J. Aisenberg: I have no idea about
whether or not N."spinning universe derived from T.S. Elliot, but if it did,
that would certainly be inconsistent since he never tired of explaining how
second rate he was and building parodies of his work into his own.
JM (to JA):
Perhaps both Eliot and Nabokov reached the same idea about the spinning universe
circling a "dead"center, therefore VN might not really be referring to
Eliot.
And yet, why not? VN rejected many of Henry James'
writings, as he did with James Joyce's - but he also praised highly
one or two of James' sentences and Joyce's works ( mainly
Ulysses), without embracing their entire oeuvre. VN lovingly
read Cervantes before he wrote an outstanding book of "Lectures on Don
Quixote" but he also expressed devastating opinions about both Quixote
and Cervantes in his interviews.
We cannot quote one sentence from a VN novel
against another sentence of his from a different novel, there are
inconsistencies because context is fundamental.
(to LH): Nabokov was as close to certain "truths" as,
in my opinion, was Freud. So, it is important to separate what
he and Freud had in common concerning the "unconscious
processes and language" and his (dated) denunciation of Freud's
psychoanalysis although these were "grounded and deeply
consistent with the rest of his work and is even instrumental in the very
structure of many of his stories."
Nabokov wrote:
RLSK: "I am Sebastian, or Sebastian is I,
or perhaps we both are someone whom neither of us
knows"
TT:
"Human life can
be compared to a person dancing in a variety of forms around his own self
[...]
Pale Fire: "How to
keep sane in spiral types of space" ( line 559)
& more
items from Transparent Things: [...]
thus the vegetables encircled a boy in his dream[...]
gradually forming a transparent ring of banded colors around a dead person or
planet. [...]How much more dreadful it would be if the very awareness of
your being aware of reality's dreamlike nature were also a dream, a built-in
hallucination! One should bear in mind, however, that there is no mirage without
a vanishing point...
From the examples quoted above, although this is rather risky ( it demands
many more hours of work instead of a short email to the VN-List...), I
concluded that VN was, like Rimbaud [in his letter à Georges
Izambard (871):" Il s'agit d'arriver à l'inconnu par le
dérèglement de tous les sens. Les souffrances sont énormes, mais il faut être
fort, être né poète, et je me suis reconnu poète. Ce n'est pas du tout ma faute.
C'est faux de dire: Je pense: on devrait dire: On me pense. - Pardon du jeu de
mots. -Je est un autre. Tant pis pour le bois qui se trouve violon, et nargue
aux inconscients, qui ergotent sur ce qu'ils ignorent tout à
fait!»] dealing with a very modern apprehension of the
Freudian "ego" (das Ich ) considered as a "dead center" or a
structuring "a vanishing point", in contrast with what any individual
artist expresses through his work as a painter, musician or writer, his
"symptomatic consistency" ( Lacan's "le Sujet", with a bar over the
"S")