GS: wrote
that "...VN's works refuse to decrease their
entropy..."
JM: I wish it were also in my power
to refuse subjection to entropy. On second
thoughts, though, I suppose that as long as readers
exist, VN's works shall be safe. But
I wonder now what did VN imply when he described an "irrevocably converging
development" in Ada or Ardor: A Family
Chronicle . In this novel time and space are split “because a gap of up to a hundred years one way or another existed
between the two earths; a gap marked by a bizarre confusion of directional
signs at the crossroads of passing time.” And yet both Terra
and Anti-Terra display “an essential sameness” and a “live organic reality”. Then, two
paragraphs later, we read that “two chess games with
identical openings and identical end moves might ramify in an infinite number of
variations, on one board and in two brains, at any middle stage of their
irrevocably converging development”. I think this assertion can be
as true for chess-matches as for the convergence of the parallel spaces of Terra
and Anti-Terra, or to the incestuous pair Van and
Ada. In chess all the pieces
in a particular match have to be placed onto the board right at the
beginning of a game. Despite “the infinite number of variations” that generate
the story of one´s life, a definite end is expected. This is not true for other
kinds of game, such as the Chinese “Go” in which pieces can be added in a
process of unceasing creation (Brazilian physicist Mario Novello believes that,
as models, both games are compatible with our present
reality). By bringing together
chess-games and novel Nabokov might have implied that, when his book
is examined by two brains - the author´s and the reader´s - a converging path
will emerge in the end, after the uncountable variations that every reading
allows are explored: will Terra and Anti-Terra come together in
infinity?
Following a different path ( but still thinking of Lucette as
a little mermaid swimming inside a bubble
of prosecco) I re-read H.G.Wells'
( 1899!) "The Crystal Egg" to find out more about
its "observed observer". The author ( careful to leave
the rigorous annotations to an unseeing scientist, so as to give the
observing reader the option to refuse the validity of what the
scientist annotated) offers us a vision of a world inside an egg
that carries itself as another egg lying inside itself. Next
he gives us an alternative: either the crystal egg is situated,
simultaneously, in two distinct worlds, or there are twin eggs that
establish a fraternal connection that allows an observer to be observed,
without one world interfering in the other ( or so it seemed at
first). While there are fiction readers in the world shall Hugh
Wells equally
resist?