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On The Original of Laura and Pale Fire
Going to press is all it takes to realize that you have not seen all
there was too see. Hardly one month after publishing (in collaboration
with Yannicke Chupin) a detailed
study of The Original of Laura (Aux Origines de Laura, Le Dernier
Manuscrit de Vladimir Nabokov, Presses de l’Université Paris-Sorbonne,
see link below) it dawns on
me that its already rich and extensively researched chapter about
intertextual networks may be lacking one or two connections between
Vladimir Nabokov’s last,
unfinished novel and one of his former works, Pale Fire. I would like
to share them briefly with fellow subscribers on NABOKOV-L.
A few characters in Pale Fire seem to prefigure characters in TOOL.
Fleur de Fyler’s first name, for one, is of course reminiscent of the
later Flora. Also clear,
although a little less direct, is the line taking the reader from
Kinbote’s Foreword, where he mentions « Prof. Hurley and his clique »
(the clique in question consisting
notably of one Prof. C.), to Philip Wild’s colleagues and competitors
Prof. Curson and Dr. Croydon (mind the initials) who appear on two
successive cards in
TOOL, Wild [2] and Wild [3]. And Wild’s scathing « We are above petty
revenge » in the same passage is remarkably Kinbotean in tone.
Also striking is the way in which some episodes in TOOL seem to echo
episodes in Pale Fire. In his note to line 71 of John Shade’s poem,
Kinbote launches onto a long
evocation of Charles II’s father, Alfin the Vague. The latter dies in a
freak plane accident which recalls Adam Lind’s suicide in Chapter 2 of
TOOL. Alfin’s
accident is captured by the eye of a camera, just like Adam’s final
moments. As the text nicely has it, Adam Lind had decided to “shoot
himself” and dies while his
camera (he is a photographer by profession) takes automatic pictures of
the whole scene, later sold to a cheap magazine by his widow. In Pale
Fire, it is the widow to
be, Queen Blenda, who takes the pictures.
In this case, tragedy (the father’s accidental death) prefigures
tragedy (Adam’s self-willed demise). My final example departs from this
pattern, as the connection it
points at combines itself with a change of tone. It draws together one
of the very rare moments of comic relief (if we may really call it
that) at the end of Pale Fire and
Philip Wild’s sorry plight in TOOL. Kinbote’s long note to line 949
shows us Gradus falling lamentably victim to a severe bout of
food-poisoning, just when he is about to
reach his goal. This misfortune forces him, in the space of two pages,
to visit the washroom of his hotel (“There his misery resolved itself
in a scalding torrent of
indigestion”) and the toilets of the campus Library (where he
“relieve[s] himself of another portion of the liquid hell inside him”).
On the next page, Kinbote, at his sarcastic
best, adds that “[o] ne finds it hard to decide what Gradus […] wanted
more at that minute: discharge his gun or rid himself of the
inexhaustible lava in his bowels”. It
seems that this moment of grotesque comedy can be linked -- but with
the change of tone I was mentioning -- to Philip Wild’s very dysphoric
description of his condition
on card D 10 : “I loathe my belly, that trunkful of bowels, which I
have to carry around, and everything connected with it -- the wrong
food, heartburn, constipation’s
leaden load, or else indigestion with a first instalment of hot filth
pouring out of me in a public toilet three minutes before a punctual
engagement”. Despite obvious
differences in context and characterization, one will note remarkable
textual similarities here. Both Gradus and Wild have an “engagement”
but are forced to repair to the
nearest public toilet before they can attend it. In both cases bad food
is a key issue and leads to the evocation of the characters’ “bowels”
and “indigestion”. More
remarkably still, the “scalding torrent of indigestion” in Pale Fire is
clearly echoed by the original version of TOOL’s manuscript (“a hot
torrent of filth”) before Nabokov
decided to cross out the words “torrent of” and the phrase underwent a
change.
These are very rapid remarks of course, and these examples would lend
themselves to deeper analysis, but I will leave it at that here. My
point, writing this note, was
only to come to terms with the simple fact that aiming at exhaustivity
in textual analysis, however hard you try (and try hard we certainly
did!), is probably fighting a lost
battle, and the best you can do is lose gracefully and keep rereading.
René Alladaye
Maître de Conférences
Université de Toulouse-Le Mirail
France
http://pups.paris-sorbonne.fr/pages/aff_livre.php?Id=904