There's something that keeps intriguing me about "the strain of his
father's demon blood" [Dementiy (Demon) ].
"Van was still being suckled by a very young wet
nurse, almost a child, Ruby Black, born Black, who was to go mad too: for no
sooner did all the fond, all the frail, come into close contact with him (as
later Lucette did, to give another example) than they were bound to know anguish
and calamity, unless strengthened by a strain of his father’s demon
blood."
Van's mother by adoption was Aqua
who "was not quite twenty when the
exaltation of her nature had begun to reveal a morbid trend. Chronologically,
the initial stage of her mental illness coincided with the first decade of the
Great Revelation, and although she might have found just as easily another theme
for her delusion, statistics shows that the Great, and to some Intolerable,
Revelation caused more insanity in the world than even an over-preoccupation
with religion had in medieval times." Inspite of an initial
suggestion that Van's demon blood was linked to Aqua's insanity
("dementia"), the idea seems to have been dropped. It makes no sense anyway,
since Aqua and Marina were twin sisters (we don't know for certain but it's
implicit* that they were identical, not fraternal twins, so they must
have shared a lot of genetic, and metaphoric, material...) and Marina was far
from frail or contaminated by Demon's blood.
Marina had strange qualms, though, unrelated to any secret
knowledge about Van and Ada both as children of hers. Their similarity
suggests something else to her, but what is it? "Presently, as Marina had promised, the two children went upstairs.
‘Why do stairs creak so desperately, when two children go upstairs,’ she
thought, looking up at the balustrade along which two left hands progressed with
strikingly similar flips and glides like siblings taking their first dancing
lesson. ‘After all, we were twin sisters; everybody knows that.’ The same slow
heave, she in front, he behind, took them over the last two steps, and the
staircase was silent again. ‘Old-fashioned qualms,’ said Marina"**.
The siblings had a similar spot on their left hands: "All this was mere scenery, easily packed, labeled ‘Hell’ and
freighted away; and only very infrequently some reminder would come — say, in
the trickwork close-up of two left hands belonging to different sexes — doing
what? Marina could no longer recall (though only four years had elapsed!) —
playing à quatre mains? — no, neither took piano lessons — casting bunny-shadows
on a wall? — closer, warmer, but still wrong; measuring something? [ ]
Someday, she mused, one’s past must be put in order. Retouched, retaken. Certain
‘wipes’ and ‘inserts’ will have to be made in the picture; certain telltale
abrasions in the emulsion will have to be corrected; ‘dissolves’ in the sequence
discreetly combined with the trimming out of unwanted, embarrassing ‘footage,’
and definite guarantees obtained; yes, someday — before death with its
clap-stick closes the scene.." (what a blooming field of clues for
the Freudians! Here it seems that Marina is aware of their incestuous
love)
Ruby
Black, born Black (an added touch for she had West-AFrican
ancestors***) suddenly reminded me of the Veen cousins: the Dark and the
Red Veen and certain types of chess-boards and pieces. It could also indicate
Stendhal's "Le Rouge et le Noir" (but I don't think so). It was once associated
to the double aspect of Aqua's pains: "It was now the forming of soft black pits (yamï, yamishchi) in her
mind, between the dimming sculptures of thought and recollection, that tormented
her phenomenally; mental panic and physical pain joined black-ruby hands, one
making her pray for sanity, the other, plead for death."
However, these problems are for other Nablers to
investigate (if they haven't yet done so already). I was simply reading
Nabokov's Lectures on Russian Literature and got
sidetracked...
...........................................................
* "Was there some additional spice? Marina, with perverse vainglory,
used to affirm in bed that Demon’s senses must have been influenced by a queer
sort of ‘incestuous’ (whatever that term means) pleasure (in the sense of the
French plaisir, which works up a lot of supplementary spinal vibrato), when he
fondled, and savored, and delicately parted and defiled, in unmentionable but
fascinating ways, flesh (une chair) that was both that of his wife and that of
his mistress, the blended and brightened charms of twin peris, an Aquamarina
both single and double, a mirage in an emirate, a germinate gem, an orgy of
epithelial alliterations."
** - Her features were saved from elfin prettiness by the
thickish shape of her parched lips. Her plain Irish nose was Van’s in miniature.
Her teeth were fairly white, but not very even.[ ] Their lips were
absurdly similar in style, tint and tissue. Van’s upper one resembled in shape a
long-winged sea bird coming directly at you, while the nether lip, fat and
sullen, gave a touch of brutality to his usual expression. Nothing of that
brutality existed in the case of Ada’s lips, but the bow shape of the upper one
and the largeness of the lower one with its disdainful prominence and opaque
pink repeated Van’s mouth in a feminine key.