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[THOUGHTS] Upside down metaphor in ADA
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For years and years I puzzled over Van's plans to stand "a metaphor on its head," although several fragmentary items were examined separately.
"It was Ada's castle of cards. It was the standing of a metaphor on its head not for the sake of the trick's difficulty, but in order to perceive an ascending waterfall or a sunrise in reverse: a triumph, in a sense, over the ardis of time." (ADA or Ardor)
Shame on me! The solution is quite simiple. The author employs the woird "metaphor" ...metaphorically! My silly puzzlement resulted from a too literal reading. So, now, what's the intended final thought or image? We know that when the subject perceives "an ascending waterfall or a sunrise in reverse" he is inhabiting a different perspective from his cotidian one, but that's not enough. As soon as we remember that the sentence is "metaphorical," we mustn't just stop there. Metaphors arise from comparisons and "intercambiation" (exchange, swapping) of two distinct elements. What are they here? .
There's gravity, allied to an "organical performance"(a misleading factor that invites the literal reading), as testified by the rest of the quoted sentence: "...Thus the rapture young Mascodagama derived from overcoming gravity was akin to that of artistic revelation in the sense utterly and naturally unknown to the innocents of critical appraisal...Van on the stage was performing organically what his figures of speech were to perform later in life - acrobatic wonders that had never been expected from them and which frightened children." Yes, gravity, because "Van gripped with splayed hands the brow of gravity."* in defiance of physical death that may be connected, not to figures of speech now, but to the ardis of time: death as a "total surrender to gravity"**
Perhaps another element, besides gratvity, may be added (never space!). After all, as Van confesses: "I delight sensually in Time, in its stuff and spread, in the fall of its folds, in the very impalpability of its grayish gauze, in the coolness of its continuum. I wish to do something about it; to indulge in a simulacrum of possession. I am aware that all who have tried to reach the charmed castle have got lost in obscurity or have bogged down in Space. I am also aware that Time is a fluid medium for the culture of metaphors." (nb: cf. Ignoring Van's personal distate of Einstein's General relativity theory, I'm now considering "gravity as a geometric property of space and time, or spacetime"). However, there's still something missing in the present metaphorical mix. As S.E.Sweeney notes, for Nabokov "locomotion is a metaphor for human thought" and we may expect plenty of references related to moving bodies and metaphors. Will there be one that fits into one of the lacunae in our puzzle?
When Nabokov analyses Joyce's allegories, symbols and style (style is what matters in this case, when its resources bring about shifts of perspective.), we get closer to a solution when Nabokov writes in his lecture about "Ulysses": "Each chapter is written in a different style, or rather with a different style predominating. There is no special reason why this should be - why one chapter should be told straight, another through a stream-of-consciousness gurgle, a third through the prism of a parody. There is no special reason but it may be argued that this constant shift of the viewpoint conveys a more varied knowledge, fresh vivid glimpses from this or that side. If you have ever tried to stand and bend your head so as to look back between your knees, with your face turned upside down, you will see the world in a totally different light. Try it on the beach: it is very funny to see people walking when you look at them upside down.They seem to be, with each step, disengaging their feet from the glue of gravitation, without losing their dignity. Well, this trick of changing the vista, of changing the prism and the viewpoint, can be compared to Joyce's new literary technique, to the kind of new twist through which you see a greener grass, a fresher world (...)". Young Van's legs hoisted like "Tarantine sails" is a confirmation for this link (item already discussed in the List and in B.B's Annotations to ADA).
Some movements described in VN's novels are quite "harmless," as in the image of deambulatory ear-soles (Pnin, p.22) "Then Timofey's torso was bared, and to it Belochkin pressed the icy nudity of his ear and the sandpapery side of his head. Like the flat sole of some monopode, the ear ambulated all over Timofey's back and chest, gluing itself to this or that patch of skin and stomping on to the next." Others gain in complexity by the vistas that are opened by a parenthetical image, such as "punchinello" who emphasizes the mobile tongue in speech): "The organs concerned in the production of English speech sounds are the larynx, the velum, the lips, the tongue [that punchinello in the troupe), and, last but not least, the lower jaw.".
Kinbote's wanderings are rendered in different ways in PF. Using binoculars to chase Shade's movements inside his house, he follows "the contours of his (Shade's) inspiration"(1) while the length of his walks towards his neighbor's house and to Wordsmith College expresses the "dull pain of distance" by "a series of foreshortened sentences" (2). When he examines book shelves, spreading "along a flight of stairs" and getting progressively more disorganized, he finds that they have "burst an appendix in the attic"(3). In all, Kinbote's imaging powers resemble the activities of the unconscious and of what Freud describes for the "dream work."#
It would be interesting to compare aspects of V's style ["a whistle blew, a rush of warm white smoke raced its shadow across the brown snow on the platform"] to his brother's, to Shade's and to Vadim's (LATH), when the latter makes his movements coincide with his writings: "I got up a minute ago to recurtain the moon that peeped between the folds of two paragraphs," since his novels provide more than a rough material for his memoirs "None of those books exceeded ninety thousand words but my method of choosing and blending them could hardly be called a time saving expedient." John Shade and V.(RLSK) both suffer the caprices of birdlike words: "For there are those mysterious moments when/ Too weary to delete, I drop my pen;/ I ambulate - and by some mute command/ The right word flutes and perches on my hand." PF "I felt immensely sorry for him and longed to say something real, something with wings and a heart, but the birds I wanted settled on my shoulders and head only later when I was alone and not in need of words." RLSK - aso...
I always find it hard to reach a definite conclusion concerning motion-thought and VN's tropes. I suffer from occasional "eclipses" ... "The day was darkening; a beaming vestige of sunlight lingered in a western strip of the overcast sky: we have all seen the person who after gaily greeting a friend crosses the street with that smile still fresh on his face - to be eclipsed by the stare of the stranger who might have missed the cause and mistaken the effect for the bright leer of madness. Having worked out that metaphor, Van and Ada decided it was really time to go home.
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* Later, there's a return to the theme of hands (and another sort of "maniambulation") related to Ada's cards: "..'I remember the cards,' she said, 'and the light and the noise of the rain, and your blue cashmere pullover - but nothing else, nothing odd or improper, that came later. Besides, only in French love stories les messieurs hument young ladies.' / 'Well, I did while you went on with your delicate work. Tactile magic. Infinite patience. Fingertips stalking gravity. ...You see I was hoping that when your castle toppled you would make a Russian splash gesture of surrender and sit down on my hand.' / 'It was not a castle. It was a Pompeian Villa with mosaics and paintings inside, because I used only court cards from Grandpa's old gambling packs. Did I sit down on your hot hard hand?'.." And, as metonymy enables us to travel, we return also do ADA's first chapter, in the attic scene [.'Good for you, Pompeianella (whom you saw scattering her flowers in one of Uncle Dan's picture books, but whom I admired last summer in a Naples museum). Now don't you think we should resume our shorts and shirts and go down...]
** "In an amateur parody, at Van's birthday party fifteen years ago, his father had made himself up as Boris Godunov and shed strange, frightening, jet-black tears before rolling down the steps of a burlesque throne in death's total surrender to gravity." ( reminiscent of Jean Cocteau's epigram: "La vie est une chute horizontale")
Or, going back to ADA, we find "levitation" and an idea/feeling transposed to gesture "fourteen-year- old Van treated us to the greatest performance we have ever seen a brachiambulant give.Not the faintest flush showed on his face or neck! Now and then, when he detached his organs of locomotion from the lenient ground,(...) one wondered if this dreamy indolence of levitation was not a result of the earth's canceling its pull in a fit of absentminded benevolence.. Incidentally, one curious consequence of certain muscular changes and osteal reclick' caused by the special training with which Wing had racked him was Van's inability in later years to shrug his shoulders."
(1)"I had learned exactly when and where to find the best points from which to follow the contours of his inspiration. My binoculars would seek him out and focus upon him from afar in his various places of labor: at night, in the violet glow of his upstairs study."
(2) -"I wish to convey, in making this reference to Wordsmith briefer than the notes on the Goldsworth and Shade houses, the fact that the college was considerably farther from them than they were from one another. It is probably the first time that the dull pain of distance is rendered through an effect of style and that a topographical idea finds its verbal expression in a series of foreshortened sentences"
(3)"family books which were also all over the house - four sets of different Children's Encyclopedias, and a stolid grown-up one that ascended all the way from shelf to shelf along a flight of stairs to burst an appendix in the attic. "
# - Wikipedia:...."It has been argued that the two poles of similarity and contiguity are fundamental ones along which the human brain is structured; in the study of human language... the two poles have been called metaphor and metonymy, while in the study of the unconscious they have been called condensation and displacement... The couple metaphor-metonymy had a prominent role in the renewal of the field of rhetoric in the 1960s.[ ] In Freud's work (1900), condensation and displacement (from German Verdichtung and Verschiebung) are two closely linked concepts. In 1957, Jacques Lacan, inspired by an article by linguist Roman Jakobson, argued that the unconscious has the same structure of a language, and that condensation and displacement are equivalent to the poetic functions of metaphor and metonymy."
[References: Roman Jakobson and Halle, Morris (1956) Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances in Fundamentals of Language. The Hague & Paris: Mouton, sectionThe Metaphoric and Metonymic Poles; Grigg, Russell () Lacan, language, and philosophy, chapter 11 Lacan and Jakobson - Metaphor and Metonymy pp.151-2, 160; Lacan [1957] The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason Since Freud.]
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