L. Durantaye [ to J.Studdard): "I
didn't mean to imply that the statements were identical. That said, the
remarks in Strong Opinions tend to be quite thoughtful. In any event,
they're both a little beside the point of "allegory as a literary mode" (as
Nabokov is clearly not thinking of works like the Divine Comedy or the Faerie
Queene)."
JM: In the novel Ada,
Darkbloom's notes on "Carte du Tendre" explain that it constitutes "a sentimental allegory of the seventeenth
century", in a sympathetic vein. In the same
spirit, in the
literary body of LATH, Botticelli's
Primavera is brought up ( with no irony, it seems) as an
allegory of Spring: "wear,in propitious sign,
the Florentine hat that looks like a cluster of wild flowers.
I want you to celebrate your resemblance to the fifth
girl from left to right, the flower-decked blonde with the straight
nose and serious gray eyes, in Botticelli's Primavera, an
allegory of Spring, my love, my
allegory." This mood invites us back to
Lolita, for Lolita herself has also been compared to
Boticelli's rust-colored Venus. As I see
it, allegory is here being employed together with "a propitious
sign".
Nevertheless, also in Lath, when
dealing directly with literary modes we read:"I
disliked him for his daring to question my teaching Ulysses, my way
- in a purely textual light - without organic allegories and
quasi-Greek myths and that sort of tripe."
Among the many definitions of "allegory" the
one that VN seems to focus, when he objects to Freud's psychoanalytic theories
or to standard literary interpretations, is not indicative
of its more ancient meaning as "a veiling function of language".
It relies mainly on allegory used as a deliberate "inversion
of speech whereby, in saying one thing a person conveys or understands something
else ( Isidore of Seville ,Etymologiae I, 47.22) or Saint
Augustine's “a mode of speech in which one thing is understood by
another,” (Cf.Angus Fletcher's online "The Dictionary of the History of
Ideas.")
In his article "Nabokov and Freud, or a Particular
Problem" L.Durantaye notes that Nabokov "saw Freud as standing for many
things he did not like and, conversely, as representing what he most vehemently
disliked: the generalizing of the rich particularities of which life is made
up.[...]The seeker of symbols [...]will inevitably conflate the dissimilar and
miss the distinctiveness of the detail." According to LD, Freudian
theories, in the eyes of VN, "Like allegory and symbolism...granted
conceptual license to interpret everything in terms of something else and this
he could not stand."
Nevertheless, literary
"symbolism" cannot be extented to encompass the normal process
of "symbol-formation" and language, nor the rendering of
a (forbidden or painful) thought, under the guise of a
"symbol", stands for the entire process of a dream-formation.
Besides, a
dreamer's "allegories" cannot be produced by an act of will, as it
happens in the ordinary artistic process of "allegorization"
( something gross or refined, following the artist's
abilities) - and this is one of the problems!*
*As I understand it, in the strictly Freudian (
ie, not "Kleinian") interpretation of dreams,
a particular image is only focused as a generic symbol in
order that it may be re-inserted, through speech, as an
expression of that particular dreamer's constellation of wishes,
talents, history and forgotten experiences - in this
case it recovers its lost status as a living metaphor
and is now free to evolve in a healthy, now
untrammeled process of abstract thinking and decision-making ( this
is, of course, an oversimplified
exposition).