Vladimir Nabokov

NABOKV-L post 0010862, Tue, 21 Dec 2004 10:03:21 -0800

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Fwd: B.Boyd´s "Nabokov´s ADA" /Morio and Moore
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----- Forwarded message from jansy@aetern.us -----
Date: Tue, 21 Dec 2004 03:03:59 -0300
From: Jansy Berndt de Souza Mello <jansy@aetern.us>

Dear Akiko and List,

B. Boyd writes in his introduction to "Nabokov´s Ada - The Place of
Consciousness" ( I only managed to secure a copy of it today!):

"After working out the reason for the sudden appearance of horse and groom (...)
we would next seek to explain the names Van has given his invented horse and
groom". ( Moiro/ Moore).

"There is a simple, immediately-offered solution for the Morio-Moore sound play
(...) your Moore is in fact an anagram of Romeo, and with this Shakespearean
hint black Morio points towards Othello, the blackamoor Iago calls " a Barbary
horse" (...)

Van (...) leaves the young Romeo behind and charges off on a black steed
reminiscent of Othello: "Ardis the First" is comparable in freshness and lyric
radiance of its young love only to Romeo and Juliet, while the chapters between
"Ardis the First" and "Ardis the Second" (...) are marked by the ever-deepening
shadow of potentially violent jealousy..."

After all our conjectures about Borromeo/Moore in TT, I thought it worth to
bring up (again?) B.Boyd´s observations about this "Moore" in Ada as
illustrating a transition from "romantic love" to " violent jealousy" created
by VN.

Is it possible to trace a similar kind of pattern in TT?

The first mention to a Moore seems to be on Ch. 7:
" As a penultimate echo came the strange case of his struggle with a bedside
table. This was when Hugh attended college and lodged with a fellow student,
Jack Moore ( no relation), in two rooms of the newly built Snyder Hall" (...)
when he " was executing a furious war dance all by itself, as he had seen a
similar article do at a séance when asked if the visiting spirit ( Napoleon)
missed the springtime sunsets of St. Helena".

1. Jack Moore has "no relation" to any of the various Swiss Jacks, to sculptor
Henry Moore, to Julia Moore.

2. Jack rescues Hugh from his "penultimate" instance ( or more precisely, "
penultimate echo") of somnambulism.

3.The "ultimate" episode would be the one in which Hugh strangled Armande while
still dreaming that he was rescuing her from dropping from a NY balcony while
Hugh´s veggie nightmares and his dream with air hostess Armande ( that anexed
the external fire as part of the dream), before he could reach the "
mysterious mental maneuver to pass from one state of being to another",
represented not another somnambulic attack in a "person and the shadows of
related matter" on the brink of a "new being" but maintained the transparent
quality of dream and awakening.

4. While still a student, Hugh would already have been suffering from a jealous
rage, such as Napoleon´s might have been because..
did not Bonaparte´s second wife Marie Louise betray him and bear two children
from Count Neipperg? ( please correct me, Historians!)
Who was Hugh jealous about then?

5. If the circumstances of Hugh´s death were taken as a kind of somnambulic
attack , then this would mean that he could not have strangled Armande in the
first place - as all the elements in the novel ( plus our good-sense )
indicate. And yet, the mixture between reality and dream ( for Hugh and in the
eyes of the reader as well) seem to be present in all these episodes.

Sorry to return to the same issues we´ve been discussing but I still feel in the
clasp of someone else´s dream.
Jansy

----- End forwarded message -----
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