John Morris wrote: ... "the only riddle" is highly ironic. Its immediate reference is: How could the lemon appear in "reality," if Simpson never actually entered the painting -- that is, if Frank's confession of having painted his former friend into the frame is correct? On that interpretation, the lemon is the only inexplicable fact, the only riddle."

JM: VN lays a trap when he describes at least twice Simpson's "mad eyes". After all, the story leaves McGore's affliction quite clear concerning his own experience of "entering a painting". So we find that, after having heard the Colonel remark that "Poor Simpson has disappeared without a trace.", McGore "suddenly stopped short with a shocked tremor...He looked at the rags with the paint sticking to them .. and tossed them out the window...ran his palm across his forehead with a frightened glance at the Colonel - who, interpretating his agitation differently..." (page 113).

Not only Simpson has "mad eyes" but he "staggered awkwardly, like an alarmed lunatic" after Frank found him on the top of a table, with outspread arms, "prepared to fly to her". In contrast, the narrator's cool appraisal informs us that Simpson is "a man of morbidly rapturous temperament...for him, impressionability took the place of intellect", but omits any direct reference to McGore's beliefs or to the rag he had tossed out into the garden (probably where Simpson and the lemon were found by the gardener).

I didn't research the dates :it would be interesting to compare McGore's description and the 'doubling of space-time' in "The Visit to the Museum", so different in handling from what happens in "La Veneziana", or in John Shade's dream and abandoned shoe, or in "The Gift". I was hoping that the specific moments in which VN "called in" the reader ( or, rather, "called out" ) - thereby warning that his story, like the painting it describes, is also a literary work of art, therefore "impenetrable" - could yield a clue about VN's "careful structuring" and also about what John Morris describes as "a device to help readers experience a bizarre straddling-between, or double-consciousness."

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