I was puzzling over what "personifications" could be, following Ruskin's
divisions under "pathetic fallacy" ("personification refers to
abstractions"). Thinking, ideas, memory, moving tongue or fingers, even
pain are not abstractions, whereas all of language itself fits
the bill. Where would I find them in Nabokov?
A few minutes ago a friend sent me a translation of a poem by
Polish Wislawa Szymborska and it teemed with emoting concepts (chance,
necessity, happiness )* Perhaps that's what "personification" means. Would these
be perceptible when VN finds mysterious intentions in the workings of his
memory, quite often to its anthropomorphic shape as Mnemosyne. (I usually
interpreted these moments as an admission of Freud's active and
"malicious" unconscious!)
When VN approaches what could be a true "personification" he
withdraws, somehow, emphasizing analogies or their "as if" quality so that
he cannot dwell in them**, as when surly sofas hide a shy pencil or clothes
dance in the wind. Are they "Harlequins"? (LATH) Are they "Jacob Gradus"?
(PF)***
From LATH, a selection:
"Look at the harlequins!" [
] "...Trees are
harlequins, words are harlequins. So are situations and sums. Put two things together--jokes, images--and you get a triple harlequin. Come on! Play! Invent the world! Invent reality!"
[ ] "When she cried out those four words, they came out in a breathless dactylic line with a swift lispy lilt, as if
it were "lookaty," assonating
with "lickety" and
introducing tenderly, ingratiatingly those "harlequins"
who arrived with festive force, the "bar" richly stressed in
a burst of inspired persuasion followed by a liquid fall of
sequin-like syllables)."
"The forefeel of fame was as heady as the old wines of nostalgia. It was remembrance in reverse, a great lakeside oak reflected so picturesquely in such clear waters that its mirrored branches
looked like glorified
roots. I felt this future fame in my toes, in the tips of my fingers, in the hair of my
head, as one feels the shiver
caused by an electric
storm, by the dying beauty of a singer's dark voice just before the thunder, of
by one line in King Lear."
"Oh, there it
comes, the crested wave line, trotting again like white
circus ponies abreast, I understood, as I perceived her against that
backdrop, how much adulation, how many lovers had helped form and perfect my
Iris, with that impeccable complexion of hers, that absence of any
uncertainty in the profile.."
" Sometimes when I work
too late and the spies of thought cease to relay
messages, a wrong word in motion feels somehow like the dry biscuit
that aparrot holds in its great slow hand."
"A curious form of
self-preservation moves us to get rid, instantly,irrevocably,
of all that belonged to the loved one we lost. Otherwise, thethings
she touched every day and kept in their proper context by the act of
handling them start to become bloated with an awful mad life of their own.
Her dresses now wear their own selves, her books leaf through their
own pages. We suffocate in the tightening circle of those monsters that
aremisplaced and misshapen because she is not there to tend them. And even
thebravest among us cannot meet the gaze of her mirror...At the momentof parting
they appeared quite normal and harmless; I would even say
theylooked taken aback.She was naked, save for her black-stockinged legs (which
was strange but at the same time recalled something from a parallel
world, for my mind stood astride on two circus horses). smudge of
color on the dull glass of my mind; had
to make twoor three lurching efforts in order to leave my
overaffectionate seat the most authentic and faithful joys of my life: the
colored phrase in my mind under the drizzle, the white page under the desk
lamp awaiting me in my humble home, the neuralgic aches which had been spreading
through my frame like an inner person of pain, all angles and claws, for
the last three years, had now attained my extremities, and made the
task of typing a fortunate impossibility."
"I was about to open the window and
strip in front of it (at moments of raw widowerhood a soft black night in
the spring is the most soothing
voyeuse imaginable)"
.........................
* "Under One Small Star"
My apologies to chance for calling it
necessity.
My apologies to necessity if I'm mistaken, after all.
Please,
don't be angry, happiness, that I take you as my due.
May my dead be patient
with the way my memories fade.
** - "as if the mind, in order to go back thither, had
to do so with the silent steps of a prodigal” (SM 171).;
"Beginning a salad, was to him like stepping into
sea water on a chilly day, and he had always to brace himself in order to attack
the fortress of an apple " or
the brainy but not animated: "And to fulfill the fish wish of the womb,/ A school of Freudians headed for the
tomb." (PF)
***
- "We shall accompany Gradus in constant thought, as he makes his way
from distant dim Zembla to green Appalachia, through the entire length of the
poem, following the road of its rhythm, riding past in a rhyme, skidding around
the corner of a run-on, breathing with the caesura, swinging down to the foot of
the page from line to line as from branch to branch, hiding between two
words..."