From: Vladimir Nabokov Forum [mailto:NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU] On Behalf Of jansymello
Sent: 16 October 2006 09:02
To: NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU
Subject: [NABOKV-L] Fw: [NABOKV-L] Nekti/Samovar/ Hippopotamians

Beth, thank you very much for the "find" of the fragmented images mirrored on a samovar, in ADA.

[ED: I'll invite Jenefer Coates to contribute to the discussions of "nonnons," however.   There's a similar description I have always liked of a samovar in Ada, "which expressed fragments of its surroundings in demented fantasies of a primitive genre" (p. 89, Vintage ed.).  --  SES]

VN didnt describe that samovar and I'm unfamiliar with these: would it have a waist in the middle that marks two mutually reflecting convex surfaces?

Reading Ch.14 for the entire quote, I was struck by VN's choice of the words "anadem of marguerites" in the first three lines. Obviously I didn't expect to find a suggestive indication for "anamorphosis" in it, but I wondered why VN chose "anadem", instead of "diadem", or even "tiara", much more common names ( not even mentioned in the  Oxford Concise English).

If I had not been occupied with "anademas" I would have simply imagined a yawning nilotic mammal and passed on when Van told Lucette that they were "hippopotamians", as in page 91, where there is an exchange with marguerite-munching Lucette. It might hint at her "death by water" since it comes just after Van mimics a crucifixion . Lucette asks next: " Are we Mesopotamians?" and Van, once again Van, answers: "We are Hippopotamians". 

I became aware, for the first time that the animal's name refers to water (potamus), just as Mesopotamia indicates the space between the two edenic rivers...

 ( if only the word had been spelled "Hipopotamians", I would be certain of the allusion since "hipo":  "beneath".)  

Ada On-Line (91:26-27) mentions that "Matthew Brillinger suggests (Nabokov’s Humor: The Play of Consciousness, unpub. doctoral diss., University of Auckland, 2004, Appendix) that the “hippopotamus” and the Edenic overtones of Mesopotamia recur on the Admiral Tobakoff, where Van and Lucette lie together by the liner’s pool, but just as Lucette’s hand works up Van’s thigh and gets him aroused, she draws away, “exhaling a genteel ‘merde.’ Eden was full of people. . . . Out of the water a bald head emerged by spontaneous generation and snorted” (479.03-08). While the bald head emerging from the water and the snorting could evoke a hippopotamus, there seems nothing to confirm a link."

There was no mention to "death by water"but, if  hippopotamus is recurrent in the Admiral Tobakoff pool scene, it might strenghthen my suposition - once we know that Lucette shall soon drown ( in salty ocean-water).