A genital reference -- schoolboy rant -- with Shakespearean pedigree.


See Ada 271-2


        "Zhe tampri (please)!"

        "Yes," said Van.  "it all started as a rag, you know, up at Chose, but
then --"



        297  "the time he had refused to show her some silly Chose snapshots
of punt girls"


        405  "In the next three stills <italic>la force des choses</italic>
("the fever of intercoures") had sufficiently disturbed the lush
herbage"


And the word "thing" is genitalized throughout Ada in various
combinations, as it is elsewhere in Nabokov (probably not in the title
Transparent Things, though).


Now whether the filthy intent is to be attributed to Nabokov, Van, the
writer of this note or all three of us (I would be proud of the
company) is a matter of interpretation.


E. Naiman




<excerpt>-------- Original Message -------- Subject: RE: Brian Boyd on
Chose in ADA Date: Thu, 31 Oct 2002 16:28:18 +1300 From: "Brian Boyd
(FOA ENG)" <<mailto:b.boyd@auckland.ac.nz><<b.boyd@auckland.ac.nz> To:
"'Vladimir Nabokov Forum'"
<<mailto:NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU><<NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU>


<fontfamily><param>Times_New_Roman</param>ö</fontfamily><fontfamily><param>Arial</param><color><param>0000,0000,FFFF</param>"Chose"
is a puzzling name, and didn't come up in association with Cambridge in
my searches for annotating ADA or for the Nabokov biography (which
included scouring through, e.g., old issues of Granta, now a famous
literary journal but in Nabokov's time just a local student
magazine--named, of course, after the local term for the Cam, and
supplying the river  Ranta  associated in ADA with Chose).


I'm afraid Alexey's conjecture about "chose" and Les Fleurs du Mal
seems most unlikely;  chose  is as common in French as  thing  in
English or  veshch'  in Russian and could be found in other texts in
more or less close proximity to Aqua (such as A la Recherche du temps
perdu).


I offer from my Annotations to ADA one likely, but perhaps incomplete,
explanation, and one unlikely, that nevertheless involves  Chose  as
(albeit temporarily) the name for a town.


<bold>ööööööööööö 18.24: Chose:</bold> This proves to be Antiterran for
Cambridge, England, although the reason remains unclear. Perhaps
because of the expression "Hobson's choice," from the practice of
Thomas Hobson (1544-1631), the famous "university carrier" at
Cambridge, who when he hired out horses made each customer "choose" the
horse nearest the door. Milton wrote two poems on the death of Hobson,
whose name--as Nabokov would have known from his years there as a
student (1919-22)--is commemorated around Cambridge in, for instance,
Hobson's Conduit and Hobson's Brook (also known as the Cambridge New
River).


ööööööööööö Though this seems an even less likely connection, I note it
anyway, since it shows "Chose" playing, even if briefly, the part of a
town's name. In <italic>Villette</italic> (1853), by Charlotte Bronte
(1816-55), narrator Lucy Snowe hears Ginevra Fanshawe declare: "`I was
excessively happy at Bonn!' `And where are you now?' I inquired.//`Oh!
at - <italic>chose</italic>,' said she. Now Miss Ginevra Fanshawe (such
was this young person's name) only substituted this word
`<italic>chose</italic>' in temporary oblivion of the real name. It was
a habit she had: `<italic>chose</italic>' came in at every turn in her
conversation - the convenient substitute for any missing word in any
language she might chance at the time to be speaking. French girls
often do the like; from them she had caught the custom.
`<italic>Chose</italic>,' however, I found, in this instance, stood for
Villette - the great capital of the great kingdom of Labassecour." (Ch.
6) Villette in fact is a version of Brussels.


I should add that the only place name on Terra rather than the
antiterras of fictionö that is called  Villette  is in Vaud Canton,
between Montreux, where Nabokov lived while writing ADA, and Lausanne,
where he would visit his tailor every year to have new shorts made for
him for butterfly hunting. Passing Villette so often for this and other
reasons COULD have piqued Nabokov s curiosity to read the novel. But
it s improbable, and even if he did, offers no link with Cambridge.


</color></fontfamily>-----Original Message-----

<bold>From:</bold> Donald Johnson
[<<mailto:chtodel@cox.net>mailto:chtodel@cox.net]

<bold>Sent:</bold> Thursday, 31 October 2002 3:46 p.m.

<bold>To:
</bold><<mailto:NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU>NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU

<bold>Subject:</bold> [Fwd: Quelques Fleurs du Mal]


<paraindent><param>right,left</param>EDNOTE. An idle thought. Does
anyone know--especially you Brits---if "Chose" was ever used as a
önick-name for Cambridge. I wonder because "Ardvaark" is used in ADA
for Harvard and is, in fact, an old nickname for Harvard.

-------- Original Message -------- Subject: Quelques Fleurs du Mal
Date: Thu, 31 Oct 2002 01:14:50 +0300 From: "alex"
<<mailto:sklyarenko@users.mns.ru><<sklyarenko@users.mns.ru> To:
"Vladimir Nabokov Forum"
<<mailto:NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU><<NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU>


Dear all,

I apologize, if somebody has already explored the following issue:

ö

In 1.3 (Part One, Chapter 3)öof <italic>Ada</italic>, after she has
fled fromöa mad house (her current "home") and has reached Demon's
country house at Kitezh, pooröAqua sees a glass container with talc
powder colorfully marked Quelques Fleursöstanding on her former bedside
table. Why this name ("some flowers") is "colorful" and what it is in
factöcommemorating remains unclear until much later, namely 1.28 of the
novel. In the first sentence of this chapter Aqua is parenthetically
mentioned and, a page or two lateröin that chapter,öVan, her putative
son, goes to Chose University in England where he wants to study
psychiatry so as to understand the nature of Aqua's mental illness that
has caused her to commit a suicide.

So, here is "Chose", another quaint name.

And still later in that chapter there isöreminiscence of Baudlelaire's
poem <italic>Le crepuscule du matin</italic> (from his book <italic>Les
Fleurs du Mal</italic>), the line ten of which goes:

ö

L'air est plein du frisson des <bold>choses</bold> qui s'enfuient

ö("The air is full oföthrill of things that are passing away" - if I
translate it right from one language which I don't know at all into
another which I know only slightly).

ö

Thus, if I'm not mistaken, Van's Universityöreceived itsöname after a
word in Baudelaire's poem and Aqua's talc powder was named in honor of
the title of the book containing that poem.

I may addöthat Quelque Chose (a kickshaw, something attractive)öwould
be a possible nameöfor a talc powder (at least, it seems to me, the
Frenchless,öso), while Quelques Fleurs, though perfectly colorless,
sounds (to me) rather strange.

I apologize foröpossible (and inevitable) mistakes and the absence of
the accent aigu above the first "e" inö<italic>crepuscule</italic>.

ö

best regards to everybody,

Alexey

ö

Alexey Sklyarenko,
<<mailto:sklyarenko@users.mns.ru>sklyarenko@users.mns.ru

ööööööööööö

</paraindent></excerpt>