PS:
J.Connolly: "We recall the last words of "The
Fight" (1925): "Or perhaps what matters is not the human pain or joy at
all but, rather, the play of shadow and light on a live body, the harmony of
trifles assembled on this particular day, this particular moment, in a unique
and inimitable way." The major English novels would seem to refute that
proposition."
"Lolita"
"...an abstract idea, a painting, stippled Hopkins or
shorn Baudelaire, God or Shakespeare, anything of genuine kind."
"Every movement she made in the dappled sun
plucked at the most secret and sensitive chord of my abject body."
" I ... had visually
possessed dappled nymphets in parks..."
"... then I saw (petrified
with a kind of sacred disgust) the man close his eyes and bare his small,
horribly small and even, teeth as he leaned against a tree in which a multitude
of dappled Priaps shivered."
"The Enchanter": "Here I invoke the
law of degrees that I repudiated where I found it insulting: often I have tried
to catch myseslf in the transition from one kind of tenderness to the
other...and would very much like to know...whether one is a rare flowering of
the other on the Walpurgis Night of my murky soul; for ir they are separate
entities, then there must be two separate kinds of beauty, and the aesthetic
sense, invited to dinner, sits down with a crash between two chairs (the fate of
any dualism)...under the pretext of discussing something remarkable, I am merely
seeking a justification for my guilt." (23,24) ..."was it
the anguish that always accompanied his hopeless yearning to extract something
from beauty, to hold it still for an instant, to do something with
it..?." (p.31)
"his gaze mechanically followed the flitting of
children in the colored haze...[ ] A violet-clad girl of twelve (he never
erred), mas treading rapidly and firmly on skates...and approached his bench
through the variable luck of the sunlight...swinging her liberated arms,
flashing in and out of sight, mingling with a kindred play of light beneath the
ciolet-and-green trees."(28)..
"losing the layer of violet that disintegrated into
ashes under his terrible, unnoticed gaze." (29)
Jansy Mello:Once again the quotes I managed
to select seem to deviate from the initial theme (the "play
of shadow and light on a live body"), perhaps because my extensive
snippings cut off the imagetic flow of a skater or tennis-player child-beauty
moving in a dappled glade. Nevertheless, they are interrelated and almost
self-revelatory, like a watermark on paper, by their rejection of
a dualistic approach to dark and light or good and evil (btw: notice
"gaze..haze")*
I wonder if the insinuated "law of degrees" (E,p.23) is
connected, in any way, to his grey creation Jacob Gradus, in Pale
Fire...
GM Hopkins's "pied beauties"** are spotted, stippled, dappled,
brindled and...pious, unlike what "Arthur" or "Humbert" experience
in relation to "mortal beauty".
.....................................................................................................................................................................................
* - Surprisingly, the lines from "The Enchanter," about
the downcrash of "aesthetic sense," offer a new perspective
for Lesley Chamberlain's conclusion that "Nabokov...was tempted to think
taste ruled out evil."
** - Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–89). Poems. 1918.
http://www.bartleby.com/122/13.htmlPied Beauty
GLORY be to God for
dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded
cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that
swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape
plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and
plough; 5
And
áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter,
original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows
how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He
fathers-forth whose beauty is past
change:
10
Praise him.