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[NABOKOV-L] Victims and St.Jeanne's "oriflamme"
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St. Joan of Arc's pennant has been described as an "oriflamme."* In Nabokov's short-story, "Perfection", its flaming gold is tinged with blue: "...Try to imagine, David, that this is not Pomerania...Look about you: you'll presently see the rarest of birds fly past, Prince Albert's paradise bird, whose head is adorned with a pair of long plumes consisting of blue oriflammes."
A blue background onto which a "fleur de lys" was presented signalled royalty, while St.Joan changed those blue and "gold flames" into white. Would Nabokov have been aware of this symbolic transition, would he have hinted at "martyrdom" or at some sort of "restauration," through Jeanne d' Arc's battle standart?
In Ada it is Lucette who bears a triangular butterfly net. While Ada is blushingly trying to explain that, while the barn burned, she'd been "fast ablaze in her bedroom.", innocent Lucette arrives "with a child's pink, stiff-bagged butterfly net in her little fist, like an oriflamme." John Shade manages to burn his rejected drafts in the pale fire of a "backyard auto da fe". Sexual blazes, death by lightning, burning barns, hotels and books, oriflammes, "Juanita Dark": their plain ennumeration is not self-explanatory. Nor Nabokov's comments on his book, "Lolita":"Once or twice I was on the point of burning the unfinished draft and had carried my Juanita Dark as far as the shadow of the leaning incinerator on the innocent lawn, when I was stopped by the thought that the ghost of the destroyed book would haunt my files for the rest of my life."
The destiny of Lolita's manuscript is similar, in a way, to "TOoL's", while Philip Wild's self-effacing procedures may have been fore-glimpsed by Daffy Duck's cartoonist (recently quoted from "Bugs Bunny, Postmodernism, Sadism, Nabokov, Characterization--Duck Amuck") who'd been "exquisitely tortured by his creator...(he) even erases and physically alters Daffy himself... Daffy kept attempting to liberate himself--to be a naturalistic, realistic character, in short, to serve the expectations of the audience--but he was ruthlessly denied such a life." However, Wild's efforts result from deliberate experimentations, his own and the author's and, ironically, they engender all the life that this character acquires in VN's novel! **
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* The Oriflamme (from Latin aurea flamma, "golden flame") was the battle standard of the King of France.It was originally the sacred banner of the Abbey of St. Denis...The banner was red or orange-red and flown from a lance...Although the azure ground (blue background of St. Martin of Tours) strewn with gold fleur-de-lis remained the symbol of royalty until the fourteenth century, the Oriflamme became the royal battle standard of the King of France, and it was carried at the head of the king's forces when they met another army in battle.
The surviving descriptions of the Oriflamme are in Guillaume le Breton (thirteenth century), in the "Chronicle of Flanders" (fourteenth century), in the "Registra Delphinalia" (1456) and in the inventory of the treasury of St. Denis (1536). The Oriflamme was mentioned in the eleventh century ballad the Chanson de Roland as a royal banner, first called Romaine and then Montjoie. It is mentioned as the banner of Charlemagne in Anne of Geierstein by Sir Walter Scott...In the fifteenth century, the fleur-de-lis on the white flag of Joan of Arc became the new royal standard replacing both the symbol of royalty and the Oriflamme on the battle field. (excerpts from the Wikipedia).
** James Twiggs informed me that there is a recent article by Brian Boyd on "On the Origins of Comics:New York Double-take" ( http://aliceandrews.tumblr.com/ ).
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