Arnie Perlstein [to JM's posting] "Just to be clear, when
I am speaking about JA's or Shakespeare's shadow stories, I am talking about
their stories being completely anamorphic, i.e., two parallel fictional
universes, with all the same characters, but where, in the shadow story, there
is all sorts of "offstage" action involving important characters of which the
reader/audience is never explicitly made aware...My guess is that at least some
of Nabokov's fiction has this sort of separate parallel fictional
universe...that ...fits my above definition of a shadow story.Wilson was, in my
view, a kind of literary critical Forrest Gump... unable to make the leap
to
there being shadow stories."
JM: Should no other Nab-L participants join in the
AP/JM discussion, it would result in the kind of ping-pong
argumentation that we are advised against by Nab-L editorial
policies...(but I'll try to redeem myself by adding a second ping-pong table to
the basement).
I don't think that Wilson was unable to discern "shadow stories"
in Nabokov (and elsewhere)! Nabokov's fiction abounds with almost
limitless "separate parallel fictional universes" with extended
sub-plots and even incidental characters.* I dare say he seldom resorted to
a single "revealed story" (of the kind he described for "Signs
and Symbols") because he was not simply a "yarn-spinner" but an
"enchanter."**
VN to EW: "In connection with Mansfield Park I
had them read the works mentioned by the characters in the novel - the two first
cantos of the "Lay of the Last Minstrel," Cowper's "The Task,"
passages from King Henry the Eighth, Crabbe's tale "The Parting
Hour," bits of Johnson's The Idler, Browne's address to "A
Pipe of Tobacco" (Imitation of Pope), Sterne's Sentimental
Journey (the whole gate-and-no-key" passage comes from there - and the
starling) and of course Lovers Vows. in Mrs Inchbald's inimitable
translation (a scream)... I think I had more fun than my
class." How like dear Professor Pnin enjoying
his Pushkin class! Most of the Austen authors will
be transmongrelized all over Nabokov's fiction, I think.
QUERY: Trying to find where there's a list of books
Nabokov instructed his students to read following Austen's lead, I came
across something by Updike on Nabokov: "he had been acquainted with German
entomological works...his first literary success was a translation, in the
Crimea, of some Heine songs for a Russian concert singer."
Would
Sklyarenko, Don, Steve... know which were the Heine songs, and who was the
Russian concert singer?
............................................................................................................................................................................................
* -Nabokov's eye for detail and the unexpected "life" bubbling up, is shown
at the end of his CD lecture when he describes a humble guy, who
holds horses and calls coaches, catching a coin: "this gesture, this one gesture, with its epithet "over-handed" - a
trifle - but the man is alive foreve in a good reader's mind." ..."A great
writer's world is indeed a magic democracy where even some very minor character,
even the most incidental character like the person who tosses the twopence, has
the right to live and breed."
**- There's a different return to the theme of "yarns and enchanters"
(Bower's ed, p.123): "A writer might be a good storyteller
or a good moralist, but unless he be an enchanter, an artist, he is not a great
writer. Dickens is a good moralist, a good storyteller, and a superb enchanter,
but as a storyteller he lags somewhat behind his virtues. In other words, he is
supremely good at picturing his characters and their habitats in any given
situation, but there are flaws in his work when he tries to establish various
links between these characters in a pattern of action" [...]