Sent: Saturday, September 13, 2008 7:03 PM
Subject: [NABOKOV-L] Le Jeu de Robin et Marion, PS
Dear List,
A new information about Adam de la Halle
disclosed one more coincidence. The thirteenth-century poet and
musician from the city of Arras, born at a time when "the knightly
ritual was dead", was not not only called Adan
d'Arras, but also Adan, le Bossus (
bosse:a hump, ie, hunchback), the son of Henri le Bossus..
Here is the serendipitous sentence in TRLSK:
"The
Funny Mountain was
completed, then Albinos in Black and then his third and last
short story, The Back of the Moon. You remember that
delightful character in it — the meek little man waiting for a train
who helped three miserable travellers in three different ways? This Mr
Siller is perhaps the most alive of Sebastian's creatures and is
incidentally the final representative of the 'research theme', which I
have discussed in conjunction with The Prismatic Bezel and Success.
It is as though a certain idea steadily growing through two books
has now burst into real physical existence, and so Mr Siller makes his
bow, with every detail of habit and manner, palpable and unique — the
bushy eyebrows and the modest moustache, the soft collar and the Adam's
apple 'moving like the bulging shape of an arrased
eavesdropper', the brown eyes, the wine-red veins on the big strong
nose, 'whose form made one wonder whether he had not lost his
hump somewhere'; the little black tie and the old
umbrella ('a duck in deep mourning); the dark thickets in the nostrils;
the beautiful surprise of shiny perfection when he removes his hat [...]
There are false clues all over
TRLSK: Nabokov was careful to inform English-readers about SK's
deceiving Mr.Goodman in relation to Chekhov, whereas he didn't bother
to clarify his references to Hamlet, which arise all over V's novel.
Nosebag (Abeson) is a character in SK's
first novel ( "Cock Robin Hits Back" or "Prismatic Bezel"). Big-nosed
and "bagless" Mr. Siller is a character
in "The Back of the Moon". He merely shares with Mr.Silberman ( the
stranger in a train of the "robisonada" lucky strike), a pair of "bushy
eyebrows" and a restless Adam's apple.
As Priscilla Meyer pointed out:
"To take Silberman's echoing Mr. Siller
as V.'s attempt to write a novel by 'plundering' Sebastian's work
collapses the complexity of Nabokov's careful construction of themes of
magic and the transcendent..." (Black and Violet Words, Nabokov
Studies 4, 1997,p.47).
These two gentlemen belong to distinct
universes (SK's and V's). Adam de la
Halle doesn't belong to any transcendetal theme, either. He wrote comic
operas, musical comedies and the names he chose might have later
inspired Robin Hood's nursery-rhymes. Probably not... Marion and Robin
are unheroic peasants. A knight hits Robin ("me donna telle colée") but
Robin never manages to hit him back...