Jerry Friedman: Despite the interesting mentions of
umbrellas that Anthony Stadlen brought up, I feel sure the main reason Nabokov
referred to Freud's "shabby umbrellas" is ..."The more striking and for both
sexes the more interesting component of the genitals, the male organ, finds
symbolic substitutes in the first instance in things that resemble it in
shape--things, accordingly, that are long and up-standing, such as sticks,
umbrellas, posts, trees and so on..." This sort of simple decoding of
symbols seems to be something Nabokov objected to particularly strongly...Jerry
Friedman is checking his post carefully for parapraxes.
JM: But phallic sticks and poles were not
symbols which were found or established by Freud! You only need to
read Shakespeare to find equivalent images and verbal games or, if so inclined,
consult ancient Hindu poetry, aso... Freud's point lies elsewhere ("far far
away").
Even Nabokov didn't reject them (in his correspondence with E. Wilson,
p.142: "I rather liked the phallic implications of the
pistl with which Joan toyed, in between her "act of intimacy" with the
"completely disrobed" Charles Chaplin...", written at the time he'd been
correcting proofs of "Gogol", where again he toys with Gogol's noseless ladies;
and his other letter to Wilson, p. 97 ending with "next day
I noticed him tingle for a moment when I happened to mention Pland and
Poles. Good case for the Viennese Wizard (who might also observe that
'pol' imeans "sex" in Russian)."*
btw: Thanks, Anthony, for having reminded me of the story
where an impatient Freud caught himself, so to say, trying
to hypnotize an umbrella. What a treat to read it in his words, he has
an impeccable sense of humor. And, as the famous saying goes, "sometimes a
cigar is only a cigar."
PS to "I'll use the
present opportunity to correct something...The addition of a fundamental
"Todestrieb" interacting with life, changes the initial picture...There's
no "hereafter", no transmigrating souls and no "metempsychosis" to be read
in Freud and his dire vision of 'eternity'." My
correction about Freud x Nabokov was, again, full of imprecisions. I
failed to distinguish "entropy" (in the material world), from Freud's
"Todestrieb" (operating in the realm of human psychic
functioning). Besides, I added, almost in the same breath, a reference
to transmigrating souls and eternity, right after Freud's postulation
of a "death drive", as if the two items were related in anyway.
Sorry.
(Would there be any echo, issuing from Nabokov's views
about an individual's after-life, to be found in his scientific
papers?)
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* Hey! I just found out (but cannot check this right now) that Nabokov must
have been playing with the meaning of "pol" in Russian, while criticizing
Freud, because he uses the word "pollination" and, perhaps, also "urns
and polls."
Perhaps even Hazel's grip on a "stang" must have been
Shade's attempt to avoid any reference to poles and sticks to
preserve his daughter's innocence.