Beside "(Lo)litophanies" and epiphanies, I
found that various other references to cosmology & religion
were brought up close to a "copulation" ( Bend
Sinister, Lolita, Pale Fire, Ada), similarly to James Joyce's choices in
"Ulysses"*.
In Bend Sinister
we find "transparent cosmogonists" set close to "jerk-jerk
flies": cosmogonists with transparent heads keep [... passing through
each other's vibrating voids, while, all around, various frames of reference
pulsate with Fitz-Gerald contractions[ ...] How many of us have begun building
anew — or thought they were building anew! [...] on the
bright polished floor where the flies played (I settle and you buzz
by; then I buzz up and you settle; then jerk-jerk-jerk; then we both buzz
up).
And, also in
B.S, "infinite space" points to Blaise Pascal ( here, instead of the
two buzzing flies, there is a couple similarly engaged:"He, the tackler,
held Laocoon, and a brittle shoulder-blade, and a small rhythmical hip, in his throbbing
coils through which glowing globules were travelling
in secret, and her eyes were closed", ch.4)
when we read: " the swooning galaxies — those mirrors of infinite space
qui m'effrayent, Blaise**, as they did
you, and where Olga is not, but where mythology stretches strong circus
nets, lest thought, in its ill-fitting tights, should break its old neck instead
of rebouncing with a hep and a
hop..."
In Ada, or Ardor the reference is to a
philosopher's "Germanic grace"[ Kant?] and to Van and Ada's "black divan",
"Now mentioned for the
first time — though both had been tacitly using it as an orientator or as a
right hand painted on a transparent signboard that a philosopher’s orbitless
eye, a peeled hard-boiled egg cruising free, but sensing which of its ends is
proximal to an imaginary nose, sees hanging in infinite space;
whereupon, with Germanic grace, the free eye sails around the glass sign and
sees a left hand shining through — that’s the
solution!"
Also
in Ada, a Lacoon-rythm of throbbing coils and glowing globules,
as in BS, joins time and (who knows?) the rythms and
concavities of sex : "Maybe the
only thing that hints at a sense of Time is rhythm
[...] The regular throb itself merely brings
back the miserable idea of measurement, but in between, something like true Time
lurks. How can I extract it from its soft hollow?
[...] I can listen to Time
only between stresses, for a brief concave moment warily and worriedly, with the
growing realization that I am listening not to Time
itself but to the blood current coursing through my brain,
and thence through the veins of the neck heartward, back to the seat of private
throes which have no relation to Time.
Returning to the theme, "Lithophanies", there is
an additional example, in ADA: [...] our awareness of being is not a dot in eternity, but a slit, a
fissure, a chasm running along the entire breadth of metaphysical time,
bisecting it and shining [...] between the back panel and fore panel
[...] we simply cannot expect a second nothing, a second
void, a second blank
The reference
in Pale Fire to: 'a faint phosphorescence at first, a
pale light in the dimness of bodily life, and a dazzling radiance after
it' (Everyman's Library, page 227,note to
line 549) calls to my mind Kinbote's words about Shade's poem (
Foreword, page 14): "a small fraction of the composition
he saw in a glass, darkly" (St.Paul, Corinthians
1.13).
................
* - Nabokov once wrote that a work of fiction exists only insofar as it
affords him aesthetic bliss, but he also applied the word “bliss” to erotic
ecstasy both in “The Enchanter” and in “Lolita”, where
the expressions “enchantment” and “magic” are charged with sexual connotations. James Joyce considered “all art as a
shadow of the Incarnation” and borrowed from the Catholic religion the term
“epiphany”, which, in some respects, is strongly reminiscent of VN’s experience
of “aesthetic bliss”. "By an epiphany" Joyce's protagonist Stephen Hero
means "a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech
or of gesture or in memorable phrase of the mind itself”, and that “it was for
the man of letters to record those epiphanies with extreme care, seeing that
they themselves are the most delicate and evanescent of moments."
** - Mirrors, lights
and shadows called to my mind a Jesuit, Athanasius Kircher, who might
have appealed to Nabokov ( he invented a fantastic system to interpret
hyerogliphs and even wrote about Oedipous) Cf. The Great Art of Light and
Shadow (Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae), first published in
1646, in which Kircher wrote about perspective
and "scenographic projection: " if a great light appears from the same
place where shadows are depicted, the image offends the eyes, as shadows
necessarily exist in opposition to light. Again, if an image is made
catoptrically (with mirrors), and set up to be seen from below, it will
not exhibit the same charm as when it is observed from above, and likewise what
is done optically, if seen from above, will seem less
perfect."