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A.Sklyarenko in response to JM: "Simultaneously
his real feet kicked off and away the false head with its crumpled cap
and bearded mask." (1.30). Rita sang the tango tune...The same tango
Ostap Bender dances in Ilf & Petrov's "The Golden Calf."
Golovotyapstvo ("bungling;" golova, "head" + tyapat', "to chop [off]")
is mentioned several times in the novel.
JM: How amazing! My fickle memory distorted the
original scene completely. In Nabokov there's not only the gig in which
inverted Mascodagama dances with Rita, but the one where he bursts in,
disguised as a black giant, and frightens the children from start to
finish, when his mask and beard are dropped!
We arrived at this episode, from "Ada,"
after our excursions over Count Skrotomoff and castration. But
freudianly loosing one's head (or
eyes) stands symbolically in lieu of castration, so here we are again.
Interestingly, Van is warned and menaced by
Demon concerning his affairs with Ada, but the forbidden sister is
really Lucette (and here she is mentioned when Rita enters on stage
with him). I still cannot grasp Nabokov's project concerning Lucette's
(relative) virginity and undiscriminating Van's rejection of her.
I quote relevant parts:
"something swept out of the wings, enormous
and black...The shock affected so deeply the children in the audience
that ...in the dark of sobbing insomnias...in the glare of violent
nightmares, nervous little boys and girls relived, with private
accretions, something similar to the ‘primordial qualm,’ a shapeless
nastiness, the swoosh of nameless wings, the unendurable dilation of
fever which came in a cavern draft from the uncanny stage..."
"a masked giant, fully eight feet tall,
erupted...A voluminous, black shaggy cloak ...enveloped his silhouette
..A Karakul cap surmounted his top. A black mask covered the upper part
of his heavily bearded face../In this weird position, with his cap
acting as a pseudopodal pad, he jumped up and down...— and suddenly
came apart..."
[and]" to a
clash of cymbals in the orchestra ... Mascodagama turned over in the
air and stood on his head.Van’s face, shining with sweat, grinned
between the legs of the boots that still shod his rigidly raised arms.
Simultaneously his real feet kicked off and away the false head with
its crumpled cap and bearded mask."
[...]"The essence of the satisfaction
belonged rather to the same order as the one he later derived from
self-imposed... seemingly absurd tasks...It was the standing of a
metaphor on its head not for the sake of the trick’s difficulty, but in
order to perceive an ascending waterfall or a sunrise in reverse: a
triumph, in a sense, over the ardis of time. Thus the rapture young
Mascodagama derived from overcoming gravity was akin to that of
artistic revelation...Van on the stage was performing organically what
his figures of speech were to perform later in life — acrobatic wonders
that had never been expected from them and which frightened children"
In another scene we find him dancing with a "Fragile,
red-haired ‘Rita’ ...bore an odd resemblance to Lucette as she was to
look ten years later. During their dance, all Van saw of her were her
silver slippers turning and marching nimbly in rhythm with the soles of
his hands..."
What a long extravagant way to describe the
production of an artistic metaphor (itself, metaphorically standing on
its head).
And how insistently this image returns (the
first mention has been in King Queen Knave, if I'm not mistaken, with
an old man and a mirror)