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*- Related to "shades and shadows" (visual silhouettes of the world?), here's an unpublished part of a paper I read at the 2007 MLA Annual Conference. Chicago, Illinois. December 29 (Yarn-spinning and magic wands: true fairy-tales  Jansy Berndt de Souza Mello) 

     "Nabokov was open to the mysteries of an external reality perceived as an expanse of referents in search of another Adam, a space that exceeds linguistic boundaries, the field of enchanters in its relation to artifacts and the reader. Writers who work with language experimentally may privilege only of its two faces, namely, the signifier or the signified. Umberto Eco places James Joyce in the first category, with his word-plays, puns, anagrams and neologisms, while Jorge Luis Borges, juggling with ideas, comes in the second.  Nevertheless, Nabokov’s work with “sounds” and “signifiers” does not fit into this (too neat) distinction. Nabokov believed that “we do not think continuously in words” (RY 425) and, in his opinion, James Joyce’s “stream of consciousness” has its origin in a mere stylistic convention, perhaps so literal that it “altered the time element” and “placed too great a reliance on typography.”

      Nabokov’s position was not always unambiguous. In a letter quoted by B. Boyd (RY: 425; Cf. SO:102), he maintains that through Joyce’s  “abstract puns, the verbal masquerade, the shadows of words, the diseases of words… wit sinks behind reason” whereas, several years later, he writes : “We think not in words but in shadows of words.  James Joyce… gives too much verbal body to his thoughts” (SO:30). James Joyce breaks up words to achieve the abnihilation of the ethym, whereas Nabokov often paints a vision with words hinting at different levels of ideas and perception that lie beyond the verbal domain: "The narrator forefeels what he is going to tell. The forefeeling can be defined as an instant vision turning into rapid speech. If some instrument were to render this rare and delightful phenomenon, the image would come as a shimmer of exact details, and the verbal part as a tumble of merging words".

       James Joyce cultivated his particular vision of “shadows” for he considered “all art as a shadow of the Incarnation” and he borrowed from the Catholic religion the term “epiphany” which, in some respects, is strongly reminiscent of VN’s experience of “aesthetic bliss”. "By an epiphany" Joyce's protagonist Stephen Hero, means "a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in memorable phrase of the mind itself”, and that “it was for the man of letters to record those epiphanies with extreme care, seeing that they themselves are the most delicate and evanescent of moments." [1]  Joyce’s epiphanies, like VN’s aesthetic  bliss, result from a particular way of apprehending reality by allowing all senses to work together in anticipation of a transformation that is undergone, and later revealed, by the artist (it is when “the soul is born”, writes J. Joyce in “Portrait of An Artist as a Young Man”). Both authors apparently indicate an ineffable experience which has gained spiritual and material expression through its having suddenly become manifest, although Joyce’s epiphanies are cultivated by a thomistic three-step exercise in awareness before an object’s “quidditas” is perceived – and therefore Joyce’s revelations differ not only from Nabokov’s “long-drawn sunset shadow of one’s personal truth”, but also from Marcel Proust’s rapturous irruption of what he named “involuntary memory”. Nabokov’s recurrent use of the word “shadow” is, in itself, rather striking. In his lectures at Cornell, he refers not only to the “tall story”  about a boy crying wolf, as told in “Good Readers and Good Writers”, but he mentions shadows and dreams: “the magic of art is manifested in the dream about the wolf, in the shadow of the invented wolf" (1955, 347). This is why he is not simply dealing with deception, enchantment, and metamorphosis, the three themes which are “akin to the fairy tale” in Alfred Appel’s interpretation. Nor do I agree with Appel when he says that “several of Nabokov’s novels, stories and poems are fairy tales in the sense that they are set in imaginary lands.” Nabokov investigated poetic resources to reach “true fiction”, instead of such writings like the ones which are “borrowed from the circulating library of public truths” (Nabokov 1980:2). For him,“between the wolf in the tall grass and the wolf in the tall story there is a shimmering go-between. That go-between, that prism, is the art of literature. (GRGW).  We may conclude that, differently from Borges, Joyce and Eco ( perhaps closer to Shelley), Nabokov believes that literature searches a secret depth, crossed by "substantial shadows" (as he wrote in his biography of Nikolai Gogol) cast on our present by other past, future or unknown dimensions, the reality of which challenges the illusions of everyday life.  At the same time, in contrast, Nabokov asserts fiction’s independence from “the material world” according to the writer’s ability to express his own (in VN’s case, always multiple) individual world, including its windows unto still other worlds."