Subject
making a closure instead of...
From
Date
Body
Speak Memory, pages 11-12 ( Foreword)
"Certain tight parentheses have been opened and allowed to spill their still active contents. Or else an object, which had been a mere dummy chosen at random and of no factual significante in the account of an important event, * kept bothering me every time ... until the arbitrary spectacles were metamorphosed into a clearly recalled oystershell-shaped cigarette case... my father had netted a Peacock butterfly very scarce..." .
Any PF reader could proceed associatively from, say, decoy onto nacreous, iridule, spectacles and death, either closing a circle, or admitting a spiraling thrust leading nowhere.
The sentence above could close the mystery about any pink mother-of pearl's lights on a shell by choosing, instead of the word that begins with a nacreous "mother" some more paternal synonim like "oystershell".
Then the allusions in PF would be merely indicating a hawkmoth and a peacock butterfly on "The Chemin du Pendu".
But our hangman ( an important Tarot-card?) may go for a nap and allow us to go on, perhaps searching for Bera range and an iridule hovering over its glittering summits and hiding a fountain ...
Initially I saw the cigarette case ( which makes its appearance I cannot recollect now where, if in Bend Sinister or in Pale Fire itself) shaped as a shell, not as an indeterminate oval or rectangle. Therefore I imagined for it the ever present Botticellian Lolita rising from the foam on a madeleine, instead of recognizing the material box...
Jansy
*- I'm certain that well-read anti-Freudian Nabokov is here indirectly referring to Freud's article on "Paramnesia" in which an insignificant object is used to hide from our memory another important scene.
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"Certain tight parentheses have been opened and allowed to spill their still active contents. Or else an object, which had been a mere dummy chosen at random and of no factual significante in the account of an important event, * kept bothering me every time ... until the arbitrary spectacles were metamorphosed into a clearly recalled oystershell-shaped cigarette case... my father had netted a Peacock butterfly very scarce..." .
Any PF reader could proceed associatively from, say, decoy onto nacreous, iridule, spectacles and death, either closing a circle, or admitting a spiraling thrust leading nowhere.
The sentence above could close the mystery about any pink mother-of pearl's lights on a shell by choosing, instead of the word that begins with a nacreous "mother" some more paternal synonim like "oystershell".
Then the allusions in PF would be merely indicating a hawkmoth and a peacock butterfly on "The Chemin du Pendu".
But our hangman ( an important Tarot-card?) may go for a nap and allow us to go on, perhaps searching for Bera range and an iridule hovering over its glittering summits and hiding a fountain ...
Initially I saw the cigarette case ( which makes its appearance I cannot recollect now where, if in Bend Sinister or in Pale Fire itself) shaped as a shell, not as an indeterminate oval or rectangle. Therefore I imagined for it the ever present Botticellian Lolita rising from the foam on a madeleine, instead of recognizing the material box...
Jansy
*- I'm certain that well-read anti-Freudian Nabokov is here indirectly referring to Freud's article on "Paramnesia" in which an insignificant object is used to hide from our memory another important scene.
Search the archive: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/archives/nabokv-l.html
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