When I spelled the subject of the past [NABOKV-L] [SIGHTING] Bedi Dobbin posting, I made a mistake that demands instant correction: the author's name is BECI. ('A Little Ghost in Natural Colors': Nabokov and the Reproduction of Colour')

 

The abstract of the paper she read in Cambridge (6 June 2012) quotes Nabokov [‘a bad memoirist re-touches his past, and the result is a blue-tinted or pink-shaded photograph’], to locate him "on the snobbish side of a contemporary debate about the merits of colour photography." She sets herself the task of evaluating Nabokov's use of color and cultural sophistication. She writes: "In reading the self-consciously artificial colours of Lolita (1955) and Pale Fire (1962) as an aspect of the larger interest in misrepresentation which characterises Nabokov’s post-war work, this paper will consider his sense of the ‘vulgarity’ of garishness as...." A note informs that the scholar is "currently gathering material for a book on Nabokov's shallowness."  I haven't attended her seminar, nor do I know anything about how Prof.Dobbin proceeds to sustain her hypothesis: "In both these novels, I will argue, unnatural or ‘natural’ colour is crucial to the conception of fictional worlds" - nor if it has any relation to VN's dismissal of "poshlust," in contrast to the different takes of the American scenery VN made in these two novels, or to his synesthesia. 

 

The two words that caught my attention were VN's deliberate ("sophisticated") use of "vulgarity" and what she intends to explore as VN's "shallowness."        

 

Nabokov, as we all know, deplored didactic novels with political or moralistic messages and the "novels of ideas." Nevertheless, there are numerous articles about Nabokov's ethics, philosophy and humanistic stance. In his writings there are serious efforts to expand his vision of literature, using the artifices of style to demonstrate, in action, how metaphors are made to stand on their heads (related to Van's maniambulation in ADA) He also attempts to hermetically insinuate his experiences of an 'afterlife' and about the nature of time. 

 

Freud once wrote that "what one cannot remember, one is condemned to repeat," and based the bulk of his ideas on the occurrence of what he designated by "transference" ("Übertragung"), particularly as the "re-edition of the patient's past in the present analytic relationship." He was attentive to the deformation caused by "paramnesias," and he theorized about the incompatibility between  memory and perception, meaning that it is impossible to remember and to perceive at the same time. At this point, and rather superficially, I'd like to suggerst that Nabokov, as an artist, focused on memory and a certain kind of "subjectivity" whereas perception, attention to details and an acute awareness of the "objective" world were an aspect of his activities as a scientist. Nabokov had a special genius to secondarily blend memory and perception in his prose works thereby sharing with his reader a special temporal dimension linking past and present emotions. It is curious to realize that he never refered to Proust's theory of  "involuntary memories" (there's a wonderful thesis about it, by Samuel Beckett) and, of course, never to the freudian "paramnesias" and "the return of the repressed." Personally, what I sometimes felt to be a sort of "shallowness" in Nabokov, was a peculiar luminous quality of childhood ("innocence"?), favoring garishness, colored glasses, transparent marbles, brief ecstatic moments and hypersensuality. In other words, an artistic rare quality, a shiver, the "raising of the dorsal hairs"...