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Jansy:He also wrote that the strategies of pornographic novels express
“a
mentality stemming from the routine of ‘true’ fairy tales in
childhood”, a
curious parallel.
LH: very curious indeed; could you tell me where this quotation comes
from?
Jansy: My point is: VN mentioned fairy-tales in relation to enchantment
and
aesthetic bliss, but also as applying to plain erotica but, in this
case,
he was describing not symbology but the "structure" of the story. I
wonder
if LH could expand on this differentiating item (fairy-tale strategies).
LH: (Apologies if what I'm saying about fairy-tales has all been said
already)
I think VN loosely makes use in some of his stories of many structural
elements of fairy tales -objects, characters, episodes- , structural
elements which have been brought to light and described by
Structuralists
(was it F de Saussure? I'm not sure); the most striking example is RLSK
where the hero sets off on a journey to find out and bring back a
trophy:
the real life of SK. As in numerous fairy tales, the hero meets a
strange
beneficial enchanter (a good genie) who first tries to make him
renounce
his plan, warning him of the deadly danger, and then gives him the
magic
object that will enable him to go through this most dangerous ordeal
unimpaired: The ordeal is of course his meeting with the malefic
princess
who manages to lure him into her frozen enchanted kingdom of death
(read
again the description of Madame Lecerf's garden*) where SK has been
engulfed forever.
See also the scene in the beech-wood (chapter9) where Clare feels that
a
spell has been cast: (p85-86-87 Vintage International) "...Strolling
rather
aimlessly....flags flapping mournfully in a dying breeze....there was a
beech-wood, deep and dark with no undergrowth exept bindwood.....and a
strange brown stillness stood waiting....she thought she might find at
any
moment a red-capped German gnome peeping bright-eyed at her from among
the
dead leaves of a hollow."
Everything coming to a disturbing standstill, as if stranded in a
meaningless gap of time... The same stillness awaits Clare and
Sebastian
when they return to the beech-wood together: "They reached the
beech-wood.
There was the same mysterious and dull suspense about it, and he
said....:"What a funny quiet place.Eerie, isn't it? One half-expects to
see
a brownie among those dead leaves and convolvulus.""
Besides, SK had already known this experience as a child when his
mother
left husband and child (chapter1 p7): "...that day in a Paris hotel,
with
Sebastian aged about four, poorly attended by a puzzled nurse, and my
father locked up in his room "...a dead burnished clock (the waxed
moustache of ten minutes to two) under its glass dome on an evil
mantelpiece, the French Window with its fuddled fly between muslin and
pane...."....but retaining the distant memory of a child's fretfulness
on a
bleak hotel carpet, with nothing to do and a queer expansion of time,
time
gone astray, asprawl..."
Jansy: Laurence Hochard's theories, themselves, afford us a sensation
of
listening to classic fairy-tales and its black & white
stereotypes,contrived symbols and magic wands
LH: I rather think that VN gives colours and a new life and new meaning
to
the fairy tales we think we know so well; in fact, they are not the
dead
repetitive children stories we thought they were but sleeping beauties
a
prince could awaken with the kiss of his art!
Laurence Hochard
*chapter17 p167: "The "domain" consisted of the garden and grove I had
already noticed. It was all very still. The black branches, here and
there
studded with green, seemed to be listening to their own inner life.
Something dreary and dull hung over the place.... For some odd reason I
recalled a murder that had happened lately, a murderer who had buried
his
victim in such a garden as this."