Dear List,
After weathering two chasms in La
Veneziana (one of these, fenestral), a few maculae and
an umbral interplay ( these came out quite naturally in the
translation I was comparing with the English story), I realized there
was a shift from light (occular after-images) into night
(noises: crunchy crackling raucuous ). The painter's name equally changes from luscent Luciani into a
gray leaden "del Piombo".
There are references to touch (ashes, dust,
powder).
British red and yellow apples against Italian
summery lemons in a veritable sensuous feast
that constrasts, by the kind of its details from Robbe-Grillet's
"snapshots", meticulously visual in kind.
I wonder about the rugby ball: a watermellon,
indeed? [ and flew across the field with a
leather watermellon under his arm![]()
...]
There are hints that the narrator is the famous
collector and restorer McGore, who stretched sheets of canvas
like tennis racquets are stretched , or get twisted in the damp. It was
he who told simple Simpson about an experience of "entering a
painting".
After all, why mention twice McGore's opinion about art
and the world? ( he "regarded the world as a rather poor
study daubed with unstable paints on a flimsy canvas",p.91 and "as we have already remarked, Mr.McGore considered life's Creator
only a second-rate imitator of the masters...",p.92)
There is a detail in La Veneziana ( the title
applies not only to the painting, but also to the short-story itself!) that
is related to theatre and to the movies. Namely, the
breaking down of an illusion by inviting the spectators to take part in a
scene. This happens in relation to the "fourth wall".
There is a fourth wall in VN's short-story (p.111):
"In the distance, instead of a fourth wall,
a far, familiar hall glimmered like water..."
The narrator's constant invitations to make readers and
characters share an illusion and his emphasis on his permanent control over the
story confirm, in my eyes, that VN was applying the words "fourth wall" in a
specific way...
The theatrical idea of the fourth-wall sets the
readers "into" the short-story. Besides, if one pays attention to VN's
description of the Colonel's "castle" we may realize that this
castle is more like a painted scenery than a four-dimensional
construction ( we only get to see its façade with French windows leading
to/from the living and the dining-room, plus the valuable galery with
its paintings). The lawn-tennis court looms big in its front, almost too big for
its location. The characters don't move about inside it very much: the
reader gets to find them already installed in their different
rooms.