Don,
I am resending the notes below that I sent yesterday but did not
see on the list yet. Too long?
Best,
Akiko
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88.03: bird-defiled benches: One of them
helped HP kissing Armande. "'I hate that beastly old bench,' . . . and he
embraced her" (Ch. 15).
88.06: toward a waterfall: Supposedly the Tara cataract
mentioned in Ch. 4. "A local miracle of nature, the Tara cataract, was painted
on the watercloset door in the passage, as well as reproduced in a huge
photograph on the wall of the vestibule." HP and his father were going to
see it after shopping, but they could not because HP's father
suddenly died. Neither in Ch. 23, we are given a chance to see
it. Note that in Ch. 4 we are shown just a few reproductions of the
fall. Humorously, they are put on the places related with water--on
the "watercloset" door and the "vestibule" wall. Here we could find
the themes of "messages by water" and "appearance (or
artificiality or reproduction) vs reality."
88.07-08: the inspector's pipe studded with
Bohemian gems: "Bohemian gems" means "Bohemian crystal" or just "imitation
doublets"? I feel something hidden behind the Bohemian gems or just
Bohemia as well as "his furuncular nose" but I cannot figure them
out.
88.16: a great Carte du Tendre: "Map of Tender
Love," sentimental allegory of the seventeenth century (Notes to *Ada* by
Darkbloom). The "Carte du Tendre" is in Madeleine de Scudery's romance
*Clélie* (10 vols; 1654 $B!] (B1660) (Notes to *Ada* by Brian Boyd,
LoA). If you are interested, see http://www.ac-rouen.fr/pedagogie/equipes/lettres/tendre/tendre.html .
There you could see "La Mer Dangereuse" or "Lac
D'Indiffrence." Boyd also notes "Pun on *tendre* as noun
("tenderness") and verb ("to stretch") to LoA.
HP's struggle to court Armande from
now on, in reality, is just following the atheletes as far
as the cable car; on the other level of the
novel, that is an adventure to save Princess Armande from
the Dragon, which is suitable for a Carte du
Tendre. We can see another example in
"Lance." The protagonist is a scientist who is exploring the space and
at the same time Lanslot of the Lake. His old parents imagine
Lance's exploration as a medieval-like adventure such
as "crossing through a notch between two stars" and "attempting a traverse on a
cliff face so sheer, and with such delicate holds." As the narrator
says, "I not only debar a too definite planet from any role in my story--from
the role every dot and full stop should play in my story (which I see as a kind
of celestial chart)," viewing the text of a work as a kind of chart or
picture is one of VN's favorite methods. Some
descriptions about proofreading galleys in TT could be
considered a
variation.
88.16-17: Chart of Torture: "with their cruel ice axes and coils of rope
and other instrumetns of torture" (89.20-21). We have seen several instruments
of torture appering in HP's erotic nightmare (Ch. 16).
89.09: rhododendrons: HP made them a sign
to try to kiss Armande, but failed. "He would try as soon as they reached
the rhododendron belt . . . " (Ch. 15).
89.12-13: His memory, in the meantime, kept
following its private path. Again he was panting in her merciless wake. .
. . Hugh, . . . had neither the legs nor the lungs to keep up with them
even in memory: One of the translucent scenes. Here HP's past climbing is
layered on the one in the present.
89.16-17: "Cool Wars," "Ah Rates": French,
couloirs and arêtes (Boyd's notes to LoA).
89.26: *more*: Russian, sea
(Ibid).
89.34-35: at the joint of the third toe,
resulting in a red eye burning there through every threadbare
thought: somehow reminds me of *Lolita*. Cf. ". . . I used to review the
concluded day by checking my own image as it prowled rather than passed
before the mind's red eye" (Ch. 8).
89.35: a red eye burning there through every
threadbare thought: is a nice Nabokovian transferred epithet with
a translucent image.
90.02: a rock-strewn field and a barn: As
Jansy wrote in her recent note, "a rock-strewn field" reminds us
of "the story of this stone, of that heath" (Ch. 1) and
the unforgettable "burning barn" in *Ada*.
90.03-05: the stream where he had once washed
his feet and the broken bridge which suddenly spanned the gap of time in his
mind were nowhere to be seen: A trompe-l'oeil-like sentence
which, typically to this chapter, parallels the brightly
remembered past and the blant, useless reality of
the present.
90.13: a mood of unusual kindliness made him
surmount the impulse to crush it under a blind boot: as if VN's tenderness
to butterflies were surging in HP.
90.21, 22:
Lammerspitz, Rimperstein: La mer (we have just seen the "immemorial
*more*") + spitz? We will be seeing a spitz in Ch. 26. Any
ideas for Rimperstein?
90.34: a succession of rapid feminine hands
had once conveyed: A filmic image with the time backward.
91.01-02: all this digested by now: as we
will be shown a digesting process inside HP in the last
chapter.
91.03: He felt a first kiss on his bald spot:
A message by water. It seems from Armande, unusually kind, but we
do not know what she means. Just suggesting HP the futility of
his journey to the past?
91.07-08: It was either raining or pretending
to rain or not raining at all, yet still appearing to rain in a sense: I
quote two paras from my article:
David Rampton explains the joke quoting "Can I
say 'bububu' and mean 'if it doesn't rain I shall go for a walk'?" from
*Philosophical Investigations* (1953; trans. G.E.M. Anscombe, 1963, 18e,
*PI*) to treat the problem of the author whose creation depends for its
meaning on how others understand it (David Rampton, *A Critical Study of the
Novels*, 172-73). Brian Boyd makes a note to the complicated sentence
concerning "raining" before the joke quoting a passage which includes "either
raining or not raining" each from *TLP* and *PI* in his
annotations to *TT* (LoA, n. 814-15): "For example, I know nothing
about the weather when I know that is either raining or not raining"
(*TLP*, 4.461); "One is inclined to say: 'Either it is raining, or it
isn't - how I know, how the information has reached me, is another matter.' But
then let us put the question like this: What do I call 'information that it is
raining'? [. . .]" (*PL*, para 356). It is stimulating that the
philosopher often uses "raining" for the problem of information, especially
because Hugh seems to fail to receive the message from the ghosts in the shape
of rain in the same paragraph as well as in another one preceding it (W. W.
Rowe, *Nabokov's Spectral Dimension*, 14).
I would like to cite Wittgenstein's last
sentences, which could suggest another example of similarity between Nabokov and
Wittgenstein in treating rain in the matter of recognition. Two days before his
death, Wittgenstein wrote his last note: "Someone who, dreaming, says 'I am
dreaming', even if he speaks audibly in doing so, is no more right than if he
said in his dream 'it is raining', while it was in fact raining. Even if his
dream were actually connected with the noise of the rain" (*On Certainty*
1969; trans. Denis Paul and G. E. M. Anscombe, para 676). Wittgenstein of course
wrote it long after *The Gift*, and there is no record that he had read
Nabokov at all. We know that this is nothing but a coincidence; however, it
still allures us to read it as if it paraphrased the last paradoxical words by
Alexander Chernyshevsky, who, on his deathbed, is deceived by the sound of
dropping water from the flower pots on the upstairs balcony under the cloudless
sky. "'Of course there is nothing afterwards.' He sighed, listened to the
trickling and drumming outside the window and repeated with extreme
distinctness: 'There is nothing. It is as clear as the fact that it is raining'"
(*The Gift*, 312).
91.08-12: only certain old Northern dialects
can either express verbally or not express, but *versionize*, as it were,
through the ghost of a sound produced by a drizzle in a haze of grateful rose
shrubs: The theme of commnunicating
with ghosts is concentratedly expressed in this sentence.
But--what are the old Northern dialects supposed to be? I have no
idea but the Swiss-German in which Armande was talking with the inspector.
"A haze of grateful rose shrubs" sounds like an allusion to
*Lolita,* the surname of the heroine and the theme of rose.
91.12: "Raining in Wittenberg, but not in
Wittgenstein": Needless to say, Wittenberg is the place
where Hamlet studied philosophy. We could hear a slight echo of
the father-son theme from Hamlet. "Wittgenstein"
finally appears in full and the reader notices the philosopher has been
hinted at by "Witt" and "the dream of Lutwidgean" (Ch.
12).
Akiko Nakata