JM, a PS
(to While reading E.T.A Hoffmann's "Des
Vetters Eckfenster," his last work, I was reminded
of Nabokov's "Laura" *)
A reference to a story, similar to Hoffmann's was
brought up in the Nab-L, but I could not locate the posting. It is one of Honoré Balzac's tales, "The Unknown
Masterpiece" ( "Le Chef d'Oeuvre Inconnu") about "...a painter [
Frenhofer] who, depending on one's perspective, is either an abject
failure or a transcendental genius-or both.... In a translation "by poet
Richard Howard, "The Unknown Masterpiece" appears, as Balzac intended, with
Gambara, a grotesque and tragic novella about a musician undone by his
dreams." Actually both, "The Unknown Masterpiece" and
"Gambara" have been inspired by ETA Hoffman writings ( "Der Artushof"
and "Der Baron von B."). There's at least one reference to this
connection, in English, made by Lewis, Timothy William. "The influence
of E.T.A. Hoffmann on Balzac." Thesis: (PhD) University of London,
1991.
I devoted so much space to amplify the comparison between
Hoffmann and Balzac (and, perhaps Proust's Vinteuil) because, besides the
actual parallel with Nabokov's imagined novel and his real index-cards
for "TOoL," I was further reminded of two early short-stories written
by Nabokov, dealing with musicians and transcendental
experiences: "Sounds" and "Music". ** Because of
Hoffmann's link to Romanticism and his technique
of "defamiliarization" (related to the "Unheimlich"), a whiff of this kind
of failed, or achieved transposition from art into
the "transcendental" realm, may be felt through
Kinbote's distorted plans concerning his influence over Shade's writings
in "Pale Fire." I'm uncertain if we
should add to this list Nabokov's other novels related to music, or
with "uncanny" madness. There is a connection bt
"Sounds" and "La Veneziana" (here the theme is painting and a
life-like model) by one striking image (which in turn reapears
through Shade's lemniscate as an indication of infinity): In "La
Veneziana" Frank's racquet is turned into a figure eight by
the damp and, in "Sounds": "On a bench, glistening like
Danish china, lay your forgotten racquet; the strings had turned brown from the
rain, and the frame had twisted into a figure eight..."
...........................................................................................
*[ when he mentions his “not quite
finished manuscript of a novel which I had begun writing and reworking before my
illness and which was completed in my mind.” and informs
that he “kept reading it aloud to a small dream audience in a walled
garden. My audience consisted of peacocks, pigeons, my long dead parents, two
cypresses, several young nurses crouching around, and a family doctor so old as
to be almost invisible." ] ...The story begins with
its narrator comparing his cousin's illness to one
which struck a physically paralised, mentally active Paul
Scarron....Hoffmann inserts a reference to one of his novels
with the story of a painter called Berklinger ( from "Der
Artushof"), who used to stand for hours in front of an
almost empty canvas on which only a neutral background had been
painted. Delirious Berklinger would proudly display the canvas
to his visitors, instructing them about the lavish scenes
and marvellous details it contained...
** from "Sounds": "You were playing
Bach.... as, incessantly, magnificently, the June shower slashed the
win-dowpanes.... A feeling of freshness welled in me like the fragrance of wet
carnations that trickled down everywhere, from the shelves, from the piano's
wing, from the oblong diamonds of the chandelier... I had a feeling of
enraptured equilibrium as I sensed the musical relationship between the silvery
specters of rain and your inclined shoulders, which would give a shudder when
you pressed your fingers into the rippling luster. And when I withdrew deep into
myself the whole world seemed like that—homogeneous, congruent, bound by the
laws of harmony...I realized that everything in the world was an interplay of
identical particles comprising different kinds of consonance: the trees, the
water, you... All was unified, equivalent, divine. ...And thus everything in the
world decants and modulates."