Jim Twiggs: The New
Republic web site often reprints essays from its archives. Today's features
include Mary McCarthy's famous "Bolt from the Blue" piece on Pale Fire. In
rereading it for the first time in a long while, I see that I was wrong in
downplaying the significance of the word "green" in the novel. McCarthy writes
that "since for Pope Zembla
was roughly equal to Greenland, then Zembla must be a green land, an
Arcadia...The complementary
color to green is red. Zembla has turned red after the revolution
that began in the Glass Factory. Green and red flash on and off in the narrative
liketraffic signals and
sometimes reverse their message. ...Green is pre-eminently the color of seeming
(the theatrical greenroom), the color, too, of camouflage, for Nature, being
green at least in summer, can hide a green-clad figure in her verdure . .
."http://www.tnr.com/book/review/bolt-the-blue?page=0,0 So the thread, as Stan and others
have suggested, is not so curious after
all.
JM:When I brought
up Hugh Well's "A Door in the Wall," I was not particularly entranced by
any "green symbolism" (life, traffic signals, recurrent
esmeraldic mentions*), nor similarities in "cut and
intonation," in his sentences and another author's (valuable indicators
as they undoubtedly are & as it has been amply demonstrated
here.) Usually Nabokov's colors come in all sorts of shades and grades,
they seldom stand alone as "a green" this and that if not in a parodical
mood.
I related
the door to a magic opening with its regular reappearance along
the subject's life, together with his various reactions to such an overture
into "arcadia" and "paradise," an "intimation" which, so I thought,
was shared by Well and Nabokov.
This
effect would not directly influence VN's style, but it might be
echoed "cryptomnemonically." Instead of cryptomnesia's involuntary
plagiarism, it would indicate a common emotional source alied to a
particular image, in this case, a door. There are examples of that in
"Glory", "A Visit to the Museum" and
etc.
I haven't
re-read Maar's articles and the 18 pages of an Ur-Lolita, but I seem to
remember there was a similar door, or an opening, in this
German short novella. Perhaps this is what could have spurred VN's
imagination, together with certain gothic undertones with incest
fantasies (which had already been hinted at in "The Gift"),
providing an overdetermined unconscious association to the name,
"Lolita," something that is rather insignificant considering the major
distinctions between these two works.
...................................
* Nabokov
pokes a sleeping angel in paradise, using a "green umbrella." Even in
Arcadia ultraviolet rays damage the
skin...