PS: In my
former posting to the VN-List I broke up the word "stratagems" into
"strata" and "gems", inadvertently suggesting that there there might be
one, or two, identifiable gems, inserted among the various strata or levels
of VN's narrative.
Cf.:" I suppose I am
especially susceptible to the magic of games. In my chess sessions with Gaston I
saw the board as a square pool of limpid water with rare shells and
stratagems rosily visible upon the smooth tessellated bottom, which to
my confused adversary was all ooze and squid-cloud. (Nabokov,Lolita)
This image must have been
induced by the work I've been pursuing and in which
I compare Freud's image about archeological excavations,
employed to assert his conviction about the indestructibility of
memory ( "Civilization and Its Discontents", 1930, SEXXI , chapter
One), to Thomas de Quincey's "The Palimpsest of the Human
Brain"* ( in "Suspiria de Profundis", 1845), when he
dealt with traumatic or enigmatic experiences which recurred inexorably and
could not be deleted.
(BTW: I got stuck in
"Lolita" simply because I was curious to compare the titles
of De Quincey's earlier work, "Confessions
of an English Opium Eater (1822)"
and Humbert Humbert's original "Lolita,
or the Confession of a White Widowed Male".)
My intention, actually, was to describe as
a precious "gem" the
entire erection of literary "strata-gems," by VN, and not
any isolated body embedded in them, i.e. VN's narratives
as including different, apparently incongruous levels of
historicity, like those we also find in "Transparent Things"( for
example), suggestive of a special kind of palimpsest-style or, perhaps,
what in modern terms became the "hypertext" ( as those in the
know already know).
Cf. "Transparent Things, Ch.One): "When we concentrate on a material object,
whatever its situation, the very act of attention may lead to our involuntarily
sinking into the history of that object. Novices must learn to skim over matter
if they want matter to stay at the exact level of the moment. Transparent
things, through which the past shines! Man-made objects, or natural ones, inert
in themselves but much used by careless life (you are thinking, and quite
rightly so, of a hillside stone over which a multitude of small animals have
scurried in the course of incalculable seasons) are particularly difficult to
keep in surface focus: novices fall through the surface, humming happily to
themselves, and are soon reveling with childish abandon in the story of this
stone, of that heath. I shall explain. A thin veneer of immediate reality is
spread over natural and artificial matter, and whoever wishes to remain in the
now, with the now, on the now, should please not break its tension film.
Otherwise the inexperienced miracle-worker will find himself no longer
walking on water but descending upright among staring fish.
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*-
“A palimpsest, then, is a membrane or roll cleansed of its manuscript by
reiterated successions . . . What else than a natural and mighty palimpsest is the human brain? Such
a palimpsest is my brain; such a palimpsest, oh
reader! is yours. Everlasting layers of ideas, images, feelings, have fallen
upon your brain softly as light. Each
succession has seemed to bury all that went before. And yet, in reality, not one
has been extinguished. And if, in the vellum palimpsest, lying amongst the other
diplomata of human archives or libraries, there is anything fantastic or which
moves to laughter, as oftentimes there is in the grotesque collisions of those
successive themes, having no natural
connection, which by pure accident have consecutively occupied the roll, yet, in
our own heaven-created palimpsest, the deep memorial palimpsest of the brain, there are not and cannot be such incoherencies."
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