Subject
Fwd: the mulberry bush,
and perhaps the walrus (Lucette & posthumous frenzy?)
and perhaps the walrus (Lucette & posthumous frenzy?)
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----- Forwarded message from jansy@aetern.us -----
Date: Sun, 20 Feb 2005 11:22:08 -0300
From: Jansy Berndt de Souza Mello <jansy@aetern.us>
Dear Eric and List
There were several postings on falling leaves, evergreens and gingko which have
not appeared at the list by some capriciousness of the internet.
In my opinion Lucette is not as frenziedly envious as many of you are trying to
make her behave. She´d have to suffer from " erotomania" for this to make sense
and nothing in her story, while still alive, suggest this pathology.
She would also have to be a "young martyr": pure and innocent and virginal. She
has not had her hymen ruptured, that´s true, but she is far from virginal and
innocent in every other sense.
The littlle fey ( she was recovering from a serious illness when Van first set
his eyes on her and mistook her for "Ardelia" ) golden-brown-russet-green child
was a very normal little girl in Ada I, but became a kind of masochistic young
lady now associated with "bears" ( attention to the sound of "urs" in her
furs, too ), soon transformed again into at least a minute mermaid/undine
floating in a bubble.
Despite VN´s apparently not mentioning Jules Verne´s name, we find hints of
Phileas Fogg and also, although there are VN´s disparaging words on TSEliot he
often, if impatiently employs "the drowned Phoenician Sailor". But we don´t
need either Fogg or Phoenician sailors to reach Shakespeare´s " The Tempest",
" a pastoral play" and a "masque" and the lines: "...Those are pearls that were
his eyes/Nothing of him that doth fade/but that suffers a sea change/into
something rich and strange." - William Shakespeare, "The Tempest."
Lucette, i.e "small light", after the "Terror on Terra" could be an
anticipation of certain "lights" from French "illuminism". She could also
represent the fallen angel from Paradise ( "Lucifer" ). She might also be a
jealous Juno watching over Jupiter Olorinus couplings with Leda but then she´d
have had to be Jupiter´s wife in the first place...
Boyd has connected Lucette and Aqua by the phoetus sized rubber doll, but he has
considered Lucette as a kind of "substitute Van". Couldn´t we also think of her
as having become Aqua´s vengeful ghost watching over not Ada, but Marina?
It is exciting for me to watch how VN´s novels and stories undergo actual and
real changes whenever I read him and therefore one of the points for my
enjoyment with "ADA" comes from the various "rich and strange" transformations
he allows for without ever coming to a definite authoritative solution but just
as a spiraling state of permanent metamorphosis.
Jansy
----- Original Message -----
From: Donald B. Johnson
To: NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU
Sent: Sunday, February 20, 2005 12:47 AM
Subject: Fwdthe mulberry bush, and perhaps the walrus (Lucette & posthumous
frenzy?)
----- Forwarded message from naiman@socrates.berkeley.edu -----
Date: Sat, 19 Feb 2005 17:19:54 -0800
From: Eric Naiman <naiman@socrates.berkeley.edu>
>From Eric Naiman:
In light of the earlier discussion of the mulberry soap, it is worth
noticing its last usage in the novel:
A boxwood-lined path, presided over by a nostalgic-looking sempervirent
sequoia (which American visitors mistook for a "Lebanese cedar"-if they
remarked it at all) took them to the absurdly misnamed rue du Mûrier, where
a princely paulownia ("mulberry tree!" snorted Ada), standing in state on
its incongruous terrace above a public W.C., was shedding generously its
heart-shaped dark green leaves, but retained enough foliage to cast
arabesques of shadow onto the south side of its trunk.
We should definitely read this passage in keeping with Brian Boyd's reading
of III.8 -- to note the presence of Lucette that seems to be ignored by the
adulterous lovers. He points to the grebes with crests seen a few pages
later as evidence of Lucette's continued existence in the text. This
passage, with its reference to the mulberry and the W.C. seems to refer to
that earlier bathing passage, and we should note the generous leaf-dropping
that Boyd sees as a Lucette marker elsewhere in the book. Note, too, that
Lucette -- or Van? -- gives this passage a shimmer of indecency evident
once we see the reference to the earlier passage. (boxwood-lined path,
l-eban-ese cedar, the mulberry "standing in state" (as was the soap -- see
also the bawdy Malrow passage on 377 where Van is cursing "the condition
in which the image of the four embers of a vixen's cross had not solidly
put him": "One of the synonyms of "condition" is "state," and the
adjective "human" may be construed as "manly" etc.
I wonder about passages like this whether they might not show that Lucette
has been unable to overcome her Ophelian frenzy in death. If she is
responsible for that phallic walrus -- as Boyd suggested in his recent post
-- and she is still obsessed with mulberries standing in state, is her
generous "blessing" of Van and Ada's reunin at Mon Trou as comforting an
ending as it might once have seemed. Or might her "blessing" of Van and
Ada's reunion be even more disturbing -- is she not ever-present, a kind of
necessary third, observing the lovers just as she did earlier as a child.
If we accept the notion that Lucette's ghost -- or else -- going back to
what Van tells the dying Phillip -- pieces of Lucette -- bless or haunt the
period after her death (including the writing of the entire manuscript)
don't we have to see the novel as stating emphatically that yes, there is
lust after death, a kind of disembodied existence where we will only have
words to play with and will suffer the hell(?) of being continually aroused?
----- End forwarded message -----
EDNOTE: From the ever fertile mind of Eric Naiman. Malrow (Malraux) indeed!
The
mulberry tie-in is intriguing and merits investigation. Cf. those ginko
leaves.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>From Eric Naiman:
In light of the earlier discussion of the mulberry soap, it is worth noticing
its last usage in the novel:
A boxwood-lined path, presided over by a nostalgic-looking sempervirent
sequoia (which American visitors mistook for a "Lebanese cedar"-if they
remarked it at all) took them to the absurdly misnamed rue du Mûrier, where a
princely paulownia ("mulberry tree!" snorted Ada), standing in state on its
incongruous terrace above a public W.C., was shedding generously its
heart-shaped dark green leaves, but retained enough foliage to cast arabesques
of shadow onto the south side of its trunk.
We should definitely read this passage in keeping with Brian Boyd's reading of
III.8 -- to note the presence of Lucette that seems to be ignored by the
adulterous lovers. He points to the grebes with crests seen a few pages later
as evidence of Lucette's continued existence in the text. This passage, with
its reference to the mulberry and the W.C. seems to refer to that earlier
bathing passage, and we should note the generous leaf-dropping that Boyd sees
as a Lucette marker elsewhere in the book. Note, too, that Lucette -- or Van?
-- gives this passage a shimmer of indecency evident once we see the reference
to the earlier passage. (boxwood-lined path, l-eban-ese cedar, the mulberry
"standing in state" (as was the soap -- see also the bawdy Malrow passage on
377 where Van is cursing "the condition in which the image of the four embers
of a vixen's cross had not solidly put him": "One of the synonyms of
"condition" is "state," and the adjective "human" may be construed as "manly"
etc.
I wonder about passages like this whether they might not show that Lucette has
been unable to overcome her Ophelian frenzy in death. If she is responsible for
that phallic walrus -- as Boyd suggested in his recent post -- and she is still
obsessed with mulberries standing in state, is her generous "blessing" of Van
and Ada's reunin at Mon Trou as comforting an ending as it might once have
seemed. Or might her "blessing" of Van and Ada's reunion be even more
disturbing -- is she not ever-present, a kind of necessary third, observing the
lovers just as she did earlier as a child. If we accept the notion that
Lucette's ghost -- or else -- going back to what Van tells the dying Phillip --
pieces of Lucette -- bless or haunt the period after her death (including the
writing of the entire manuscript) don't we have to see the novel as stating
emphatically that yes, there is lust after death, a kind of disembodied
existence where we will only have words to play with and will suffer the
hell(?) of being continually aroused?
----- End forwarded message -----