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excerpts:
§ 0 Synoptic spicilège of Laura’s Original
§ 0 Synoptic spicilège of Laura’s Original
The original of Laura, Flora Lind, is the offspring of the promiscuous
ballerina Lanskaya and, legally at least, the fashionable New York photographer
Adam Lind, himself the offspring of Russian emigré painter Lev Linde and his
wife Eva. After Adam Lind shoots himself in a Montecarlo hotel, the widow
Lanskaya takes Flora to Paris, Florence, London, and back to Paris, all the
while enjoying a succession of glamorous lovers, the final not-so-glamorous one
of which, perhaps, is the elderly English charmeur and fondler of child Flora,
Hubert H. Hubert, whose daughter Daisy had been backed over and killed by a
truck in his obscure preterite youth. Upon graduating from Sutton College,
Flora, her mother newly dead, opens a boutique d’eventails with fellow student
and Polish artist Rawitch; soon marries the brilliant neurologist, renowned
lecturer, and gentleman of independent means, Dr Philip Wild; and cultivates her
habitual wanton wont for, her inherited prurient penchant with, various lovers
including, it seems, a certain A. Nigel Delling (AND), who, once dropped by
Flora, authors the roman à clef My Laura from which Flora, naturally, gazes out
through the mask of Laura, her mother transforms into the fabricated film
actress Maya Umanskaya, and Dr Philip Wild sympathetically translates as
Philidor Sauvage. Also involved are: Flora’s friends Winnie and Anthony Carr and
the latter’s Aunt Emily; Flora’s mulatto chambermaid Cora; Wild’s scientific
rivals Curson and Croydon (both demolished in a recent paper by Mr West);
Flora’s deflowerer Jules; a fun-loving Japanese girl with a Gallo-Slavic
stepfather; literary critic and reviewer of My Laura, Ivan Vaughn; Wild’s typist
Sue Ure; and AND’s urologist, Dr. Aupert.
Although Raymond Roussel was not a photographer, his suicide by
overdose of barbiturates in a hotel in Palermo (Caradec 1997: 401–413)
constitutes a plagiary by anticipation of the suicide by bullet in a hotel in
Montecarlo of Flora’s fashionable father Adam Lind (Nabokov 2009: 49), a
plagiary made all the more apparent by its visual resonance—through the proxy of
two of the 59 illustrations Roussel commissioned Henri A. Zo to provide for the
last book he published during his lifetime, Nouvelles Impressions
d’Afrique (pp. 195 and 203)—with the “automatic pictures of [Lind’s] final
moments” taken by a camera Lind had “geared and focussed [...] in a corner of
the drawing room so as to record the event from different angles” (Nabokov 2009:
49). In Ian Monk’s translation of Roussel’s instructions to Zo, the two
illustrations may be captioned, 
respectively, as follows: “An elegant man dressed in evening hat
and coat going down the steps of a luxurious hallway; his open coat reveals that
he is dressed in black (Roussel 2004: 210) and “An elegantly dressed man placing
the barrel of a revolver against his temple, his finger on the trigger” (Roussel
2004: 218). Roussel furthermore anticipated Lind by masking his fondness for
boys (Caradec 1997: 120–126; Nabokov 2009: 47–49) with what Anglo-Appalachians
refer to as a beard and Gallo-Flouzianians as un paravent, though, in contrast
with Lind’s legal and possibly coital union with the ballerina Lanskaya, Roussel
did not extend his contract with Charlotte Dufrène beyond the confines of
companionable amitié (Caradec 1997: 126–129). Moreover, as the clitalyses in our
ludicts of 26 February 2009, 9 February 2009, and 18 January 2009 have divastigated, the entire œuvre of
Roussel, including his various procédés, constitutes a vast body of plagiaries
by anticipation of not just Nabokov’s methods of composition, but the very
thematic quanta which generate the infratextual texture of his
texts.