100.04-05: (the folds of tenses are badly
disarranged in regard to the building under examination): The folds of time and
space, into which people, things and events disappear and out of
which they come are one of the major themes. Cf. "[H]e fumbled for
things in the bathwater of space, groping for the transparent soap of evasive
matter. . ."; "[I]ts button had disappeared among the folds and furrows of
space" (Ch. 4). "Rimiform" is chosen as one of the rare
words that trouble HP (Ch. 19) probably because its meaning is "shaped like a
narrow furrow." In the earlier part of the last chapter, such "folds of
time" are repeatedly emphasized.
100.08-09: the younger of the two
waiters: He stole a case of Dôle and got fired in the previous
chapter. He sets fire to the hotel.
100.09-10: a black patch masked the grim
captain's left eye: like a pirate captain. Now we
remember seeing a notorious pirate "Blackbeard" as the
blackbearded secretary, Tamworth--in Ch. 10, he is called "Mr. Tamworth of the
brigand's beard," though. Blackbeard (1680?--1718) was the nickname of
Edward Teach alias Edward Thatch, who reined the Caribbean Sea for a short
while. It is said that Captain Hook (Peter Pan's nemesis) was
Blackbeard's bosun.
Q: Does Captain Hook have a black
patch in addition to a hook?
100.12 a Bloody Ivan: Probably a pun on Bloody
Mary plus Ivan the Terrible. As Prince Igor is a bakery
in Ch. 17, Ivan IV turns into a cocktail.
100.18: (Tangled tenses again!):
Time and space are often tangled in this novella. Also "tangled time"
might be a pun on *A Tangled Tale* by Lewis Carroll whose middle name,
Ludwidge, appears in Ch. 12.
100.21-22: if ins and outs, doors and beds
still endured: "Ins and outs" probably has another meaning, but
I leave it to John. I would like to say that it is
described with a theatrical image. Cf. "That monumental man with
his clayey makeup and false grin, and Mr. Tamworth of the brigand's beard,
seemed to be acting out a stiffly written scene for the benefit of an invisible
audience from which
Person, a dummy, kept turning away as if moved with his
chair by Sherlock's concealed landlady" (Ch. 10); "Armande decreed they
regularly make love around teatime, in the living room, as upon an imaginary
stage" (Ch. 17). After many "ins and outs" on the stage, the sets such
as doors and beds are damaged.
101.01: the green figurine of a girl skier:
The figurine could be actually the same one that HP saw in the show window
when he came to Switzerland for the first time (Ch. 5). The
figurine was carved and colored by a convict named Armand. In Ch. 15, we
see Armande in a green ski suit just like the figurine.
101.01-02: which shone through the double kix: Brian Boyd's note to
"kix": "The husk of case of a chrysalis; hence, a protective
covering."
The double kix literally stands for the box and the wrapping
paper. It is also a kind of double cocoon that warps both time
(we are looking at the figurine that we saw 18 years ago)
and space (as if it were miniature Armande ).
101.08-10: A bunch of bellflowers and bluebonnets (their different shades
having a lovers' quarrel): The theme of colors in TT may reflect
Wittgenstein's interest in colors for the problem of limits and
understanding.
101.13: (sericanette): Seric, archaic, "Chinese." In a "Words" file Nabokov
kept, he marked off as used in TT "Sericana, region of SW China (in Milton)"
(Brian Boyd's note to the LoA edition).
Q: Why does VN use the word here?
101.12-13: in that landscape of serpents and caves two or three apple
seeds: The last Edenic motif.
101.26: a smudge of grease: The fat from hum "the lady with the
dog" feeds her spitz before she leaves the room.
101.23: an Amilcar: The Carthaginian general Amilcar (or Hamilcar) was the
father of Hannibal (Brian Boyd's note to the LoA edition). An Amilcar is a
French sports car. See also the "Amilcar" mail.
101.32-33: He pulled on his smart turtleneck: Cf. "He bought a nice gray
turtle neck sweater" (Ch. 13); "throwing in the turtleneck for style" (Ch. 14);
"Did he ever buy her a turtleneck sweater?" (Ch. 16).
102.10-11: just happily balancing on the soft brink of sleep: Cf.
"Persons might then straddle the middle stretch of the seesaw when considering
this or that object" (Ch. 1).
102.18-19: a child playing with wriggly refractions in brook water: Cf.
"He [Victor] placed various objects in turn — an apple, a pencil, a
chess pawn, a comb — behind a glass of water and peered through it at each
studiously: the red apple became a clear-cut red band bounded by a straight
horizon, half a glass of Red Sea, Arabia Felix. The short pencil, if held
obliquely, curved like a stylized snake, but if held vertically became
monstrously fat — almost pyramidal. The black pawn, if moved to and fro, divided
into a couple of black ants. The comb, stood on end, resulted in the glass's
seeming to fill with beautifully striped liquid, a zebra cocktail" (*Pnin* IV:
6).
102.23-26: Person, *this* person, was on the imagined brink of imagined
bliss when Armande's footfalls approached--striking out both "imagined" in the
proof's margin . . . . At this moment of her now indelible dawning: Half asleep,
as he used to do as a professional editor, HP
proofreads his thought and completes the draft in which his
death is "indelible."
102.26-29: This is where the orgasm of art courses through the whole spine
with incomparably more force than sexual ecstasy or metaphysical panic:
Cf: As I quoted before, "his eye and his spine
(the true reader's main organ) collaborating rather than occluding each other"
(Ch. 19); "In order to bask in that magic a wise reader reads the book of
genius not with his heart, not so much with his brain, but with his spine. It is
there that occurs the telltale tingle even though we must keep a little aloof, a
little detached when reading. Then with a pleasure which is both sensual and
intellectual we shall watch the artist build his castle of cards and watch the
castle of cards become a castle of beautiful steel and glass." "Good Readers and
Good Writers" in *Lectures on Literature*.
102.05-06: Here comes the air hostess bringing bright drinks, and she is
Armande: Cf. "her figure as trim as that of an air hostess" (Ch. 17).
102.13-15: our Person . . . groped for the light, but the click of the lamp
was as ineffective as the attempt to move a paralyzed limb: Cf. He groped for
the fallen lamp and neatly lit in its unusual position (Ch. 20).
102.21-22: The fire, . . . and then helped up by lighter fluid: Lighter
fluid is, of course, the fluid for a lighter. On the other hand,
"lighter" suggests Armande, who was described as "lightly followed light
Jacques" (Ch. 14).
102.27-29: Now flames were mounting the stairs, in parts, in trios, in
redskin file, hand in hand, tongue after tongue, conversing and humming happily:
"Humming happily" is from the first chapter: "novices fall through
the surface, humming happily to themselves." Here we see *Vege-Men's
Revenge* (See Don's article "Nabokov's Golliwoggs"), its
American-Indian variation, and *Magician's Apprentice,* which John
mentioned in his notes to Ch. 16.
102.31-33: excuse me, said a polite flamelet holding open the door: As I
wrote above, I think the flamelet is Armande. "Excuse me" is said by
Armande and Tamworth. But Tamworth is not dead as far as we know. And if he
should be a flame, he could not be a "flame*let*." Armande is called "this
little one" by Jacques (Ch. 14).
103.04-05: a long lavender-tipped flame danced up to stop him with a
graceful gesture of its gloved hand: Who is the long, elegant flame?
No one was related with lavender--M. Chamar paints her brows in purple, and
Mrs. Frankard Iis she also dead?) has a painting of mauve snowflakes,
but they are not long. Almande is the only person who is gloved,
but she could not be said "long" either and she is another
flame.
103.07-09: one of his last wrong ideas was
that those were the shouts of people anxious to help him, and not the howls of
fellow men: The fellow men are those unlucky few who perish in the fire? Or
the ghosts watching HP dying? The line reminds us of the ending of
*The Invitation to a Beheading*: "Cincinnatus made his way in that direction
where, to judge by the voices, stood beings akin to him."
103.09-13: Rings of blurred colors circled around him, reminding him
briefly of a childhood picture in a frightening book about triumphant vegetables
whirling faster and faster around a nightshirted boy trying desperately to awake
from the iridescent dizziness of dream life: As I wrote in the notes to Ch. 24,
the picture book is *The Vege-Men's Revenge* discussed by Don. The heroine, Miss
Poppy Cornflower, is surrounded by the raging vege-men. “Swifter and swifter
twine their clinging feet, / A Dervish dance by color made complete, / Only a
tinted whirlpool now they seem, / The whirring sound becomes the storm-wind’s
scream. / The yellow light / is blurred to sight, / ‘Tis like the nightmare of a
troubled dream.” "Poppy awakens from her nightmare; Hugh Person awakens
from his nightmarish life into his ghostly narrator’s dimension. " (from
Don's "Nabokov's Golliwoggs" on Zembla). We saw HP as a
nightshirted boy in "the spectral fits" in Ch. 7.
103.13-15: Its ultimate visioin was the incandescence of a book or a box
grown completely transparent and hollow: looks like a coffin. Now HP is dying
into the book, TT. Or he is going to experience "the incomparable pangs" in a
cocoon of the book and awaken into another state of being, into the fellow
ghosts who have been waiting for him in the beginning of the novella.
103.15: This is, I believe, *it*: The italicized "it" stands
for something unspeakable (Wittgenstein again!). In the world of TT,
where we (or they) have no mystery and everything is transparent, the only
thing the narrator cannot name is this *it*. I would like to write more
about that later.
103.21: Easy, you know, does it, son: The unnaturally inserted "you know"
and the address "son" prove the identity of the narrator.
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Thank you very much for reading all!
Akiko