-------- Original Message --------
TT : "Human life can be compared to a person dancing in a
variety of forms around his own self: thus the vegetable of our first
picture book encircled a boy in his dream - green cucumber, blue
eggplant
[...]their spinning ronde going faster and faster and gradually forming
a
transparent ring of banded colours around a dead person or planet."
the "dead person or planet" is precisely the extra textual self who
cannot
be described directly, but only en creux -like an intaglio engraving-
through the different vegetable spinning around him. Hugh Person is one
of
these vegetable, like other characters of VN's stories who belong to
the
same "family". As if the nucleus of an atom could be known only through
its
electrons.
In VN's fiction, even a fictive character is defined as "a dead person
or
planet" whose elusive reality can be approached only through his
different
selves ( none of which encompassing his whole reality) revolving around
a "blind spot" (RLSKchapter 13 p123): In chapter 14 p 135, V writes
about
SK's first and last love affairs: "Tow modes of his life question each
other and the answer is his life itself and that is the nearest one
ever
can approach a human truth."
And of course the last sntence in RLSK, where the "extra-textual self"
re-
asserts his presence hovering over the whole book: "I am Sebastian, or
Sebastian is I, or perhaps WE BOTH ARE SOMEONE WHOM NEITHER OF US
KNOWS."
Laurence Hochard