JM: Marina’s operatic laughing became adverbial (“trillingly”)* [ ]. I chose a short-story (First Love)…
Continuation: Not only Marina, Ada too will create combinations of sounds and manner: “When he grew too loud, she shushed, shushingly breathing into his mouth.” But, leaving aside the magic adjectives and adverbs, this time I isolated something different from the same “First Love”, not junctions, but ‘disjunctions’…
“ It was at night that the Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits et des Grands Express Européene lived up to the magic of its name. From my bed under my brother's bunk (Was he asleep? Was he there at all?), in the semidarkness of our compartment, I watched things, and parts of things, and shadows, and sections of shadows cautiously moving about and getting nowhere. The woodwork gently creaked and crackled. Near the door that led to the toilet, a dim garment on a peg and, higher up, the tassel of the blue, bivalved nightlight swung rhythmically. It was hard to correlate those halting approaches, that hooded stealth, with the headlong rush of the outside night, which I knew was rushing by, spark-streaked, illegible.”**
Several “illegible” elements without and within are now experienced in “halves”: “semidarkness,” “parts of things,” “sections of shadows.” This is quite the opposite of the more obvious twins, doubles, mirrors and Doppelgängers - and yet, it is somehow close to John Shade’s splits.
“ But, Doctor, I was dead!/ He smiled. "Not quite: just half a shade," he said.” Followed by “.. I once overheard/ Myself awakening while half of me/ Still slept in bed. I tore my spirit free,/ And caught up with myself — upon the lawn/ [ ] / …where Shade stood in nightshirt and one shoe./ And then I realized that this half too/ Was fast asleep; both laughed and I awoke.”
Or, for that matter, following CK, the barn ghost’s (Aunt Maud) blurred voice suggestive “of a half-awakening from a half-dream slashed by a sword of light on the ceiling.” And Gradus himself is halved: “we may concede, doctor, that our half-man was also half mad.”
Cf. also CK’s note to Lines 727-728.
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Would it be too absurd to extend the comparison between “First Love” and “Pale Fire” and their fragments and “halves,” by mentioning also various levels of actual (“real”) trains, toy trains and “toylike trams” in the short-story, together with PF’s “sudden trains” (mainly used by Gradus who even rode a “train of thought”)? It seems to be a futile task and yet I feel there’s a significant link somewhere (well, the link is Nabokov’s mind…but what pregnant image is still lying in wait?)
A first flimsy attempt: First Love, part One - Announcing a boy’s “toy love,” which will emerge on Part Three **.
First paragraph: “IN THE early years of this century, a travel agency on Nevski Avenue displayed a three-foot-long model of an oak-brown international sleeping car. In delicate verisimilitude it completely outranked the painted tin of my clockwork trains. Unfortunately it was not for sale…
Second paragraph: “The then great and glamorous Nord Express (it was never the same after World War I), consisting solely of such international cars and running but twice a week, connected St. Petersburg with Paris…”
Sixth and seventh paragraphs: “When, on such journeys as these, the train changed its pace to a dignified amble and all but grazed housefronts and shop signs, as we passed through some big German town, I used to feel a twofold excitement, which terminal stations could not provide. I saw a city with its toylike trams, linden trees, and brick walls enter the compartment, hobnob with the mirrors, and fill to the brim the windows on the corridor side. This informal contact between train and city was one part of the thrill. The other was putting myself in the place of some passerby who, I imagined, was moved as I would be moved myself to see the long, romantic, auburn cars, with their intervestibular connecting curtains as black as bat wings and their metal lettering copper-bright in the low sun, unhurriedly negotiate an iron bridge across an everyday thoroughfare and then turn, with all windows suddenly ablaze, around a last block of houses.”
[ ] “There were drawbacks to those optical amalgamations. The wide-windowed dining car, a vista of chaste bottles of mineral water, miter-folded napkins, and dummy chocolate bars (whose wrappers—Cailler, Kohler, and so forth—enclosed nothing but wood) would be perceived at first as a cool haven beyond a consecution of reeling blue corridors; but as the meal progressed toward its fatal last course, one would keep catching the car in the act of being recklessly sheathed, lurching waiters and all, in the landscape, while the landscape itself went through a complex system of motion, the daytime moon stubbornly keeping abreast of one's plate, the distant meadows opening fanwise, the near trees sweeping up on invisible swings toward the track, a parallel rail line all at once committing suicide by anastomosis, a bank of nictitating grass rising, rising, rising, until the little witness of mixed velocities was made to disgorge his portion of omelette aux confitures de fraises.”
PF: “When I’d just turned eleven, as I lay/ Prone on the floor and watched a clockwork toy —/ A tin wheelbarrow pushed by a tin boy —/ Bypass chair legs and stray beneath the bed.” And CK: “From far below mounted the clink and tinkle of distant masonry work, and a sudden train passed between gardens, and a heraldic butterfly volant en arrière, sable, a bend gules, traversed the stone parapet, and John Shade took a fresh card.” (I find that these two sentences are connected to the poem’s last lines…#)
“ And from the inside, too, I’d duplicate / Myself, my lamp, an apple on a plate:/ Uncurtaining the night, I’d let dark glass/ Hang all the furniture above the grass..”
There are alternations of dark and light, past and present, real and dummy objects but, most of all, inside and outside percepients that are “optically amalgamated” by reflections on glass or that are gastrically disgorged by variations of speed.
The universe expands and contracts, like a little boy’s stomach. Things are split and then unified (but unification seems to be catastrophic).
I think the key-word that describes story and poem to connect them to a particular Nabokovian anguish is “anastomosis.” At least, for now!
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* - Thrillingly, a return to Ada and Marina’s “trills”, now with natural cricket sounds toying with “trillion” and “in thrall,” in Shade’s PF: “And there’s the wall of sound: the nightly wall/ Raised by a trillion crickets in the fall./ Impenetrable! Halfway up the hill/ I’d pause in thrall of their delirious trill.”
** - This quote was copied from an interesting blog with splashes of commentaries, images and assorted Nabokoviana: THhttp://tomclarkblog.blogspot.com.br/2010/05/night-train-iii-vladimir-nabokov.htmlURSDAY, 13 MAY 2010 Night Train (III): Vladimir Nabokov
For the lines about “A Refrigerator Awakens” (originally printed in The New Yorker), quoted in a former posting, I visited another, lighter, blog: http://tesslolitaworld.blogspot.com.br/2013/10/the-refrigerator-awakes.html
** - Part Three: “On the browner and wetter part of the plage, that part which at low tide yielded the best mud for castles, I found myself digging, one day, side by side with a little French girl called Colette.[ ] She would be ten in November, I had been ten in April. Attention was drawn to a jagged bit of violet mussel shell upon which she had stepped with the bare sole of her narrow long-toed foot.” [ ] Two years before, on the same plage, I had been much attached to the lovely, suntanned little daughter of a Serbian physician; but when I met Colette, I knew at once that this was the real thing. Colette seemed to me so much stranger than all my other chance playmates at Biarritz
[ ] Colette was back in Paris by the time we stopped there for a day before continuing our homeward journey; and there, in a fawn park under a cold blue sky, I saw her (by arrangement between our mentors, I believe) for the last time …She took from her governess and slipped into my brother's hand a farewell present, a box of sugar-coated almonds, meant, I knew, solely for me; and instantly she was off, tap-tapping her glinting hoop through light and shade.[ ] The leaves mingle in my memory with the leather of her shoes and gloves, and there was, I remember, some detail in her attire (perhaps a ribbon on her Scottish cap, or the pattern of her stockings) that reminded me then of the rainbow spiral in a glass marble. I still seem to be holding that wisp of iridescence, not knowing exactly where to fit it, while she runs with her hoop ever faster around me and finally dissolves among the slender shadows cast on the graveled path by the interlaced arches of its low looped fence.”
# - A dark Vanessa with a crimson band
Wheels in the low sun, settles on the sand
And shows its ink-blue wingtips flecked with white.
And through the flowing shade and ebbing light
A man, unheedful of the butterfly —
Some neighbor’s gardener, I guess — goes by
Trundling an empty barrow up the lane.