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Distortions and slanting views
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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....
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*- 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."]
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