There is a saying I once read in the list: "Grattez le russe et vous verrez le tartare” (“Scratch a Russian and you will find a
Tartar”), attributed to Napoleon while he'd been emprisioned by
the British.
Scratch Mme.Lecerf and you'll find Helene,
Nina or some other name kept "sub Rosa"?
Thinking about roses
and secrets led me to a more recent novel,"The Mysterious Flame of
Queen Loana", by Umberto Eco who composes a detective-story that
follows the intrincacies of the protagonist's personal history and who we
meet lying in a hospital: "And what's your name?"/[...] After a moment I
offered the most obvious reply./"My name is Arthur Gordon Pym."/"That isn't your
name./"Of course, Pym was someone else. He did not come back
again... "
However, I would not have been
reminded of E.A.Poe in relation to SK were it not for Eco's Norton Lectures, Harvard,
1993: "Six Walks in the Fictional Woods". In one of
his lectures U.Eco stops at Poe's "The Narrative of
Arthur Gordon Pym" to discuss its various voices and worlds inside worlds,
when he stressed the author's intervention to emphasize the narrator's rendering
of Pym's disappearance.
The book I now hold
in my hand bears the title "The Real Life of Sebastian Knight" and the
author's name, Vladimir Nabokov.
My New Directions Edition
repeats this title at the opening of every chapter.What I read, though, is
the narrator's (V.) account of his experience of gathering information
about his half-brother, Sebastian. A kind of diary that only once in a while
reveals a little about Sebastian, his life and work. Sebastian comes and
goes, but V. and his
"narrative" have vanished...