Rene ALLADAYE:"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...) 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....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."
JM: ...or else, after
rereading, get ready to write a sequel to the initial book?
The examples about Gradus and Wild's bowel
troubles reminded me of an extremely long letter about intestinal distress
written by Nabokov to his friend Edmund Wilson. In the published book (Dear
Bunny,dear Volodya, ed. S.Karlinski) it covers two entire pages and a
little more, having been written by its author totally unaided by Vera
- who was in N.Y, with their son Dmitri, for an appendixectomy.
It is dated june,1944, letter 100,pg.146.I was hoping to find a previous link, a shared word in his
extensive and detailed report about his own experience with "food
poisoning" (which caused him a hemorraging colitis)*... I didn't!
The only item that might interest
you came almost at the end of the letter: "I feel very much
like Verlaine these days - "Mes Hôpitaux." and that kind of stuff."
(Dmitri, in his foreword to TOOL gave us a whiff of his father's predicaments
in Swiss clinics...)
.........................................................................................................................................
* He must have been feverish, still, while writing the
letter, it is so unusually detailed and literal, and oft
repeated ("I threw up, or rather down, i.e.,right on
the steps, such sundry items as pieces of ham, some spinach, a little
mashed potatoes, a squirt of beer - in all 80 cents worth of food. Excruciating
cramps racked me and I had just the strength to reach the toilet where a
flow of brown blood rushed out of me from the opposite part of my miserable
body..."). There are disgustingly funny elements (calculating the
worth of lost food, for example), or the lost Dobuzhinsky couple wandering about
town after finding his host's house empty) lurking in the three literary
sources.And cold, almost cruel parts (how he describes the death of an old
man who shared a room with him).