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Re: Green Door-- lost and refound post
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Jim Twiggs: The New Republic web site often reprints essays from its archives. Today's features include Mary McCarthy's famous "Bolt from the Blue" piece on Pale Fire. In rereading it for the first time in a long while, I see that I was wrong in downplaying the significance of the word "green" in the novel. McCarthy writes that "since for Pope Zembla was roughly equal to Greenland, then Zembla must be a green land, an Arcadia...The complementary color to green is red. Zembla has turned red after the revolution that began in the Glass Factory. Green and red flash on and off in the narrative liketraffic signals and sometimes reverse their message. ...Green is pre-eminently the color of seeming (the theatrical greenroom), the color, too, of camouflage, for Nature, being green at least in summer, can hide a green-clad figure in her verdure . . ."http://www.tnr.com/book/review/bolt-the-blue?page=0,0 So the thread, as Stan and others have suggested, is not so curious after all.
JM:When I brought up Hugh Well's "A Door in the Wall," I was not particularly entranced by any "green symbolism" (life, traffic signals, recurrent esmeraldic mentions*), nor similarities in "cut and intonation," in his sentences and another author's (valuable indicators as they undoubtedly are & as it has been amply demonstrated here.) Usually Nabokov's colors come in all sorts of shades and grades, they seldom stand alone as "a green" this and that if not in a parodical mood.
I related the door to a magic opening with its regular reappearance along the subject's life, together with his various reactions to such an overture into "arcadia" and "paradise," an "intimation" which, so I thought, was shared by Well and Nabokov.
This effect would not directly influence VN's style, but it might be echoed "cryptomnemonically." Instead of cryptomnesia's involuntary plagiarism, it would indicate a common emotional source alied to a particular image, in this case, a door. There are examples of that in "Glory", "A Visit to the Museum" and etc.
I haven't re-read Maar's articles and the 18 pages of an Ur-Lolita, but I seem to remember there was a similar door, or an opening, in this German short novella. Perhaps this is what could have spurred VN's imagination, together with certain gothic undertones with incest fantasies (which had already been hinted at in "The Gift"), providing an overdetermined unconscious association to the name, "Lolita," something that is rather insignificant considering the major distinctions between these two works.
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* Nabokov pokes a sleeping angel in paradise, using a "green umbrella." Even in Arcadia ultraviolet rays damage the skin...
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JM:When I brought up Hugh Well's "A Door in the Wall," I was not particularly entranced by any "green symbolism" (life, traffic signals, recurrent esmeraldic mentions*), nor similarities in "cut and intonation," in his sentences and another author's (valuable indicators as they undoubtedly are & as it has been amply demonstrated here.) Usually Nabokov's colors come in all sorts of shades and grades, they seldom stand alone as "a green" this and that if not in a parodical mood.
I related the door to a magic opening with its regular reappearance along the subject's life, together with his various reactions to such an overture into "arcadia" and "paradise," an "intimation" which, so I thought, was shared by Well and Nabokov.
This effect would not directly influence VN's style, but it might be echoed "cryptomnemonically." Instead of cryptomnesia's involuntary plagiarism, it would indicate a common emotional source alied to a particular image, in this case, a door. There are examples of that in "Glory", "A Visit to the Museum" and etc.
I haven't re-read Maar's articles and the 18 pages of an Ur-Lolita, but I seem to remember there was a similar door, or an opening, in this German short novella. Perhaps this is what could have spurred VN's imagination, together with certain gothic undertones with incest fantasies (which had already been hinted at in "The Gift"), providing an overdetermined unconscious association to the name, "Lolita," something that is rather insignificant considering the major distinctions between these two works.
...................................
* Nabokov pokes a sleeping angel in paradise, using a "green umbrella." Even in Arcadia ultraviolet rays damage the skin...
Search archive with Google:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
Visit "Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
Manage subscription options: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/