de l'écrivain ou de collection" ( NABOKV-L Archives -- February 2004 (#39)
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listserv.ucsb.edu/lsv-cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0402&L=nabokv-l&T=0&P=4393
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( It was posted by Sandy
Drescher.)