It seems to me that this technique, or motif, surfaces explicitly at several points in Lolita: the letter from Dolly Schiller has shape-shifting penmanship (H initially believes it to be from Rita's mother), and Humbert describes his voyeuristic experiences in which the image of the nymphet resolves into, or reveals itself to be, a man in an undershirt reading the newspaper. Of course, the notion of anamorphism, or distorted perception, seems to inhere in the novel even more broadly. H claims that the very act of perceiving a nymphet requires a kind of "focal adjustment." But perhaps this is too obvious, and you're looking for different kinds of anamorphism, more subtly encoded into the texts. If this is the case, then maybe the tone shifts that signal the interjections (incompletely masked) of John Ray, or Nabokov himself, are relevant here.
Date: Wed, 7 Mar 2012 03:38:41 -0300
From: jansy@AETERN.US
Subject: [NABOKV-L] Distortions and slanting views
To: NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU
The article by Mikhail Epstein "Good-bye
to Objects, or, the Nabokovian in Nabokov",* which I recently quoted in the
N-L, doesn't mention an anamorphic construction
explicitly, but it's point of departure indicates an awareness of its
operation in VN's writings because he links the slanting, oblique way to
look at the world to Nabokov's own name..*
Of course, it's easier to identify some of the instances in
which Nabokov describes this mechanism, as in a painting, than
how he works it into the structure of a pargraph or an entire chapter
- also because the assembled items result from evoked
muscular, tactile, olfactory elements, not only auditory or visual stimuli
( as in Pnin, ch.5). I'm afraid I haven't yet managed to find the main ugly
and mangled verbal blurbs which a convex surface, or a particular
perspective, would organize and reveal as a beautiful image, as suggested
by VN (in SO) happens in Lolita ( "a beautiful
puzzle"). Unless the corrective surface brings forth not an image, but a
spinal thrill that overturns all the rest?
1. In Bend Sinister's Foreword "... There can be distinguished, no doubt, certain reflections in the
glass directly caused by the idiotic and despicable regimes that we all
know....The plot starts to breed in the bright broth of a rain puddle....this
little puddle vaguely evokes in him my link with him: a rent in his world
leading to another world of tenderness, brightness and
beauty.."
Nabokov explicitly mentions stylistic distortions, starting
with paronomasia "...a contagious sickness in the world
of words; no wonder they are monstrously and ineptly distorted in Padukgrad,
where everybody is merely an anagram of everybody else." ( I'm almost
certain that my inclusion of paronomasia here stretches the
original concept too much. )
2. In Pnin: the entire Chapter 5 is an exercise in stretching and
folding sensations: "Although Victor's eye was his
supreme organ, it was rather by smells and sounds that the neutral notion of St
Bart's impressed itself on his consciousness...Among the many exhilarating
things Lake taught was that the order of the solar spectrum is not a closed
circle..; and that if Degas could immortalize a calèche, why could not Victor
Wind do the same to a motor car?" [...] "One way to do it might be by making the
scenery penetrate the automobile. A polished black sedan was a good
subject [... ]This mimetic and integrative process Lake called the necessary
'naturalization' of man-made things...In the chrome plating, in the glass of
a sun-rimmed headlamp, he would see a view of the street and himself comparable
to the microcosmic version of a room (with a dorsal view of diminutive people)
in that very special and very magical small convex mirror that, half a
millennium ago, Van Eyck and Petrus Christus and Memling used to paint into
their detailed interiors, behind the sour merchant or the domestic
Madonna)....He placed various objects in turn
— an apple, a pencil, a chess pawn, a comb — behind a glass of water and peered
through it at each studiously: the red apple became a clear-cut red band bounded
by a straight horizon, half a glass of Red Sea, Arabia Felix. The short pencil,
if held obliquely, curved like a stylized snake, but if held vertically became
monstrously fat — almost pyramidal. The black pawn, if moved to and fro, divided
into a couple of black ants. The comb, stood on end, resulted in the glass's
seeming to fill with beautifully striped liquid, a zebra
cocktail."
3. In Pale Fire there is a direct reference to this deformed
perspective, found in the work of Eystein, the Zemblan "prodigious master of the trompe l’oeil in the depiction
of various objects surrounding his dignified dead models and making them look
even deader by contrast to the fallen petal or the polished panel that he
rendered with such love and skill.".Aso....
............................................................................................................................................................................................................
*-
Mikhail Epstein Good-bye to
Objects, or, the Nabokovian in Nabokov ... www.emory.edu/.../e.rl.nabokovi...
[Excerpt: "The Russian
name Nabokov means "leaning sideways" or "on one's side" (perhaps the closest
English approximation would be "Sideman"). It seems that this name itself
contains the formula of his style and conveys the magic of this bending, this
slanting movement of all things: not straight but skewed on its side like a ray
of light at sunset. Thus, the sum of all Nabokovian works turns out to be the
justification of this magical surname, which is the first and most important
word uttered about the writer, earmarking him, and setting the path for his own
words."]All private editorial communications are
read by both co-editors.