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Fw: TT-17 Oriental customs
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----- Original Message -----
From: D. Barton Johnson
To: nabokv-l@listserv.ucsb.edu
Sent: Friday, September 24, 2004 9:12 PM
Subject: TT-17
Akiko's Note:
66.12-14: "if we recall the customs of certain Far Eastern people, virtually halfwits in many other respects:" What does VN has in mind as the customs? I
might be expected to figure it out as one from the Far East, but I must confess I have no idea (virtually half-witted!). "The contrast between the
fictitious and the factual" is, for example, the Chinese reversals associated with death in *The Gift*?
TT passage:
Hugh's mediocre potency might not have survived the ordeal had she concealed from him more
completely than she thought she did the excitement derived from the contrast between the fictitious and the factual -- a
contrast which after all has certain claims to artistic subtlety if we recall the customs of certain Far Eastern
people, virtually halfwits in many other respects. But his chief support lay in the never deceived expectancy of the dazed
ecstasy that gradually idolized her dear features, notwithstanding her efforts to maintain the flippant patter.
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EDNOTE. Akiko's Note calls attention to VN's (or Mr. R's) remark about "Far Eastern sexual customs" and ponders what customs these might be. A couple of passages from ADA (cited below) offer some clarification. VN apparently illustrates the "fictitious" and the "factual" distinction by reference to old Japanese prints such as the one I have attached. Although it is not particularly evident in this example, an examination of erotic shunga and ukiyo-e prints shows that the faces of the participants, especially females in frenzied couplings, very often display no emotion. This disjunction of strong emotion and stolid expression is presumably what VN has in mind in his account of Armande's sexual protocol. Although I know very little about such matters I would hazard that the Japanese dichotomy may be in some part a by-product of the limitations of woodblock printing as well as local traditions of sexual etiquette. Perhaps those better informed could enlighten us.
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ADA passages:
The collection of Uncle Dan's Oriental Erotica prints turned out to be artistically second-rate and inept calisthenically. In the most hilarious, and expensive, picture, a Mongolian woman with an inane oval face surmounted by a hideous hair-do was shown communicating sexually with six rather plump, blank-faced gymnasts in what looked like a display window jammed with screens, potted plants, silks, paper fans and crockery. Three of the males, contorted in attitudes of intricate discomfort, were using simultaneously three of the harlot's main orifices; two older clients were treated by her manually, and the sixth, a dwarf, had to be contented with her deformed foot. Six other voluptuaries were sodomizing her immediate partners, and one more had got stuck in her armpit. Uncle Dan, having patiently disentangled all those limbs and belly folds directly or indirectly connected with the absolutely calm lady (still retaining somehow parts of her robes), had penciled a note that gave the price of the picture and identified it as: 'Geisha with 13 lovers.' Van located, however, a fifteenth navel thrown in by the generous artist but impossible to account for anatomically.
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'- took place at coincident dates, we were just ordinary sisters, exchanging routine nothings, having little in common, she collecting cactuses or running through her lines for the next audition in Sterva, and I reading a lot, or copying beautiful erotic pictures from an album of Forbidden Masterpieces that we found, apropos, in a box of korsetov i khrestomatiy (corsets and chrestomathies) which Belle had left behind, and I can assure you, they were far more realistic than the scroll-painting by Mong Mong, very active in 888, a millennium before Ada said it illustrated Oriental calisthenics when I found it by chance in the corner of one of my ambuscades.
