Alain
Andreu's investigations demonstrate that LATH's narrator, Vadim, must have
suffered an undetected
dyslexia in his early years and, later, when he begins to write LATH, he's
become "an aphasic, plagued by serious memory problems
following a stroke." Andreu then asks: ..." if Vadim’s stroke at the end of the
story explains many things, one question remains: why did VN choose to write
it ?"
Yes,
this is a fundamental question: What kind of intellectual exercise did
VN indulge in when he chose to write
LATH?
Vadim confessed that "palm trees are all right
only in mirages..." and I venture the opinion that his book might also
be another mirage, like an Escher hand being drawn by a
second hand that is drawn by the first one. So, when Vadim
describes his great-aunt, the one who instructed him on how to
playbout the Harlequin game ( "Come on! Play! Invent the
world! Invent reality!") he
immediately follows her advice: " I invented my
grand-aunt in honor of my first
daydreams..."
Are
we back to anamorphosis?
A.Andrew reminds us that
"Vadim’s
principal problem, which he feels obliged to confess, hidden as a prelude to all
of his new conquests, consists of the impossibility of imagining himself, in the
center of moving from point H to
point P, stopping and then turning around to advance in the other direction,
reversing the perspective." ( he offers us a special explanation
to this problem at the end of his very stimulating article, wtih a
Bergsonian bonus, which I encourage L-participants to
read!).
I
wonder: The problem Vadim describes is it one of not being able to
imagine himself in a "reversed the perspective"?
Has this any relation to "a vision through the looking glass"?
Is it related to a frequent image chosen by VN in PF: that of being surrounded
by a reflecting and transparent glass-wall of
time?
Jansy