Dear List,
After I described VN's lines, in his Gogol biography,
about a Chinese The Thousand Pieces Execution ["cut
out from the patient's body one tiny square bit... (all of them selected...so as
to have the patient live to the nine hundred ninety ninth piece) ...his
whole body was delicately
removed"] the familiar alliance bt. sex,
death,art gained a new twist when I noticed how often a kind of "human
sacrifice" is associated to art inVN's various novels ( Shade's
death in Pale Fire, also Quilty's murder and HH's
subsequent Confessions - not counting Lolit's and HH's own, Luzhin's
suicide before his final move, Nina in Spring in Fialta).
I wonder now about when it doesn't occur in that
"sacrificial" way ( the death of Ada's lovers, for example, Hugh Person in
TT, Chorb's ritual return...) with or without
regret.
J.Aisenberg: I found the pages, at
last! From his analysis of Gogol’s transformations of
“a queer vehicle” that starts as a “fat-cheeked watermelon set upon wheels” to roll as
“a dream melon” into a dream town until,
upon its arrival it “becomes a definite species of
carriage”, ie, a britzka, we can watch it resume its
travels in ADA: The cook’s niece Blanche jumped out of a pumpkin-hued police van
(long, long after midnight, alas); the station man banged shut … all six doors of every
carriage… of pumpkin origin, fused together; Blanche rushed
down the corridor and lost a miniver-trimmed slipper on
the grand staircase, like Ashette in the English version.” Even in
"Speak Memory" VN describes a coachman's livery with the round folds
of a pumpkin.
Cinderella also rides through Mariette in BS:
"the little slattern, moving and dusting in a dream,
always ivory pale and unspeakably tired after last night's ball;…a number of
seedy-looking pumps, a girl's tiny slipper trimmed with moth-eaten squirrel
fur…”(my thanks to A.Bouazza for this
reference), and we may find her in Lolita, or in Pnin, where a shoe is again
associated to vert-verre-vrai-vair applied to eye-color, glass, truth, squirrels
and slippers ...
Nevertheless, Nabokov wrote ( chapter Our Mr. Chichikov, pages 93 a 95):
"Madame Korobochka is as much like Cinderella as Paulo
Chichikov is like Pickwick. The melon she emerges from can hardly be said to be
related to the fairy pumpkin. It becomes a brtizka just before her emergence,
probably for the same reason that the crowing of the cock became a whistling
snore [...]"
Cinderella’s pumpkin is sometimes suggested by the
round sound of words, like “pompon” and “pumps” - we shall find referred
to other meanings in KQK's slippers- and not by any intrinsic imagetic
value. It also occurs by juxtaposed or migratory
verbal images. (VN writes, in ADA,"the
ludicrous…mistake of the Signy-Mondieu analysts consists in their regarding a
real object, a pompon, say, or a pumpkin as a significant
abstraction of the real object.”. We have already found Mariette's
"seedy-looking pumps, a girl's tiny
slipper...")
In ADA the lascivious servant, Blanche, becomes a sexualized parody of
Cinderella, like Mariette in Bend Sinister. M. Roth
recently sent me "a note regarding ancillary servants. You might recall
that Kinbote calls the Shades' maid "ancillula," and imagines that she wants
Shade to make a pass at her, so there too we have a sexual servant."
As I see it, Cinderella, Blanche and other servants might function as a
personification of Nabokov's observation that sex is but a servant, “an
ancilla of art”, in his invectives against “shams and shamans”.
Jansy Mello (she)