Describing the Night of the Burning Barn (when they make love for the first time), Ada compares herself and Van to Praying Children:
Oh, Van, that night, that moment as we knelt side by side in the candlelight like Praying Children in a very bad picture, showing two pairs of soft-wrinkled, once arboreal-animal, soles — not to Grandma who gets the Xmas card but to the surprised and pleased Serpent, I remember wanting so badly to ask you for a bit of purely scientific information, because my sidelong glance —
Not now, it’s not a nice sight right now and it will be worse in a moment (or words to that effect).
Van could not decide whether she really was utterly ignorant and as pure as the night sky — now drained of its fire color — or whether total experience advised her to indulge in a cold game. It did not really matter. (1.19)
In Rimbaud’s poem Le Bateau ivre (“The Drunken Boat”) the boat compares itself to une femme à genoux (a woman on her knees):
Parfois, martyr lassé des pôles et des zones,
La mer dont le sanglot faisait mon roulis doux
Montait vers moi ses fleurs d'ombre aux ventouses jaunes
Et je restais, ainsi qu'une femme à genoux...
At times a martyr weary of poles and zones,
The sea, whose sob created my gentle roll,
Brought up to me her dark flowers with yellow suckers
And I remained, like a woman on her knees...
(tr. W. Fowlie)
In his Russian translation (1928) of Rimbaud's poem VN renders une femme à genoux as molyashchayasya zhenshchina (a praying woman):
Меж полюсов и зон устав бродить без цели,
порой качался я нежнее. Подходил
рой теневых цветов, присоски их желтели,
и я как женщина молящаяся был,-
The next stanza of Rimbaud’s poem ends in the phrase à reculons (backward):
Presque île, balottant sur mes bords les querelles
Et les fientes d'oiseaux clabaudeurs aux yeux blonds
Et je voguais, lorsqu'à travers mes liens frêles
Des noyés descendaient dormir, à reculons!
Resembling an island tossing on my sides the quarrels
And droppings of noisy birds with yellow eyes
And I sailed on, when through my fragile ropes
Drowned men sank backward to sleep!
As they look in the window trying to see the distant fire, Ada points Van to a group of people: two men, one with a ladder, and a child or dwarf who is walking à reculons as if taking pictures:
‘Can one see anything, oh, can one see?’ the dark-haired child kept repeating, and a hundred barns blazed in her amber-black eyes, as she beamed and peered in blissful curiosity. He relieved her of her candlestick, placing it near his own longer one on the window ledge. ‘You are naked, you are dreadfully indecent,’ she observed without looking and without any emphasis or reproof, whereupon he cloaked himself tighter, Ramses the Scotsman, as she knelt beside him. For a moment they both contemplated the romantic night piece framed in the window. He had started to stroke her, shivering, staring ahead, following with a blind man’s hand the dip of her spine through the batiste.
‘Look, gipsies,’ she whispered, pointing at three shadowy forms — two men, one with a ladder, and a child or dwarf — circumspectly moving across the gray lawn. They saw the candlelit window and decamped, the smaller one walking à reculons as if taking pictures. (1.19)
A child or dwarf who is walking à reculons as if taking pictures is Kim Beauharnais, a kitchen boy and photographer at Ardis whom Ada (who wanted to spend a night with Van) has bribed to set the barn on fire. In Rimbaud’s poem “H” (included in Illuminations) Hortense seems to be Hortense de Beauharnais (Napoleon’s step-daughter who married Napoleon’s brother Louis Bonaparte and became Queen consort of Holland):
Toutes les monstruosités violent les gestes atroces d’Hortense. Sa solitude est la mécanique érotique, sa lassitude, la dynamique amoureuse. Sous la surveillance d’une enfance elle a été, à des époques nombreuses, l’ardente hygiène des races. Sa porte est ouverte à la misère. Là, la moralité des êtres actuels se décorpore en sa passion ou en son action — Ô terrible frisson des amours novices, sur le sol sanglant et par l’hydrogène clarteux ! trouvez Hortense.
All that is unnatural violates the atrocious gestures of Hortense. Her solitude is erotic mechanics, her weariness, love’s dynamic. Under a childhood’s supervision she has been, in several eras, the ardent hygiene of the races. Her door is open to destitution. There, the morality of present beings is disembodied in her passion or her action––O terrible trembling of novice loves on the blood-soaked ground and in the milky hydrogen! work out who is Hortense.
Rimbaud was a poète maudit (cursed poet). Mlle Larivière (Lucette's governess) wrote a novel entitled Les enfants maudits ("The Accursed Children"). Van's and Ada's half-sister, Lucette commits suicide jumping from Admiral Tobakoff (a ship on which she and Van travel from Europe to America) into the Atlantic. Before the jump Lucette drinks three Cossack ponies of Klass vodka. In "The Drunken Boat" Rimbaud mentions drowned men that sink backward to sleep through the boat's fragile ropes.
The titlte of Rimbaud's poem, H is the initial of Herbe, Lucette's favorite painter whose diary she recalls in her last stream of consciousness:
Six, seven — no, more than that, about ten steps up. Dix marches. Legs and arms. Dimanche. Déjeuner sur l’herbe. Tout le monde pue. Ma belle-mère avale son râtelier. Sa petite chienne, after too much exercise, gulps twice and quietly vomits, a pink pudding onto the picnic nappe. Après quoi she waddles off. These steps are something. (3.5)
In "The Drunken Boat" Rimbaud mentions vomissures (vomit):
Plus douce qu’aux enfants la chair des pommes sures,
L’eau verte pénétra ma coque de sapin
Et des taches de vins bleus et des vomissures
Me lava, dispersant gouvernail et grappin.
Sweeter than the flesh of hard apples is to children
The green water penetrated my hull of fir
And washed me of spots of blue wine
And vomit, scattering rudder and grappling-hook.
A flower (hydrangea, hortensia) and a female given name, Hortense (cf. "work out who is Hortense" in Rimbaud's poem "H") brings to mind Violet Knox, old Van's typist who seems to be Ada's granddaughter (the reader has to work out who Violet is). Van never finds out that in the Night of the Burning Barn Ada is not a virgin, nor does he realize that Ronald Oranger (old Van's secretary who marries Violet after Van's and Ada's death) and Violet Knox are Ada's grandchildren.
Describing Lucette's suicide, Van mentions Violet:
Although Lucette had never died before — no, dived before, Violet — from such a height, in such a disorder of shadows and snaking reflections, she went with hardly a splash through the wave that humped to welcome her. That perfect end was spoiled by her instinctively surfacing in an immediate sweep — instead of surrendering under water to her drugged lassitude as she had planned to do on her last night ashore if it ever did come to this. The silly girl had not rehearsed the technique of suicide as, say, free-fall parachutists do every day in the element of another chapter. Owing to the tumultuous swell and her not being sure which way to peer through the spray and the darkness and her own tentaclinging hair — t,a,c,l — she could not make out the lights of the liner, an easily imagined many-eyed bulk mightily receding in heartless triumph. Now I’ve lost my next note.
Got it.
The sky was also heartless and dark, and her body, her head, and particularly those damned thirsty trousers, felt clogged with Oceanus Nox, n,o,x. At every slap and splash of cold wild salt, she heaved with anise-flavored nausea and there was an increasing number, okay, or numbness, in her neck and arms. As she began losing track of herself, she thought it proper to inform a series of receding Lucettes — telling them to pass it on and on in a trick-crystal regression — that what death amounted to was only a more complete assortment of the infinite fractions of solitude. (3.5)
Let me draw your attention to the updated version of my previous post, “recueilli silence, Paris & Tagne in Ada” (yesterday I failed to notice the connection between Ada’s fits of scratching and Van’s bombastic and arcane utterances that hurt people like a jagged fingernail caught in satin).