Dear List,
After considering the sonorous repetitions in "Pnin" ( "tears and
stars", instead of "stars and cars" as they arise in "Lolita") I
began to puzzle about a special kind that I encountered in Nabokov’s “Ada”,
now departing from the expression: “ being on the brink of”, where it was
insistently applied in relation to “brooks” and almost devoid of the
meaning that suggests some impending presentification.
We find it at least four times:
1.Lucette had abandoned her skipping rope to
squat on the brink of the brook and float a fetus-sized rubber doll;
2.Van
found himself standing on the brink of the brook
3.as they grappled on the
brink of the brook;
4. as they crouched on the brink of one of the brook’s
crystal shelves... ( adding here a play with “book shelves”)
Today, re-reading two short stories by
E.A.Poe I came across a description
of the narrator’s difficulty to render the expression of his beloved’s eyes, of
feeling “on the verge of”…( “Ligeia, page 3)
The narrator observed that “when L’s beauty
passed into my spirit, there dwelling as in a shrine” (…) “we often find
ourselves upon the very verge of remembrance” (…)Yet not the more could I define
that sentiment, or analyze, or even steadily view it. I recognized it, let me
repeat, sometimes in the survey of a rapidly-growing vine – in the contemplation
of a moth, a butterfly, a chrysalis, a stream of running water…”
Poe also wrote about “being on the
brink”, but there the suspension included a watery medium, like in VN, a
stinking tarn and in “The Fall of the House of Usher” he wrote:
“ I reined my horse to the precipitous
brink of a black and lurid tarn that lay in unruffled luster by the dwelling,
and gazed down…” This situation is brought back at the
very end of the story:
“ and the
deep dank tarn at my feet closed sullenly and silently over the fragments of the
“HOUSE OF USHER”
( 1991,Dover Thrift Editions, page 15
&29).
There might be something “dangerous” when
one stops at the brink of something unremembered or before an abyss. And yet,
this “impending danger” that sounds so innocent in English, gains a special
sexual meaning when heard in French.
“Verge” applies to the penis, to the male sexual organ, that is, to a
positive presence that lies in contrast to any forgetfulness, tarns, or
“absences”.
VN uses the word “verge” only once where he
clearly suggests its sexual meaning although in its context it still means “being on the brink
of”. When
( Cf.Penguin ed. page 263)
”…because there exists a simple cure for all my maux and throes and that
is an extract of scarlet aril, the flesh of yew, just only yew. Je realize, as
your sweet Cinderella de Torf (now Madame Trofim Fartukov) used to say, that I’m
being coy and obscene. But it all leads up to an important, important
suggestion! Van, je suis sur la
verge ( Blanche again) of a revolting amorous adventure. I could be instantly
saved by you (…)”
There might have been more plays with “verge” when he describes a certain Miss Vertograd, “his father’s librarian, a completely servile and infinitely accommodative spinster of Verger’s format and presumable date of publication”… All the same, I wonder if the lulling sound of being on the “brink of a brook” had been so often repeated because the narrator wanted to conjure away, then, the other (hidden) French meaning.
Jansy