Claudio Soares: "Machado de
Assis [...]also burnt (himself) all his correspondences and, probably,
unfinished works [...]
JM: I agree that this issue (burn or not burn ) is a
very controversial subject and its solution depends on a very subjective,
personal, decision.
Nabokov and John Shade themselves burnt some of their work, as you
pointed out of Machado.
Nabokov allowed a manuscript to be rescued from the fire and I have
the impression that he seemed to count on it, as regards
Lolita.
Borges' story about Pierre Ménard focuses on Spain and, like VN
in Pale Fire, he mentions the inquisitorial "auto-de-fé"
before he produces a marvellously allegorical "invisible masterpiece"
of which there were only a few lines left.
Osberg may have written "mystico-allegoric
anecdotes", whereas Borges was sufficiently successfull when
he created other (mental) structural devices to succintly
describe almost impossible matters, such as to what kind of readings
and readers an author may expect and what is the destiny of one's
writings.
From the list of quotes I almost
randomly assembled for "VN on allegory" it is clear that VN was mainly
irked and prejudiced against freudians, or with Freud's choice related
to the "Oedipus complex" (and he was profetically right in
as many ways...*)
His comments about "symbols" should be registered with
the same grain of salt as those on "allegories": it is clear that he demanded
precision in a writer's (almost) inevitable use of analogies and
metaphors, while he also made space for non-scientific playful concoctions
in art (the"crossbreeding casual fancies just for
the fun of the contour and color").
.....................................................................................................
* And so was Freud! He complained that people at
first didn't understand that unconscious wishes interfere
with conscious thoughts and, next, that those who did, mostly
psychoanalysts themselves, started to explain everything focusing only on the
unconscious...
"When I look at a rennaissance painting I begin to
look for the unconscious; when I look at a surrealist painting I start to
look for the conscious," he once said. Already in his "The Interpretation of
Dreams", vol.V, he asserted, in a vein similar to Buffon's: "it's not the
conscious, it's not the unconscious that is what one should mainly
examine in a dream! It is the dreamwork itself." ( ie: the
dreamer's style!)