Word: nabokovs
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Freud has always irritated Nabokov, offended his deep sense of psychological subtlety. Here his satire of "the Viennese quack" and his "Sigmundian school" is refined into a brief parody of dream research. Of "some two hundred healthy jailbirds" investigated, "one hundred seventy-eight of the men were seen to have powerful erections during the stage of sleep called HAREM ("Has A Rapid Eye Movement") marked by visions and causing a lustful opthalmic roll, a kind of internal ogling...
With pun and allusion Nabokov turns words themselves transparent, making meanings flicker through each other. In the light of a bit of high school physics, watch what happens to the sentence: "An electric sign, DOPPLER, shifted to violet through the half drawn curtains..." Several pages later, a woman standing by the same window "wore a Doppler shift over her luminous body...
Language is for Nabokov a realm in itself, where, for instance, "by some mnemoptical trick" something cherry-red is remembered as applegreen. A new word brings a new kind of reality. The writer's language constructs a wonderland of possibility--witty, dreamy, tidy--somewhere in the gap between language and every day life. What kind of world would it be if the word "tralatitions," which makes the title of R.'s book, were as common as its synonym, "metaphor"? What it there were a town in Switzerland where present objects bulged transparent with their parts...
...NABOKOV IS among the most "writerly" of writers, consciously making use of a whole series of poses and tones to tell his transparent tale, intervening to remind the reader of the creator behind it all. For a man who despises the novel of ideas, the telling is everything. Here it is accomplished through the voice guiding us within the transparent world, through bits of the psychoanalytic interrogation Person goes through after his crime, through a letter from old R., through a single quotation from Person's prison journal. The prose slips seamlessly from tone to tone, now reportorial, now lyrical...
True to form, Nabokov has said that he likes his novels to end in infinite self-reflection. Appropriate metaphors would be two mirrors facing each other, or pictures within endless pictures, but also the "ultimate vision of a book...grown completely transparent and hollow." Art imitates and criticizes itself into a kind of reality where the whole gleams through at every point...