Brian Boyd makes references to
"painted ceilings" in his annotations to ADA - but I'm missing
his later commentaries (not yet Online, not yet in "The
Nabokovian"...) concerning Van's musings about time, on
Part Four. Van's associative
stream seems to flow towards some other similar, important event
in Nabokov's life, perhaps linked to a brief truce in his
trompe l'oeil "style". Brian Boyd relates this motif to a different
set of lines in "Speak,Memory,"
though.*
btw: Lolita's,
pre-historic aurochs ( probably preserved as paintings on the
ceiling and walls of Altamira) - could they be also related to
consciousness, time and "plafonds"? ** and to Pale Fire's
"ceil"?***
ADA, 4: 535:15 -
536:08: "... my Present, my brief span of
consciousness, tells me I did, not the silent thunder of the infinite
unconsciousness proper to my birth fifty-two years and 195 days ago
[ ] My first recollection goes back to mid-July, 1870, i.e., my
seventh month of life [ ] when, one morning, in our Riviera
villa, a chunk of green plaster ornament, dislodged from the ceiling by an
earthquake, crashed into my cradle. The 195 days preceding that event being
indistinguishable from infinite unconsciousness, are not to be included in
perceptual time, so that, insofar as my mind and my pride of mind are concerned,
I am today (mid-July, 1922) quite exactly fifty-two, et trêve de mon
style plafond peint." ]
B.Boyd: 178.16:
Boucher plafond: François Boucher (1703-1770), French painter, engraver
and designer of the Rococo period, known for his blue-and-white pastel-hued
painting and his decorative, stylized-cherub manner, often amatory or erotic. He
worked for Queen Maria and for Louis XV’s mistress Mme de Pompadour at
Versailles and elsewhere. Boucher did not paint in the Americas, but the Frick
Collection, 1 East 70th Street, Manhattan, at the corner of Fifth Avenue, has a
Boucher Room adorned by panels once thought to have been commissioned by Mme de
Pompadour.
Cf. “the tiny red rectangle hung for an instant askew in a blue spring sky.
The hall was famous for its
painted
ceilings” (Ardis, summer 1884, 36.07-08);
“Everything appeared as it always used to be, the little nymphs and goats
on the painted ceiling” (Ardis, summer 1888: 288.12-13);
“Not the least adornment of the chronicle is the delicacy of pictorial
detail: a latticed gallery; a painted ceiling; . . . ” (589.03-04). MOTIF:
painted ceiling.
........................................................................................................................................................
* - [ painted
ceiling: 36.07-08;
(62.16); 178.16;]
36.07-08: tiny red rectangle . . . . famous for its painted
ceilings: Cf. the famous trompe-l'oeil ceiling at the end of the first chapter
of Nabokov's autobiography (SM 31-32). MOTIF: painted ceiling.
62.15-16: The rope for the fakir’s bare-bottomed child to climb up in the
melting blue?: Ada normally wears no panties in summer (95.14-15).
In a
celebrated passage at the end of the first chapter of Speak, Memory,
Nabokov recalls his father being called from the family lunch to be tossed in
the air by peasants and seeming to be suspended “on his last and loftiest
flight, reclining, as if for good, against the cobalt blue of the summer noon”
(SM 31). Here the blue may be that of Ardis’s “blue spring sky” in one of its
famous “painted ceilings” (36.08). MOTIF: gravity; painted
ceiling.
** - "I am thinking of
aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the
refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my
Lolita."
*** - "Conmal mastered it
all [ ] and had just completed Kipling’s "The Rhyme of the
Three Sealers" ("Now this is the Law of the Muscovite that he proves with shot
and steel") when he fell ill and soon expired under his splendid painted bed
ceil with its reproductions of Altamira animals, his last words in his last
delirium being "Comment dit-on ‘mourir’
en anglais?" — a beautiful and touching end."