The Texture of Type: Nabokov’s Sensory Perception of Alphabetical Letters: The Semanticized Graphic Form

Abstract

ABSTRACT My paper investigates how Nabokov’s synesthetic perception of typographic letters as images was expanded into a special letter-coding semanticizing practice and discusses the important questions raised by this strategy with regard to the theory and practice of literary analysis. I argue that Nabokov reconceives and expands his biologically determined binary (letter-with-color) synesthetic associations in a cross- and self-referential system of motifs permeating the whole oeuvre. Consciously controlling his personal experience of his synesthetic mind, Nabokov extrapolates it by adding images and objects and how in this artistic method he attaches symbolic or emblematic notions to letters through color- and object-associations. This complex meaning of letters can be unfolded from supporting codes, metaphors and motifs that trigger adequate contextual interpretations. His prose invites the same meticulous text-decoding methodology demanded by Symbolist and avant-garde prose art that helps to discover a similar segment in the theory of art of these two literary tendencies reputed as antithetical. 1 1 The article was written in the framework of the project “The Border Zone Paradigm: Crossroads in Culture” (2018–2020) funded by the Russian Foundation for Fundamental Research (No. 18–512–23002).