CCC's edition, page 798, brings the reference
I made to Sci Fiction time-travel: "he pictured it so vividly that for a split
second he saw before him his own receding back, saw his hand, saw himself
opening the door, and because that sensation was a foray into the future, and it
is forbidden to ransack the future, he was swiftly punished... " On
the same page we also find the word
"Libidettes" ( not used in the Russian original, as D.B.Johnson
informed me off-list) : "brought a little silver case with
Libidettes ( Vienese cigarettes)"
Now, the links between "automaton",
"caroussel/vertigo/spinning", "Doom/Fate" and
"death and sexual arousal and extasis" are a bit tricky, but
they are clearly there...For starters ( or
continuing with last posting's quotations or references on automaton
gardener and Red Admirals:)
1. "Dreyer abruptly returned to the mortaility of a
winter morning, and with desperate haste, as if he were dealing with an
infernal machine, stopped the alarm clock that was about to
ring."( 829)
After almost being killed
in an accident on a winter night ( Icarus totally smashed and chauffer dead) we
find dream versus mortal life ( ie: waking life), plus alarm clock
as a "machine infernale" ( title of a play by Cocteau, dealing with Oedipus but,
eloquently, also about Deus ex-Machina fateful
interventions.)
2 .790: "saturated with sweat,
limp with delicious languor, moving with the slow motion of a
sleepwalker called back to his rumpled warm pillow, Franz went back to
bed... ( connect with automaton and
vertigo)
3. "She began teaching him obstinately and fervidly...the
specious grace and pace she was teaching him enslaved
him totally: now he could no longer disobey the sound whose mystery he had
solved. Vertigo became a habitual and pleasurable state, an
automaton's somnambulic languor, the law of his existence; now Martha
would gently exult...
( a little before we have a penile
gnomons: looking down the while with an intent
smile, as though following the motions and growth of an already distinct
shadow...instead the erect poise ...
(843)
4. "However neither did Dreyer, nor Miss Reich ( who had her own dreadful
troubles), nor anyone at all in the world ever found out that the lonely and
homesick inventor happened to live in the very same room where Franz had spent
the night of his arrival; where a great ash tree, now leafless, was
visible from the window; and where one could notice, if one looked very
carefully, that some minute glass dust [Franz broke his
glasses when staying in the room] had become imbedded in the cracks of
the linoleum by the washstand. It is significant that
Fate should have lodged him there of all places. It was
a road that Franz had travelled - and all at once Fate remembered and sent
in pursuit this practically nameless man who of course knew nothing of his
important assignment, and never found out anything about it, as for
that matter no one else ever did, not even old Enricht... The inventor smirked
indulgently in response and resumed his explanations...'What was that?', he
interrupted. 'The noble slowness of a sleepwalker's progress?'
...'Go on, go on,' Dreyer
said, closing his eyes. 'This is pure witchcraft'.
" (814-15)