Fran Assa [to JM :In
TOoL there is a quick reference to "asparagus" when Flora's
mother has to go out herself to get "aspirins" ...) Sorry,
Jansy. But obviously phallic.
JM: So Freudian, like his cigar. But his cigar is
not Magritte's pipe.
Eric Naiman [to F.Assa]: Not
entirely. That "girly asparagus" is TT's equivalent to Despair's hermaphroditic
"phallic tulips". The masculinity, in other words, is attenuated, which seems to
have been an important part of VN's take on Proust. There is also a certain
posterior, homoerotic charge in the example in PF (appropriate given the novel)
-- mASterpiece, fairy tale,ASparagus dream, unconnected with any possible people
in any historical France (un-con-nected, i.e. no women involved), sexual
travestissement, coloSSAl fARCE (maybe we should even hear CUL-ossal). There is
even a bit of posteriority in the example from ADA -- "Proust's
After-effect"...Alexander Dolinin, I believe, writes about the importance of
"aspirin" in KQKn -- my recollection is he hears Sirin there. And perhaps one
can even hear Sirin's breathing.
JM: Wonderful
observations, Eric, on "attenuated masculinity" and VN's "take on Proust,"
connecting PF,Despair, Ada - and bringing in, through Dolinin, the echo of
a Sirin's breathing. My difficulty, as a "Freudian," derives from Nabokov's putative
wordplay ("coloSSAl fARCE" or "Cul-ossal") which would be merely a conscious,
deliberate and childish game on the author's part, a kind
of hide-and-seek to manipulate those readers who, like VN,
believes that Freud belongs to "a police state of sexual myth,"* to be
able to disavow the workings of unconscious processes.
You seem to be one of the few to challenge
this Nabokovian prejudice.
Freud, in his "New Introductory Letters,"
chapter on Dreams develops further what he wrote in Ch.VI of "The
Interpretation of Dreams". He makes it quite clear that it is not the trite
sexual symbolism that which matters in a dynamic interpretation of any
"normal" dream, but the structural workings which are responsible
for the transformation of unconscious material into the images of
a dream, which he then applies to demonstrate the
mechanisms lying behind a neurotic symptom
formation.
.....................................................................................................................
* From my notes on Lolita: Freudians, Keep
Out : "In Richard
Rorty's view, the obsessive and strident animosity that Nabokov felt towards
Freud was 'the resentment of a precursor who may already have written all one's
best lines', which, of course is an exaggeration. Nabokov saw psychoanalysts as
the accomplices of the 'police state of sexual myth', an image that served to
heighten his hostility. He regarded the Freudian interpretation of dream
symbolism as a product of a coarse and 'medieval mind.' The most devoted
Nabokovians follow the lead of their master and keep away from Freud... In his biography of Gogol, the novelist remarked that 'The crudest
curriculum vitae crows and flaps its wings in a style peculiar to the
undersigner. I doubt whether you can even give your telephone number without
giving something of yourself'. Nevertheless, he insistently affirmed that his
life was not to be mistaken for his work. He saw his characters as gargoyles and
caryatids expelled to the outside of the cathedrals: 'they are outside my inner
self like the mournful monsters of a cathedral façade - demons placed there
merely to show that they have been booted out.' ...In Lolita, however, his signature can be found beyond the voices of
the author and the narrator (that so often
intermingle)."