Subject
[NABOKOV-LIST] [GOGOLIAN EXTRACTS] Art: Ancillae and Human
Sacrifice.
Sacrifice.
From
Date
Body
Dear List,
After I described VN's lines, in his Gogol biography, about a Chinese The Thousand Pieces Execution ["cut out from the patient's body one tiny square bit... (all of them selected...so as to have the patient live to the nine hundred ninety ninth piece) ...his whole body was delicately removed"] the familiar alliance bt. sex, death,art gained a new twist when I noticed how often a kind of "human sacrifice" is associated to art inVN's various novels ( Shade's death in Pale Fire, also Quilty's murder and HH's subsequent Confessions - not counting Lolit's and HH's own, Luzhin's suicide before his final move, Nina in Spring in Fialta).
I wonder now about when it doesn't occur in that "sacrificial" way ( the death of Ada's lovers, for example, Hugh Person in TT, Chorb's ritual return...) with or without regret.
J.Aisenberg: I found the pages, at last! From his analysis of Gogol's transformations of "a queer vehicle" that starts as a "fat-cheeked watermelon set upon wheels" to roll as "a dream melon" into a dream town until, upon its arrival it "becomes a definite species of carriage", ie, a britzka, we can watch it resume its travels in ADA: The cook's niece Blanche jumped out of a pumpkin-hued police van (long, long after midnight, alas); the station man banged shut . all six doors of every carriage. of pumpkin origin, fused together; Blanche rushed down the corridor and lost a miniver-trimmed slipper on the grand staircase, like Ashette in the English version." Even in "Speak Memory" VN describes a coachman's livery with the round folds of a pumpkin.
Cinderella also rides through Mariette in BS: "the little slattern, moving and dusting in a dream, always ivory pale and unspeakably tired after last night's ball;.a number of seedy-looking pumps, a girl's tiny slipper trimmed with moth-eaten squirrel fur."(my thanks to A.Bouazza for this reference), and we may find her in Lolita, or in Pnin, where a shoe is again associated to vert-verre-vrai-vair applied to eye-color, glass, truth, squirrels and slippers ...
Nevertheless, Nabokov wrote ( chapter Our Mr. Chichikov, pages 93 a 95): "Madame Korobochka is as much like Cinderella as Paulo Chichikov is like Pickwick. The melon she emerges from can hardly be said to be related to the fairy pumpkin. It becomes a brtizka just before her emergence, probably for the same reason that the crowing of the cock became a whistling snore [...]"
Cinderella's pumpkin is sometimes suggested by the round sound of words, like "pompon" and "pumps" - we shall find referred to other meanings in KQK's slippers- and not by any intrinsic imagetic value. It also occurs by juxtaposed or migratory verbal images. (VN writes, in ADA,"the ludicrous.mistake of the Signy-Mondieu analysts consists in their regarding a real object, a pompon, say, or a pumpkin as a significant abstraction of the real object.". We have already found Mariette's "seedy-looking pumps, a girl's tiny slipper...")
In ADA the lascivious servant, Blanche, becomes a sexualized parody of Cinderella, like Mariette in Bend Sinister. M. Roth recently sent me "a note regarding ancillary servants. You might recall that Kinbote calls the Shades' maid "ancillula," and imagines that she wants Shade to make a pass at her, so there too we have a sexual servant." As I see it, Cinderella, Blanche and other servants might function as a personification of Nabokov's observation that sex is but a servant, "an ancilla of art", in his invectives against "shams and shamans".
Jansy Mello (she)
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After I described VN's lines, in his Gogol biography, about a Chinese The Thousand Pieces Execution ["cut out from the patient's body one tiny square bit... (all of them selected...so as to have the patient live to the nine hundred ninety ninth piece) ...his whole body was delicately removed"] the familiar alliance bt. sex, death,art gained a new twist when I noticed how often a kind of "human sacrifice" is associated to art inVN's various novels ( Shade's death in Pale Fire, also Quilty's murder and HH's subsequent Confessions - not counting Lolit's and HH's own, Luzhin's suicide before his final move, Nina in Spring in Fialta).
I wonder now about when it doesn't occur in that "sacrificial" way ( the death of Ada's lovers, for example, Hugh Person in TT, Chorb's ritual return...) with or without regret.
J.Aisenberg: I found the pages, at last! From his analysis of Gogol's transformations of "a queer vehicle" that starts as a "fat-cheeked watermelon set upon wheels" to roll as "a dream melon" into a dream town until, upon its arrival it "becomes a definite species of carriage", ie, a britzka, we can watch it resume its travels in ADA: The cook's niece Blanche jumped out of a pumpkin-hued police van (long, long after midnight, alas); the station man banged shut . all six doors of every carriage. of pumpkin origin, fused together; Blanche rushed down the corridor and lost a miniver-trimmed slipper on the grand staircase, like Ashette in the English version." Even in "Speak Memory" VN describes a coachman's livery with the round folds of a pumpkin.
Cinderella also rides through Mariette in BS: "the little slattern, moving and dusting in a dream, always ivory pale and unspeakably tired after last night's ball;.a number of seedy-looking pumps, a girl's tiny slipper trimmed with moth-eaten squirrel fur."(my thanks to A.Bouazza for this reference), and we may find her in Lolita, or in Pnin, where a shoe is again associated to vert-verre-vrai-vair applied to eye-color, glass, truth, squirrels and slippers ...
Nevertheless, Nabokov wrote ( chapter Our Mr. Chichikov, pages 93 a 95): "Madame Korobochka is as much like Cinderella as Paulo Chichikov is like Pickwick. The melon she emerges from can hardly be said to be related to the fairy pumpkin. It becomes a brtizka just before her emergence, probably for the same reason that the crowing of the cock became a whistling snore [...]"
Cinderella's pumpkin is sometimes suggested by the round sound of words, like "pompon" and "pumps" - we shall find referred to other meanings in KQK's slippers- and not by any intrinsic imagetic value. It also occurs by juxtaposed or migratory verbal images. (VN writes, in ADA,"the ludicrous.mistake of the Signy-Mondieu analysts consists in their regarding a real object, a pompon, say, or a pumpkin as a significant abstraction of the real object.". We have already found Mariette's "seedy-looking pumps, a girl's tiny slipper...")
In ADA the lascivious servant, Blanche, becomes a sexualized parody of Cinderella, like Mariette in Bend Sinister. M. Roth recently sent me "a note regarding ancillary servants. You might recall that Kinbote calls the Shades' maid "ancillula," and imagines that she wants Shade to make a pass at her, so there too we have a sexual servant." As I see it, Cinderella, Blanche and other servants might function as a personification of Nabokov's observation that sex is but a servant, "an ancilla of art", in his invectives against "shams and shamans".
Jansy Mello (she)
Search archive with Google:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
Visit "Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
Manage subscription options: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/