-------- Original Message --------
A narrow concern leading to a broader insight.
In the index to PF, we learn that Sylvia O'Donnell married an Oriental
prince whom she met in Chamonix. (I've been trying to figure out
Sylvia's
role in the novel because she seems to be a hinge between the worlds of
Zembla and New Wye.) Chamonix is a French town located at the foot of
Mont
Blanc, the white mountain about which John Shade wrote in his Blue
Review
poem (we learn from Mrs. Z). Priscilla Meyer notes that Mont Blanc is
an
important symbol of the Romantic sublime, as used by Shelley and
Wordsworth. She does not, however, note that it is on the Mer de Glace
above Chamonix that Victor Frankenstein meets his monster for the first
time. This got me to thinking about how one might tie the Mont Blanc
and
Chamonix references together with the Shelleys and Frankenstein. I
should
note that Ellen Pifer has published an extensive article drawing
together
Frankenstein and Lolita.
Anyway, this all remains a mystery to be solved (or not) but the search
for
connections here and elsewhere has reinforced for me one of the true
pleasures of reading Nabokov: the way in which his works manage to
gather
into themselves the rest of the world--past, present and future;
literary,
historical, etymological, entomological. In a way unlike any other
writer I
know, Nabokov writes books which, though so often seen as
self-enclosed, in
fact have no margin. The works of Pope and Goethe are as much "within"
Pale
Fire as John Shade's poem; likewise, I can't read "The Rape of the
Lock,"
with its "distant northern land," without seeing Zembla entwined there.
I
suppose this is the apotheosis of Eliot's notion that "the past should
be
altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past."
This seamlessness extends not just from art to art, but into history
and
language itself--all the things through which we live and move and have
our
being (even religion, which is itself a melange of art, history and
language). So this is for me the great reward and riddle of reading VN:
the
more deeply I submerge myself inside the work, the more richly I become
part of the world outside it (because in fact there is no "outside it").
Too sincerely?
Matt Roth