Dreams of Ghosts in Nabokov

"Whenever in my dreams I see the dead, they always appear silent, bothered, strangely depressed, quite unlike their dear, bright selves. I am aware of them, withuot any astonishment in surroundings they never visited during their earthly existence, in the house of some friend of mine they never knew. They sit apart, frowning at the floor, as if death were a dark taint, a shameful family secret. It is certainly not then, not in dreams, but when one is wide awake, at moments of robust joy and achievement, on the highest terrace of consciousness, that mortality has a chance to peer beyond its own limits, from the mast, from the past and its castle tower. And although nothing much can be seen through the mist, there is somehow the blissful feeling that one is looking in the right direction." (Page 50)

This is one of my favorite passages in the first four chapters of Vladimir Naobokov's autobiography. I think he hits home with his dreams about the dead. Every time that I have had a dream about someone in my life that has passed away, I only see them as ghosts, and I only see them in states of hopelessness and sorrow, as if death has stolen their souls (which it quite literally has). Every time my subconscious mind brings these ghosts to my dreams, they are never smiling and are almost always crying. The tears are the most vivid pieces of the images. These beings must be missing me just as much as I am missing them.

When one is at his/her happiest, mortality is certainly something that comes to mind. These are the moments when a person believes that his/her life is headed in the right direction, or becoming meaningful day by day. When I am at my happiest, when I have just done something that I am particularly proud of, the cloud-nine feeling ensues. The cloud-nine feeling brings hopes of allowing myself to be suspended in time, being in that moment forever, but then I realize that tomorrow could be very different, with very different (possibly poor and depressing) outcomes. That is life!

'storytelling...

"This is an example of 'storytelling', I arranged actual events so as to make 'a good story' out of them. It is hard to overcome this temptation if you are in the habit of writing fiction, one does it almost automatically".
Mary McCarthy, pg. # 164 + 65

Discussion from Thursday, Oct. 2

Just to touch on what was discussed on Thursday...(my last post was on the same topic).

Catholic oppression seems to be a common thread through various narratives (besides this one, Angela's Ashes comes to mind). I'm Catholic and have had a much different experience, so it is interesting to me to read these accounts. Of course I believe them. I only went to Catholic School on Sundays and for camp; I never had to attend a school with nuns everyday of the week, and I also live in a different time period. I also think it has something to do with the Catholics in Mary McCarthy's life. Her grandmother, though innately a good person, used Catholicism as ammunition against others and her hostility came across to Mary. I had a very different type of Catholic grandmother. If you look for the negatives in something, you're sure to find them. But if you look for the positives, you're sure to find those too.

Another Make-Up Post for Mary McCarthy (Catholicism in General)

In class we discussed the portrayal of the Catholic Church and some of us shared our own ideas. I was able to start how I perceived it, but I feel like there's still more I would like to say.

Especially in college, many of us are subjected to novels where Catholicism is critiqued harshly or remembered by many authors as a cruel upbringing. Granted, a lot of the experiences that people have remembered are almost unbelievable. I know that I have been made to read stories about how horrible convents were, mostly in Ireland, where punishments seemed cruel and unusual. Accounts of authors such as James Joyce and Frank McCourt make Catholicism appear to be strict and harsh. In the modern days, the Catholic Church is often associated by the priests who were caught having sexual encounters with altar boys.

All of this and more does upset me, yes, but as a born and raised Catholic I was brought up with a different understanding of the church. To me, going to church was a family experience and was always followed on Sunday mornings by going out to breakfast or getting donuts to have at home. The priest at my church was a gentle and caring man who was very close to our family. It was easy for me to see him as a man rather than JUST a priest, which made it a lot less intimidating for me to see him preaching at church... and "preaching" is used very loosely here. Now that I'm away at college and getting older, I don't attend mass very often and when I do go it's usually because I'm home for the weekend and I decide to go with my parents. My religion is a comfort to me, knowing I have my beliefs and that I can practice them in my own way, and it is not being forced onto me as an obligation. It's because of this that I can read about the Catholic Church and not let it sway my decision to be Catholic.

Make-Up Post for Mary McCarthy

With all that has been happening to me and my family, the last line of Memories of a Catholic Girlhood stuck out to me.
"At that moment, the fact that my grandmother was senile became real to me."
We discussed in class how that was a fitting ending and there was no use for an italics portion after it with Mary McCarthy explaining it further. It is such a powerful last line and I think that most of us know exactly what she meant in that last line. I have had a few moments in my life where something finally became "real" to me, and one of those moments happened during the time when I was unable to be in class.

My grandfather was an amazing man and represented my idea of strength. He had a very sudden and severe fight with cancer, and I went and saw him when he was at his worst. It was then, seeing him in bed and his struggles to just speak and move, that his illness became real to me. It's an upsetting thing to see a family member completely altered by any disease, and Mary McCarthy hit the nail on the head for me. Throughout the whole book, I found things I could relate to or instances where I could almost get what she was going through without living the experience myself. However, it was that last line that really grabbed my attention, and I was almost sorry that it was the end of the book because then there was nothing more for me to follow.

Make-Up Post for Frederick Douglass

While reading The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, I couldn't help but notice how his priorities were very apparent through his recollection of the past. To most of us, family is one of the most important things we think about. No matter what sort of relationship you have with your family members, it is difficult to see what life would be without them. Douglass establishes early on in his book that his mother was hardly present and his father's identity was uncertain. While sharing what brief moments he had with her before her death, he still seems very detached emotionally. However, while sharing the times where literacy was in his grasp, such as when he learned the ABC's, it is very obvious that this was a very important part of his life. Like I said, in our modern world it's hard to position literacy at a greater importance than our parents, which is what makes this part of Douglass' book so fascinating to me.

Here we see a great example of how powerful it was for slaves to learn how to read and write. It meant that they had a leg up on their owners and it could possibly end in being freed. Nowadays, learning to read is so common that many of us don't think of what it would be like to be considered inferior for not knowing how to read or write. Reading this narrative made me think a bit about just how much it would've meant to Douglass, or any slave from the time to be able to pick up a book and understand the writing in it. Especially where right now in my life, family has been one of my top priorities, it's interesting to see a perspective where something as simple as posting on a blog is considered a great part of life.

Italic vs. Non-italic

Page 192, "Yellowstone Park:"

Technically, this ought to precede "The Figures in the Clock," since it happened a year and a half before Miss Gowrie's play. But I have placed it here because in "Yellowstone Park" I seem older. This may have been because I was not in school. Also, in Medicine Springs, I was having to live up to a role that "grew me up" overnight. Once I was out of that curious wonderland where all the men were married, I shrank back to my nomral age."

I found this passage particularly interesting because it suggest that age is not really the same as the number of years which a person has lived; age can shift back and forth, from older to younger or younger to older, not in accordance with actual shifts in time. I thought this was remarkable because it suggests that, although McCarthy has not lied, she has readjusted chronology out of it's original order to make more chronological sense... a peculiar idea, but one that I find very appealing. I think that we may all experience moments when we feel older or younger than our "real" age, and I know that I have, so I felt I connected with this idea more than some others presented in this text.

How Memory Works

Mary McCarthy's final chapter begins with a series of memories regarding her grandmother. The further the memories are placed in the time, the less Mary remembers about them. The memories become more specific as they become more recent. This is a realistic representation of how the memory works. The further back in the time the memory is, the more trouble a person may have remember details. For example, Mary first recalls her grandmother's gray electric, the way it looked, and the many instances in which it pulled up to her house. The last memory in the series is specifically oriented around the time that her parents died of the flu. She remembers her grandmother's sobs. Then, she remembers a vision of her grandmother five years later when she returns to Seattle.

"I did not see her again until five years later, when she was standing in the depot in Seattle in a hat with a black dotted veil, pulled tight across her face, which was heavily rouged and powdered. By this time, I knew that she was my grandmother, that she was Jewish, and died her hair."
(Page 202)

Mary's memories become clearer as well as the amount of knowledge that she knows about her grandmother. Before this memory, Mary could barely note that she was related to her. Are there any other points in the autobiography in which you believe the writing mimics Mary's memory/ability to recall events and information?

~Megan

Ideas about Intersubjective Exchanges - Italic Disclaimers

Mary McCarthy – Memories of a Catholic Girlhood – Intersubjective Exchange – Patterns

“As an intersubjective mode, it lies outside a logical or juridical model of truth and falsehood, as models of the paradox of self-reference have suggested….” Smith & Watson (13)
««««««««««
from Smith & Watson: “But autobiographical truth is a different matter; it is an intersubjective exchange between narrator and reader aimed at producing a shared understanding of the meaning of life.”(13)
««««««««««

“If we approach self-referential
writing as an intersubjective process that occusr within the writer/reader pact, rather than a true-or-false story, the emphasis of reading shifts from assessing and verifying knowledge to observing processes of communicative exchange and understanding.” Smith & Watson (13)

To The Reader
Yonder Peasant , Who is He?
[“There are several dubious”…]
A Tin Butterfly
[“Uncle Harry tells me”….]
The Blackguard
[“This account is highly fictionalized…”]
C’est le Premier Pas Qui Coute
[“This story is so true….”]
Names
[“A good deal of stress has been laid…”]
The Figures in the Clock
[“There are some semi-fictional touches here.”]
Yellowstone Park
[“Except for the name of the town & the names
Of the people, this story is completely true.”]
Ask Me No Questions

Italics vs. Regular

Hopefully this is what we were supposed to post about..
I believe that Mary McCarthy uses the italics sections of her autobiography to be completely truthful. Perhaps McCarthy believed that if her entire autobiography was written as bluntly as the italics are, no one would want to read it. I very much enjoy reading the italic sections because it is the blunt truth about her life. I feel that during the italicized sections I get to know the real Mary McCarthy. I also find that her italicized sections are very humorous, perhaps because she is being so blunt. I think that the italics offset the "regular" writing in her autobiography.

Truth & Lies

In January 1980, Mary McCarthy in a television interview with Dick Cavett was asked for an example of an "over-praised" writer. She named Lillian Hellman, stating "who I think is terribly overrated, a bad writer and a dishonoest writer." When Cavett asked what she meant by "dishonoest," McCarthy responded, "everything ..... every word she writes is a lie including 'and' and 'the."

Subsequently, Hellman sued for libel in a $2.25 million lawsuit, later dropped at the time of Hellman's death in 1984. McCarthy apparently felt put out, stating: "I still feel disgusted by the amount of lying that didn't stop. I wanted it to go to trial, so I was disappointed when she died."

Catholic Thoughts

"An aggressive churchgoer, she was quite without Christian feeling; the mercy of the Lord Jesus had never entered her heart. Her piety was an act of war against the Protestant ascendancy..."


I think that this is an example of something common among religious zealots today. I have always found it ironic that many influential religious leaders are the ones preaching intolerance; intolerance against certain groups of people, either of a different denomination or sexuality, for example.

As a practising Catholic, I find it a waste and a shame for someone to use their religion as a means of emanating superiority or a source of leverage. During this day and age, we are all exposed to the discrimination that can be found between different religious groups, and also the harshness of some who claim to be "serving the Lord." What ever happened to WWJD? Spread love!