When I related
Lucette's knocking before entering a room, and her drowning in Oceanus
nox, I must have blocked away part of the wealth of semantic
avenues in ordinary language (What a most unNabokovian thing to
do!) This is why I hadn't realized, then, that the deity named Oceanus
bears the brunt of the "behind theme"in its last four letters!
which might add strength to B.Boyd's argument about the 'buggering
up' Van and Ada inflicted upon Lucette. However, I'm still entertained
by the mythological cloacal possibilities, children's fantasies and the
primal scene.
Although Lucette is often described
as invading Van and Ada's sexual encounters, she also "knuckle knocks"
before coming into those typically freudian primal scene situations and
it's not a coincidence that his last typist's maiden name is Violet
Knox (K,n,o,x - not n,o,x)*. This prefatory warning of a knock
approaches Lucette not only to Miss Knox (later Mrs.Ronald Oranger),
but also to Polly (cf. example n.1, below).In a Freudian theory, primal
scenes relate not only to what is seen or pictured, but also to what is
heard. Aural disturbances are more effective because they provide a
two-way disturbance together with an excuse/defense. And...one must try
to always keep in mind that, for Nabokov, "literature is not an
auditory phenomenon, but a visual one,"# because VN is the first to
disrupt his own extra-fictional assertion in his novels.
When
,once in a while (in "ADA," as in "Pale Fire,") we find Van (or
Kinbote,) addressing secretaries or editors to correct a mispelling, we
find that quite often it's the reader who becomes the onlooker of their
exchanges (the voyeuristic third in the oedipal situation).
Sometimes the conversation is only a record of a long past report (as
in example n.1, below). Sight and hearing are intermingled and the two (or more) situations are very dissimilar.
However, the author takes his time and his pleasure with comic
misunderstandings and puns, allied to the long loose string of
allusions and imprecations which have
now become stylistically permissible.
In the same buzzing chapter ("In Time
and Beyond") I find the reference to "Spring in Fialta" once visited by
Lucette, in ADA. It amplifies their connections (like the one from the
verse from "Ay Chiquita"), now through Violet ("Ada calls Violet
"Fialochka"...a diminutive of the Russian for "violet," "fialka"
...Fialta is an invented place name that combines Yalta, the Crimean
resort twon, with "fialka,", violet)##.
Brian Boyd sees Lucette as a "good
mermaid" who sends saving messages and "acts through the agency of
Violet Knox and Ronald Oranger." Nabokov's titillating games with
his readership (concerning "who is narrating? whose voice lies behind
him? who wrote this sentence, and when...who is watching us now?"), appear to have been settled by
Brian Boyd in connection to ADA: "Oranger's editorial work is very
limited: apart from the contributions in the passage just quoted, which
are necessary to establish the identity of our 'Ed,' he intrudes only
fifteen times, or about once every forty pages....The redactor's
remarks are ellicited by Van's reconstructing the conversation between
himself and Lucette with the help of the letter Lucette had sent him a
year earlier..."(212). The ghostly model approaches Lucette and
Hazel, mermaid and butterfly.
Ada, or Ardor:
1. "At this point, as in a well-constructed play larded
with comic relief, the brass campophone buzzed [...]Van (crossly): ‘I don’t
understand the first word... What’s that? L’adorée? Wait a
second’ (to Lucette). ‘Please, stay where you are.’ (Lucette whispers a
French child-word with two ‘p’s.). ‘Okay’ (pointing toward the
corridor). ‘Sorry, Polly. Well, is it l’adorée? No? Give me
the context. Ah — la durée. La durée is not... sin on what?
Synonymous with duration [...] ‘Lucette, let it run over, who
cares!’[...] for a ridiculous moment could not remember what the
hell he had been — yes, the polliphone...It had died, but buzzed as soon as
he recradled the receiver, and Lucette knocked discreetly at the same
time...‘La durée... For
goodness sake, come in without knocking... No, Polly, knocking does not
concern you.....What’s wrong now? You don’t know if it’s dorée or
durée? D, U, R. I thought you knew French..."
2.Van omnisciently recollects: "The sky was also heartless
... clogged with Oceanus Nox, n,o,x. At every slap..."
3. "He was a
very slow writer. It took him six years to write the first draft and
dictate it to Miss Knox, after which he revised the typescript, rewrote
it entirely in long hand (1963-1965) and redictated the entire thing to
indefatigable Violet, whose pretty fingers tapped out a final copy in
1967. E, p, i — why ‘y,’ my dear?"
In Pale Fire, Kinbote
writes:
4.. "Frank has acknowledged the safe
return of the galleys I had been sent here and has asked me to mention
in my Preface — and this I willingly do — that I alone am responsible
for any mistakes in my commentary. Insert before a professional. A
professional proofreader has carefully rechecked the printed text of
the poem against the photo type of the manuscript, and has found a few
trivial misprints I had missed"
5. "I send this by air and urgently
repeat the address Sylvia gave you: Dr. C. Kinbote, Kinbote (not
"Charles X. Kingbot, Esq.,**" as you, or Sylvia, wrote; please,
be more careful — and more intelligent)..."
.......................................................
* - In "Nabokov's Ada: The Place of
Consciousness" there are rich references to Violet Knox (Mrs. Ronald
Oranger) from pages 211-214. Here is how he writes about the connection
"Knocks,Knox and nox" "the poor secretary takes down the
instructions too and then transcribes all Van says in his search for a
note; and of course Van must spell out 'Nox' so that Violet will not
confuse it with her own surname or the verb 'knocks.' "
** Wiki: "In the United States the suffix
Esq. most commonly designates individuals licensed to practice law, and
may be used by both men and women"
Kinbote describes how he admonished his Queen
in a letter, but apparently without access to a direct quote from any
document. The sound of the word, in parallel to its meanings, serves as
an explosion of amusement (as in X, équis, Esq.).
#- One
of Nabokov's translators in Portugal (Telma Costa) notes that
the commanding author "imposes words. Imposes his words. Words in a learned
language, 'recherchés,' ambiguous, treacherous,
ridiculous, proteiform, but, always, filled with a semantic charge.
Does he invent them? No, he consctructs them. And it is from the
wordplay, from the text lying beyond the text that the novel comes
out as existence - and not from the gestures and situations pursued
by his characters intertwined in spaces and times, as equivocal and
overlapped as they are. 'Literature is not an auditory phenomenon,
but visual,' VN has declared in an interview."
"Impõe palavras.
Impõe as suas palavras. Palavras de uma língua aprendida. Usa-as
rebuscadas, ambíguas, traiçoeiras, ridículas, proteiformes, mas sempre
cheias de carga semântica. Inventa-as? Não, constrói-as. E é do jogo
das palavras, do texto para além do texto que resulta o romance como
existência, não dos gestos e das situações que os seus personagens
percorrem em espaços e em tempos enredados, sobrepostos e equívocos,
como eles próprios./ 'A literatura não é um fenômeno auditivo, mas
sim visual', declarou VN numa entrevista.")
Fogo
Pálido, coleção Estórias, Editorial Teorema, Lda., Lisboa,
Portugal.
## -
Akiko Nakata (Nabokov Studies, volume 11 - 2007/2008) in "A Failed
Reader Redeemed" extends the links from "Spring in Fialta" to "The Real
Life of Sebastian Knight" through the mysterious flash of violets. She
writes: "Fialta, an Adriatic resort whose name is a blend of Fiume and
Yaslta (Boyd, Russian Years, 426), is associated with violets
via fialka,the Russian word for violet (Lee 33, Parker
131). btw. The dates and references brought up by A.Nakata are
puzzling to me, concerning how we should read the name "Fialta" (Boyd
1990, Lee 1976, Parker,1987, Boyd 2001)