Hafid Bouazza.: While you are discussing Wells'
influence on Nabokov (pity no one seems to have read his short story 'The Moth',
which I have pointed out a while ago: it is more important than any green door),
I want to show Nabokov's influence on others. On Martin Amis, especially... "Her
hands mimed their defencelessness as the great muscles rippled and plunged along
Vernon's powerful back"....A strong echo of Nabokov's in Despair: "From my magical point of vantage I watched the ripples running and
plunging along my muscular back" [...] MA:" Vernon always felt
desperately ashamed afterwards, and would be a limp spectre of embarrassment and
remorse at breakfast the following day." That 'limp spectre of
embarrassment...etc.' reminds me strongly of Nabokov...I am sure he used 'limp
spectre of' at least once, but I cannot pinpoint any passage...Amis' whole
erotic story seems to draw heavily from the sexual part in Despair when the
narrator dwells on his 'dissociation' during love-making (chapter
two).
Sandy Klein's link to Prison Proxy ( March 5, 2010 -
Rereading Like Nabokov, Texas Inmate): "The author Vladimir
Nabokov once said (and I paraphrase) that novels shouldn't merely be read, but
rather, reread multiple times so that once can hold the novel in his mind, in
its entirety, like a painting...The other night, though, I was listening to an
old song on the radio, and, noting the way that I was holding the song in my
mind, I got to thinking about the possibility of Nabokov's rereading reasoning
applying to other forms of art....When I now listen to, and view, the song as it
spans across my points of former and current appreciation, I see it rendered in
3-D through the prism of growth and experience. Isn't that related to the
dynamic described by Nabokov?"
JM: I picked up Martin Amis'
'excursions' collected under the title: "Visiting Mrs
Nabokov." Before I began my search I found a list
of pencilled notes about particular words I needed to search in a
dictionary to fit them into their context: "bowdlerize, phutted,
stafing, shattered stanctions, plinthed, flange, spavined..." It gave me a
Nabokovian tingling sensation on re-reading them.
Those are convincing paralles, HB ("ripples running and
plunging") and a curious insertion of the "limp spectre of" (a
spooky giveaway) by Amis. I
remember spectres, spectral, and spectacles (the delicious KQK
"respectables" series of lapsi) and, of course, prisms and photographers in VN.
There are limp hands (which always remind me of Uriah Heep's handshake), limp
sleeves, greensleeves and,of course, Shade (and Pnin?) have a limp.
Nabokov often brings up feet (I was told Trilby's were
perfect) and slippers and shoes, or barely
noticeable limps. I don't think any of these will be of help to
Hafid's investigation and sensitivity to words and sonorous iterations, but I
decided to set them down anyway.
I enjoyed Prison Proxy's testimony of his jewelled
bejailed maturation with an almost synesthetic connection bt.
sound and images, "like a painting kept in the mind."
The three-dimensional aspect is less close to
painting than to sculpture and music, but one must remember that paintings,
for Nabokov, may be penetrated and rendered in 3-D and served by
multimidiatic invisible resources. There's still a lot of mysteries to
explore...