Vladimir Nabokov

NABOKV-L post 0017284, Sat, 8 Nov 2008 14:09:44 -0200

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Re: QUERY: Aunts and orphans, changelings and lightnings.
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Re: [NABOKV-L] QUERY: Aunts and orphans, THANKSS K-B to Matt: is it really surprising that in many (most?) cultures the duty of caring for orphans should fall on the nearest available kin of the deceased parent(s)? [...] The choice of childhood- and parental-background for key characters is usually plot-relevant, of course, but the basic choices are quite limited!
JM: I wikipediaed "changelings": "The changeling, for example, is the baby left behind by malevolent fairies to replace the original they've snatched for themselves. (In premodern Europe, midwives were suspected of witchcraft in part because they were thought capable of presiding over such secret switches.) The theme of mistaken identity -- of birthrights dispossessed and ultimately reclaimed, of one child living out a life destined for another -- underlies the narrative not only of Bible stories like Moses in the bulrushes and of fairy tales like ''The Princess and the Pea,'' but of great and kitschy literary characters, from Little Lord Fauntleroy to Daniel Deronda. And, of course, Mark Twain's ''The Prince and the Pauper'' and ''Puddn'head Wilson,'' in the latter of which the mother of a baby born into slavery exchanges him with the master's son."

I also checked in VN for "lightning" ( found no other mention of lightning-orphaned kids besides HH, but I'm still looking!).
Here is what I gleaned:
The Defence
"Luzhin [...] did not have to deal with visible, audible, palpable pieces whose quaint shape and wooden materiality always disturbed him and always seemed to him but the crude, mortal shell of exquisite, invisible chess forces[...] he felt quite clearly that this or that imaginary square was occupied by a definite, concentrated force, so that he envisioned the movement of a piece as a discharge, a shock, a stroke of lightning - and the whole chess field quivered with tension, and over this tension he was sovereign, here gathering in and there releasing electric power[...] he conducted in a celestial dimension, where his tools were incorporeal quantities.
Lolita:
1. "My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three"
2. "Quilty, Clare, American dramatist [...] Started on a commercial career but turned to playwriting. Author of The Little Nymph, The Lady Who Loved Lightning (in collaboration with Vivian Darkbloom), Dark Age, The strange Mushroom, Fatherly Love..."
3. HH: "As happens with me at periods of electrical disturbance and crepitating lightnings, I had hallucinations. Maybe they were more than hallucinations"
4. HH and Lo: " 'I am not a lady and do not like lightning," said Lo, whose dread of electric storms gave me some pathetic solace.(btw: I hadn't realized before Lo was already familiar with Quilty's play on this issue...]
PF
Kinbote on John Shade's: "The Nature of Electricity,"
The dead, the gentle dead - who knows? - In tungsten filaments abide,/And on my bedside table glows/ Another man's departed bride[...]
Streetlamps are numbered, and maybe/ Number nine-hundred-ninety-nine/[...] is an old friend of mine./And when above the livid plain/Forked lightning plays, therein may dwell/ The torments of a Tamerlane,/ The roar of tyrants torn in hell.
At least two thunderstorm adventures were described by fleeing King/Kinbote. These might be compared to a dream told in Pnin:
"...in the course of one of those dreams that still haunt Russian fugitives, even when a third of a century has elapsed since their escape from the Bolsheviks, Pnin saw himself fantastically cloaked, fleeing through great pools of ink under a cloud-barred moon from a chimerical palace[...]The Sheppard brothers were both awake [...] the elder lay thinking of silence...of a poplar that years ago lightning had struck, killing John Head, a dim, distant relation.[...] It was a pity nobody saw the display in the empty street, where the auroral breeze wrinkled a large luminous puddle, making of the telephone wires reflected in it illegible lines of black zigzags."
ADA:"When lightning struck two days later (an old image that is meant to intimate a flash-back to an old bam), Van became aware that it brought together, in livid confrontation, two secret witnesses..."
( usually flashes of lightning bring up the photographer Kim. I don't know if Lettrocalamity is storm-related, but in PF we have learned that "Science tells us, by the way, that the Earth would not merely fall apart, but vanish like a ghost, if electricity were suddenly removed from the world.")
LATH
"Already twice in my young life a fit of total cramp--the physical counterpart of lightning insanity--had all but overpowered me"
" Thunderstorms to me are agony. Their evil pressure destroys me; their lightning forks through my brain and breast."

Query: would forked lightning also suggest something related to "Time" ( besides madness, hallucinations, play of invisible forces,death,flash-back,photography,theatrical scenery and drama)? VN, in "Ada" often wrote about two temporal dimensions when "time forked".

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