From: Donald B. Johnson

To: NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU

Sent: Saturday, December 18, 2004 6:50 PM

Subject: Fwd: TT-26 Introductory Notes

----- Forwarded message from a-nakata@courante.plala.or.jp -----
    Date: Sat, 18 Dec 2004 23:13:35 +0900
    From: Akiko Nakata <a-nakata@courante.plala.or.jp>
Reply-To: Akiko Nakata <a-nakata@courante.plala.or.jp>


100.04-05: (the folds of tenses are badly disarranged in regard to the
building under examination): The folds of time and space, into which people,
things and events disappear and out of which they come are one of the major
themes. Cf. "[H]e fumbled for things in the bathwater of space, groping for
the transparent soap of evasive matter. . ."; "[I]ts button had disappeared
among the folds and furrows of space" (Ch. 4). "Rimiform" is chosen as one
of the rare words that trouble HP (Ch. 19) probably because its meaning is
"shaped like a narrow furrow." In the earlier part of the last chapter, such
"folds of time" are repeatedly emphasized.

100.08-09: the younger of the two waiters: He stole a case of Dôle and got
fired in the previous chapter. He sets fire to the hotel.

100.09-10: a black patch masked the grim captain's left eye: like a pirate
captain. Now we remember seeing a notorious pirate "Blackbeard" as the
blackbearded secretary, Tamworth--in Ch. 10, he is called "Mr. Tamworth of
the brigand's beard," though. Blackbeard (1680?--1718) was the nickname of
Edward Teach alias Edward Thatch, who reined the Caribbean Sea for a short
while. It is said that Captain Hook (Peter Pan's nemesis) was Blackbeard's
bosun.

Q: Does Captain Hook have a black patch in addition to a hook?

100.12 a Bloody Ivan: Probably a pun on Bloody Mary plus Ivan the Terrible.
As Prince Igor is a bakery in Ch. 17, Ivan IV turns into a cocktail.

100.18: (Tangled tenses again!):  Time and space are often tangled in this
novella. Also "tangled time" might be a pun on *A Tangled Tale* by Lewis
Carroll whose middle name, Ludwidge, appears in Ch. 12.

100.21-22: if ins and outs, doors and beds still endured: "Ins and outs"
probably has another meaning, but I leave it to John. I would like to say
that it is described with a theatrical image. Cf. "That monumental man with
his clayey makeup and false grin, and Mr. Tamworth of the brigand's beard,
seemed to be acting out a stiffly written scene for the benefit of an
invisible audience from which
Person, a dummy, kept turning away as if moved with his chair by Sherlock's
concealed landlady" (Ch. 10); "Armande decreed they regularly make love
around teatime, in the living room, as upon an imaginary stage" (Ch. 17).
After many "ins and outs" on the stage, the sets such as doors and beds are
damaged.

101.01: the green figurine of a girl skier: The figurine could be actually
the same one that HP saw in the show window when he came to Switzerland for
the first time (Ch. 5). The figurine was carved and colored by a convict
named Armand. In Ch. 15, we see Armande in a green ski suit just like the
figurine.

101.01-02: which shone through the double kix: Brian Boyd's note to "kix":
"The husk of case of a chrysalis; hence, a protective covering."
The double kix literally stands for the box and the wrapping paper. It is
also a kind of double cocoon that warps both time (we are looking at the
figurine that we saw 18 years ago) and space (as if it were miniature
Armande ).

101.08-10: A bunch of bellflowers and bluebonnets (their different shades
having a lovers' quarrel): The theme of colors in TT may reflect
Wittgenstein's interest in colors for the problem of limits and
understanding.

101.13: (sericanette): Seric, archaic, "Chinese." In a "Words" file Nabokov
kept, he marked off as used in TT "Sericana, region of SW China (in Milton)"
(Brian Boyd's note to the LoA edition).

Q: Why does VN use the word here?

101.12-13: in that landscape of serpents and caves two or three apple seeds:
The last Edenic motif.

101.26: a smudge of grease: The fat from hum "the lady with the dog" feeds
her spitz before she leaves the room.

101.23: an Amilcar: The Carthaginian general Amilcar (or Hamilcar) was the
father of Hannibal (Brian Boyd's note to the LoA edition). An Amilcar is a
French sports car. See also the "Amilcar" mail.

101.32-33: He pulled on his smart turtleneck: Cf. "He bought a nice gray
turtle neck sweater" (Ch. 13); "throwing in the turtleneck for style" (Ch.
14); "Did he ever buy her a turtleneck sweater?" (Ch. 16).

102.10-11: just happily balancing on the soft brink of sleep: Cf. "Persons
might then straddle the middle stretch of the seesaw when considering this
or that object" (Ch. 1).

102.18-19: a child playing with wriggly refractions in brook water: Cf. "He
[Victor] placed various objects in turn ? an apple, a pencil, a chess pawn,
a comb ? behind a glass of water and peered through it at each studiously:
the red apple became a clear-cut red band bounded by a straight horizon,
half a glass of Red Sea, Arabia Felix. The short pencil, if held obliquely,
curved like a stylized snake, but if held vertically became monstrously
fat ? almost pyramidal. The black pawn, if moved to and fro, divided into a
couple of black ants. The comb, stood on end, resulted in the glass's
seeming to fill with beautifully striped liquid, a zebra cocktail" (*Pnin*
IV: 6).

102.23-26: Person, *this* person, was on the imagined brink of imagined
bliss when Armande's footfalls approached--striking out both "imagined" in
the proof's margin . . . . At this moment of her now indelible dawning: Half
asleep, as he used to do as a professional editor, HP proofreads his thought
and completes the draft in which his death is "indelible."

102.26-29: This is where the orgasm of art courses through the whole spine
with incomparably more force than sexual ecstasy or metaphysical panic: Cf:
As I quoted before, "his eye and his spine (the true reader's main organ)
collaborating rather than occluding each other" (Ch. 19); "In order to bask
in that magic a wise reader reads the book of genius not with his heart, not
so much with his brain, but with his spine. It is there that occurs the
telltale tingle even though we must keep a little aloof, a little detached
when reading. Then with a pleasure which is both sensual and intellectual we
shall watch the artist build his castle of cards and watch the castle of
cards become a castle of beautiful steel and glass." "Good Readers and Good
Writers" in *Lectures on Literature*.

102.05-06: Here comes the air hostess bringing bright drinks, and she is
Armande: Cf. "her figure as trim as that of an air hostess" (Ch. 17).

102.13-15: our Person . . . groped for the light, but the click of the lamp
was as ineffective as the attempt to move a paralyzed limb: Cf. He groped
for the fallen lamp and neatly lit in its unusual position (Ch. 20).

102.21-22: The fire, . . . and then helped up by lighter fluid: Lighter
fluid is, of course, the fluid for a lighter. On the other hand, "lighter"
suggests Armande, who was described as "lightly followed light Jacques" (Ch.
14).

102.27-29: Now flames were mounting the stairs, in parts, in trios, in
redskin file, hand in hand, tongue after tongue, conversing and humming
happily: "Humming happily" is from the first chapter:  "novices fall through
the surface, humming happily to themselves." Here we see *Vege-Men's
Revenge* (See Don's article "Nabokov's Golliwoggs"), its American-Indian
variation, and *Magician's Apprentice,* which John mentioned in his notes to
Ch. 16.

102.31-33: excuse me, said a polite flamelet holding open the door: As I
wrote above, I think the flamelet is Armande. "Excuse me" is said by Armande
and Tamworth. But Tamworth is not dead as far as we know. And if he should
be a flame, he could not be a "flame*let*." Armande is called "this little
one" by Jacques (Ch. 14).

103.04-05: a long lavender-tipped flame danced up to stop him with a
graceful gesture of its gloved hand: Who is the long, elegant flame? No one
was related with lavender--M. Chamar paints her brows in purple, and Mrs.
Frankard Iis she also dead?) has a painting of mauve snowflakes, but they
are not long. Almande is the only person who is gloved, but she could not be
said "long" either and she is another flame.

103.07-09: one of his last wrong ideas was that those were the shouts of
people anxious to help him, and not the howls of fellow men: The fellow men
are those unlucky few who perish in the fire? Or the ghosts watching HP
dying? The line reminds us of the ending of *The Invitation to a Beheading*:
"Cincinnatus made his way in that direction where, to judge by the voices,
stood beings akin to him."

103.09-13: Rings of blurred colors circled around him, reminding him briefly
of a childhood picture in a frightening book about triumphant vegetables
whirling faster and faster around a nightshirted boy trying desperately to
awake from the iridescent dizziness of dream life: As I wrote in the notes
to Ch. 24, the picture book is *The Vege-Men's Revenge* discussed by Don.
The heroine, Miss Poppy Cornflower, is surrounded by the raging vege-men.
?Swifter and swifter twine their clinging feet, / A Dervish dance by color
made complete, / Only a tinted whirlpool now they seem, / The whirring sound
becomes the storm-wind?s scream. / The yellow light / is blurred to sight,
/ ?Tis like the nightmare of a troubled dream.? "Poppy awakens from her
nightmare; Hugh Person awakens from his nightmarish life into his ghostly
narrator?s dimension. " (from Don's "Nabokov's Golliwoggs" on Zembla). We
saw HP as a nightshirted boy in "the spectral fits" in Ch. 7.

103.13-15: Its ultimate visioin was the incandescence of a book or a box
grown completely transparent and hollow: looks like a coffin. Now HP is
dying into the book, TT. Or he is going to experience "the incomparable
pangs" in a cocoon of the book and awaken into another state of being, into
the fellow ghosts who have been waiting for him in the beginning of the
novella.

103.15: This is, I believe, *it*: The italicized "it" stands for something
unspeakable (Wittgenstein again!). In the world of TT, where we (or they)
have no mystery and everything is transparent, the only thing the narrator
cannot name is this *it*. I would like to write more about that later.

103.21: Easy, you know, does it, son: The unnaturally inserted "you know"
and the address "son" prove the identity of the narrator.

---------------------

Thank you very much for reading all!

Akiko

----- End forwarded message -----

---



100.04-05: (the folds of tenses are badly disarranged in regard to the building under examination): The folds of time and space, into which people, things and events disappear and out of which they come are one of the major themes. Cf. "[H]e fumbled for things in the bathwater of space, groping for the transparent soap of evasive matter. . ."; "[I]ts button had disappeared among the folds and furrows of space" (Ch. 4). "Rimiform" is chosen as one of the rare words that trouble HP (Ch. 19) probably because its meaning is "shaped like a narrow furrow." In the earlier part of the last chapter, such "folds of time" are repeatedly emphasized.

 

100.08-09: the younger of the two waiters: He stole a case of Dôle and got fired in the previous chapter. He sets fire to the hotel. 

 

100.09-10: a black patch masked the grim captain's left eye: like a pirate captain. Now we remember seeing a notorious pirate "Blackbeard" as the blackbearded secretary, Tamworth--in Ch. 10, he is called "Mr. Tamworth of the brigand's beard," though. Blackbeard (1680?--1718) was the nickname of Edward Teach alias Edward Thatch, who reined the Caribbean Sea for a short while. It is said that Captain Hook (Peter Pan's nemesis) was Blackbeard's bosun.

 

Q: Does Captain Hook have a black patch in addition to a hook? 

 

100.12 a Bloody Ivan: Probably a pun on Bloody Mary plus Ivan the Terrible. As Prince Igor is a bakery in Ch. 17, Ivan IV turns into a cocktail.

 

100.18: (Tangled tenses again!):  Time and space are often tangled in this novella. Also "tangled time" might be a pun on *A Tangled Tale* by Lewis Carroll whose middle name, Ludwidge, appears in Ch. 12.   

 

100.21-22: if ins and outs, doors and beds still endured: "Ins and outs" probably has another meaning, but I leave it to John. I would like to say that it is described with a theatrical image. Cf. "That monumental man with his clayey makeup and false grin, and Mr. Tamworth of the brigand's beard, seemed to be acting out a stiffly written scene for the benefit of an invisible audience from which
Person, a dummy, kept turning away as if moved with his chair by Sherlock's concealed landlady" (Ch. 10); "Armande decreed they regularly make love around teatime, in the living room, as upon an imaginary stage" (Ch. 17). After many "ins and outs" on the stage, the sets such as doors and beds are damaged.

 

101.01: the green figurine of a girl skier: The figurine could be actually the same one that HP saw in the show window when he came to Switzerland for the first time (Ch. 5). The figurine was carved and colored by a convict named Armand. In Ch. 15, we see Armande in a green ski suit just like the figurine.

 

101.01-02: which shone through the double kix: Brian Boyd's note to "kix": "The husk of case of a chrysalis; hence, a protective covering."

The double kix literally stands for the box and the wrapping paper. It is also a kind of double cocoon that warps both time (we are looking at the figurine that we saw 18 years ago) and space (as if it were miniature Armande ).  

 

101.08-10: A bunch of bellflowers and bluebonnets (their different shades having a lovers' quarrel): The theme of colors in TT may reflect Wittgenstein's interest in colors for the problem of limits and understanding.

 

101.13: (sericanette): Seric, archaic, "Chinese." In a "Words" file Nabokov kept, he marked off as used in TT "Sericana, region of SW China (in Milton)" (Brian Boyd's note to the LoA edition).

 

Q: Why does VN use the word here? 

 

101.12-13: in that landscape of serpents and caves two or three apple seeds: The last Edenic motif.

 

101.26: a smudge of grease: The fat from hum "the lady with the dog" feeds her spitz before she leaves the room.

 

101.23: an Amilcar: The Carthaginian general Amilcar (or Hamilcar) was the father of Hannibal (Brian Boyd's note to the LoA edition). An Amilcar is a French sports car. See also the "Amilcar" mail.

 

101.32-33: He pulled on his smart turtleneck: Cf. "He bought a nice gray turtle neck sweater" (Ch. 13); "throwing in the turtleneck for style" (Ch. 14); "Did he ever buy her a turtleneck sweater?" (Ch. 16). 

 

102.10-11: just happily balancing on the soft brink of sleep: Cf. "Persons might then straddle the middle stretch of the seesaw when considering this or that object" (Ch. 1).

 

102.18-19: a child playing with wriggly refractions in brook water: Cf. "He [Victor] placed various objects in turn — an apple, a pencil, a chess pawn, a comb — behind a glass of water and peered through it at each studiously: the red apple became a clear-cut red band bounded by a straight horizon, half a glass of Red Sea, Arabia Felix. The short pencil, if held obliquely, curved like a stylized snake, but if held vertically became monstrously fat — almost pyramidal. The black pawn, if moved to and fro, divided into a couple of black ants. The comb, stood on end, resulted in the glass's seeming to fill with beautifully striped liquid, a zebra cocktail" (*Pnin* IV: 6).

 

102.23-26: Person, *this* person, was on the imagined brink of imagined bliss when Armande's footfalls approached--striking out both "imagined" in the proof's margin . . . . At this moment of her now indelible dawning: Half asleep, as he used to do as a professional editor, HP proofreads his thought and completes the draft in which his death is "indelible."  

 

102.26-29: This is where the orgasm of art courses through the whole spine with incomparably more force than sexual ecstasy or metaphysical panic: Cf: As I quoted before, "his eye and his spine (the true reader's main organ) collaborating rather than occluding each other" (Ch. 19); "In order to bask in that magic a wise reader reads the book of genius not with his heart, not so much with his brain, but with his spine. It is there that occurs the telltale tingle even though we must keep a little aloof, a little detached when reading. Then with a pleasure which is both sensual and intellectual we shall watch the artist build his castle of cards and watch the castle of cards become a castle of beautiful steel and glass." "Good Readers and Good Writers" in *Lectures on Literature*.

 

102.05-06: Here comes the air hostess bringing bright drinks, and she is Armande: Cf. "her figure as trim as that of an air hostess" (Ch. 17).

 

102.13-15: our Person . . . groped for the light, but the click of the lamp was as ineffective as the attempt to move a paralyzed limb: Cf. He groped for the fallen lamp and neatly lit in its unusual position (Ch. 20).

 

102.21-22: The fire, . . . and then helped up by lighter fluid: Lighter fluid is, of course, the fluid for a lighter. On the other hand, "lighter" suggests Armande, who was described as "lightly followed light Jacques" (Ch. 14).

 

102.27-29: Now flames were mounting the stairs, in parts, in trios, in redskin file, hand in hand, tongue after tongue, conversing and humming happily: "Humming happily" is from the first chapter:  "novices fall through the surface, humming happily to themselves." Here we see *Vege-Men's Revenge* (See Don's article "Nabokov's Golliwoggs"), its American-Indian variation, and *Magician's Apprentice,* which John mentioned in his notes to Ch. 16.

 

102.31-33: excuse me, said a polite flamelet holding open the door: As I wrote above, I think the flamelet is Armande. "Excuse me" is said by Armande and Tamworth. But Tamworth is not dead as far as we know. And if he should be a flame, he could not be a "flame*let*." Armande is called "this little one" by Jacques (Ch. 14).

 

103.04-05: a long lavender-tipped flame danced up to stop him with a graceful gesture of its gloved hand: Who is the long, elegant flame? No one was related with lavender--M. Chamar paints her brows in purple, and Mrs. Frankard Iis she also dead?) has a painting of mauve snowflakes, but they are not long. Almande is the only person who is gloved, but she could not be said "long" either and she is another flame. 

 

103.07-09: one of his last wrong ideas was that those were the shouts of people anxious to help him, and not the howls of fellow men: The fellow men are those unlucky few who perish in the fire? Or the ghosts watching HP dying? The line reminds us of the ending of *The Invitation to a Beheading*: "Cincinnatus made his way in that direction where, to judge by the voices, stood beings akin to him."

 

103.09-13: Rings of blurred colors circled around him, reminding him briefly of a childhood picture in a frightening book about triumphant vegetables whirling faster and faster around a nightshirted boy trying desperately to awake from the iridescent dizziness of dream life: As I wrote in the notes to Ch. 24, the picture book is *The Vege-Men's Revenge* discussed by Don. The heroine, Miss Poppy Cornflower, is surrounded by the raging vege-men. “Swifter and swifter twine their clinging feet, / A Dervish dance by color made complete, / Only a tinted whirlpool now they seem, / The whirring sound becomes the storm-wind’s scream. / The yellow light / is blurred to sight, / ‘Tis like the nightmare of a troubled dream.” "Poppy awakens from her nightmare; Hugh Person awakens from his nightmarish life into his ghostly narrator’s dimension. " (from Don's "Nabokov's Golliwoggs" on Zembla). We saw HP as a nightshirted boy in "the spectral fits" in Ch. 7.  

 

103.13-15: Its ultimate visioin was the incandescence of a book or a box grown completely transparent and hollow: looks like a coffin. Now HP is dying into the book, TT. Or he is going to experience "the incomparable pangs" in a cocoon of the book and awaken into another state of being, into the fellow ghosts who have been waiting for him in the beginning of the novella.

 

103.15: This is, I believe, *it*: The italicized "it" stands for something unspeakable (Wittgenstein again!). In the world of TT, where we (or they) have no mystery and everything is transparent, the only thing the narrator cannot name is this *it*. I would like to write more about that later.

 

103.21: Easy, you know, does it, son: The unnaturally inserted "you know" and the address "son" prove the identity of the narrator.

 

---------------------

 

Thank you very much for reading all! 

 

Akiko