Hafid Bouazza: Still
searching for 'a limp spectre' in Nabokov's works, I stumbled upon a... green
door! In fact, green doors. They are the doors of Elphinstone hospital (the poet
Oliver Goldsmith was born near Elphin, Ireland) : "- and Aurora had hardly
'warmed her hands,' as the pickers of lavender say in the country of my
birth, when I found myself trying to get into that dungeon again, knocking upon
its green doors, breakfastless, stool-less, in despair. "(Lolita,
II:22)
JM: This interesting example from
"Lolita" offers, for the first time, the idea of "knocking upon a green
door." In "ADA" there are phantom fists knocking against a green door (Ada, I
ch.24: "Van was already unlocking the door — the green door against
which they were to bang so often with boneless fists in their later separate
dreams." ) The additional "knocking" is an
important element and it had escaped my attention until now, inspite of Bob
Dylan's "knockin' on heaven's door" and all the real green
ones)
My books are, unfortunately, heavily
underlined with what I want to find again because this makes it almost
impossible for me to find what is new or unprecedent. I created for
myself a "prejudiced trap." Hafid, did you try to explore "The Eye"? That's
a good place for posthumous apparitions.