JM: You are absolutely right. We must remember the third party: either seeing similarities where there are none, or being misled by them. I only didn't want to drag in lots of details ( mirror games, triptych, conjuring tricks produce myriads of disparate effects) because I feared no one would read a long message.

What struck me yesterday, something so obvious as to make my message seem rather silly, was the impression that we sometimes see merely as a "doubling" that which is altogether different from watching a character look at his mirror reflection, or trying to establish a analogical correspondences ( for example: between a diamond swallow, a skimming swallow and a lady that wants to swallow her partner...).

Of course, there are such doublings, analogies and even verbal and visual "palindromes". There are split characters whose parts seem to lead independent lives. The "eyes" staring at us in a butterfly wing may not only deceive an animal predator, but enchant a scientist who describes "mimetism" and sees the butterfly.

VN was a conjuror, though, "doing it with mirrors" ( as in a novel by Agatha Christie). He could make us believe that an object disappeared and see something that never existed as if it were present and real.

We all seem to agree that Gradus was invented by Kinbote, a figure of speech swinging from one paragraph to another. We don't question the concreteness of an ashen fluff nor the materiality of Pale Fire's index cards. John Shade altered names in his poem: was there really a young-woman called "Hazel Shade"?

In KQK, a "chauffeur" gets killed and not the King, but he looks as unimportant as a sacrificed pawn ( this might result from a certain effect of "mimetism") .

We look at the dog ( Tom represented "the outside world" once!), at Dreyer and at Martha, while we may forget that her ancestor had been accused of drowning his first wife while we, simultaneously, follow her schemes to drown a husband.

It is my impression that Nabokov revealed certain conjuring tricks in his early novels, but grew progressively as an enchanter and a Houdini in his later work.

Here is the full quote of Martha's almost harmless first deceiving:

"Among them was the magnificent portrait of a noble-looking gentleman, with sidewhiskers ( & a morning coat and a cane). Right beside it, on the dining-room wall, she placed a daguerreotype of her grandfather...he also had sidewhiskers (& a morning coat and a cane); and his proximity to the sumptuous oil ( signed by Heinrich von Hildenbrand) neatle transformed the latter into a family portrait. "Grandpa," Martha would say, indicating the genuine article with a wave of her hand that indolently included in the arc it described the anonymous nobleman to whose portrait the deceived guest's gaze shifted" (763/764).