Jim Twiggs:In my
opinion, a careful look at lines 161-163 may help to answer some of the recent
questions about Canto One. Here are the lines: "But like some little lad forced
by a wench/ With his pure tongue her abject thirst to quench,/I was corrupted,
terrified, allured,"
...Because of what they suggest about Shade's life and
character, Iconsider them the most important lines in the poem,perhaps in the
entire book. ...... the
experience he describes--HIS experience--remains so painful that, even in
his sixties, he can't face it head on. The switch back to the first person for
line 163-- "I was corrupted, terrified, allured" --reveals the awesome and hence
lasting trauma of his being sexually abused by his Aunt Maud. If we're willing
to go this far, then we might want to revisit lines 102-104: "How fully I felt
nature glued to me And how my childish palate loved the taste/ Half-fish,
half-honey, of that golden paste!" Any grown man with a lick of worldly
experience ought to be struck, on a first reading, by the strong sexual
connotations of the words "honey," "fish," and"taste." Then he might decide that
what's being talked about here is merely the liquid glue that children use for
pasting items in scrapbooks. But then, when he reaches lines 161-162, he may
once again want to reconsider. If he does, the image that comes to mind--Aunt
Maud's pudenda plastered to a small boy's face--might seem as funny, in a very
Nabokovian way, as it is appalling.
J.Mello: I was intrigued by
J.Twiggs' certainty that the dead wench had actually been his Aunt Maud.
I'm still unsure about who corrupted, terrified and
allured Shade, but I recalled another reference to a sticky paste and a
"roll-wave of surfeit" associated to remembrance and an aunt
(Proust's), found in "Ada":
"In later years he had never been able
to reread Proust (as he had never been able to enjoy again the perfumed gum
of Turkish paste) without a roll-wave of surfeit ...yet his favorite
purple passage remained the one concerning the name 'Guermantes,' with
whose hue his adjacent ultramarine merged in the prism of his
mind..."