Joseph Aisenberg: [...] little statements N. sometimes
made in interviews and forewords have to be understood in less than
comprehensive terms[...] I would say that N.'s "general" stricture against
allegory ... has something in common with Susan Sontag's essay Against
Interpretation. For instance, a book and film like Invasion of The Body
Snatchers is regularly understood to be an allegory about social paranoia of
"The Other"; only it can also be seen as being a political allegory about having
really good reasons to be afraid of subsversive groups
[...] Amusingly, N. wanted us to keep in mind all
the things his novels weren't about and didn't mean so that
as readers we couldn't help but scratch our heads and say, hey Humbert
really is like an ape trapped by his own obsessions, and his way of
depicting things are kind of like the bars of a cage, symbolically that
is. The critics are just too smart for these guys, if you ask me, pining
for logical consistency when what they've got are showmen.
JM: Aisenberg's description
of The Invasion of Body Snatchers, based on a novel by Jack
Finney, reminded me of Ionesco's play "Rhinoceros" and Ira
Levin's "The Stepford Wives"!. Perhaps in literature
this kind of "invasion" is inevitable because language, in a way, is a
"body-snatcher" ( or "a virus" as sung by Laurie Anderson).
I've been recently reading about Walt Disney,
how he was born a Joe in Spain and adopted by an American
family, before he became one of the most representative (albeit
over-zealous) iconic manager of americana. In "Once upon a time:
the sources of inspiration for the Disney studios" we see how Wilhelm
Busch, Beatrix Potter and Honoré Daumier influenced some of the scenes,
movements and captions. Disney hired many emigré artists with their
nostalgia but the influences that interested me most came
from German expressionism and movies. Not only do we feel Gustave
Doré's illustration of Dante's Inferno ( in Snow-White!), or Arthur Rackham's or
Blake's drawings, but the metamorphosis of the SW's
cruel step-mother into a witch, inspired in a movie
about "Dr.Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" and in Fritz Lang's "Metropolis."
I couldn't help finding, in retrospect, a connection
between Van's "Mascodagama act" and the
gigantic batlike monster in Mussorgsky's "A Night in Bald
Mountain" (cf. Disney's "Fantasia".)
A. Sklyarenko: [...]
Whatever
happiness or grief/ Would sing in the past
years,/ I have never shunned/ Metaphors, or even allegories.
The first stanza of a Russian poem (the
fifth one in the cycle "Seven Poems") written in the nineteen fifties.
There is an allegory (or metaphor?) of death in the second (and last)
stanza. I apologize to Nabokov's shadow for my
translation.
JM: Thank you for the translation of VN's poem and the
additional interpretation of intrusive death in its last lines.
From: jansymello <jansy@AETERN.US>
Subject: Re: [NABOKV-L] VN
on allegory?
To: NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU
Date: Thursday, November 27,
2008, 3:53 AM
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).