“The unexpected is the infra-red in the spectrum of art” (V.N)

Rapidily changing tactics, unexpected sceneries, even bungled internet inputs may at times promote catastrophic feelings – and solutions. Nevertheless the unforeseen is quite often ridiculous or downright funny, like those snapshots where an intruder dominates the picture.

After finding one example of such an intrusion today, I realized that such event carries a particular interest for Nabokov when he experiments with "narrative conventions" (as indicated by Tim Major, see blog entry below*). But there is something beyond that, when we consider his slightly earlier poem "The Snapshot," in which a familiar scene bursts its crust and the world rushes in expanding it, or (vainly?) breaking down its intended patterns.

Photographs are important elements in VN’s fiction (as in “Signs and Symbols”, “Transparent Things”, “Ada”…) and they serve multiple functions in his writing, but seldom as the record of an “accidental spy” imprisoned in a future time.

The Snapshot (1927)
Vladimir Nabokov

Upon the beach at violet-blue noon,
in a vacational Elysium
a striped bather took
a picture of his happy family.
……………
……………
That bit of film imprinted
all it could catch,
the stirless child, his radiant mother,

and a toy pail and two beach spades,
and some way off a bank of sand,
and I, the accidental spy, 
I in the background have been also taken.
……………
…………….
My likeness among strangers,
one of my August days,
my shade they never noticed,
my shade they stole in vain.

……………………………………………………………………………………..

*Tim Major (in 2010) writes about the skiing scene in “KQK” (1928): “ In just his second novel Nabokov had begun experimenting with narrative conventions. While it’s maybe not quite as impressive taken out of context, I love the trick he plays in the extract below. Chapter 8 of King, Queen, Knave begins in one scenario with Franz and his lover Martha, but as Franz examines a photo of her husband Dreyer, Nabokov smoothly transitions to the scene within the image, lingers for a few moments, then hops out again. It’s an effect that’s simpler to achieve in film, but in prose it takes you by surprise. It leaves you feeling hyper-aware of each sentence as you begin to suspect that any sentence might spring off on an unexpected tangent.

One such blurry morning, a Sunday, when he and Martha in her beige dress were walking decorously about the snow-powdered garden, she wordlessly showed him a snapshot she had just received from Davos. It showed a smiling Dreyer, in a Scandinavian ski suit, clutching his poles; his skis were beautifully parallel, and all around was bright snow, and on the snow one could distinguish the photographer’s narrow-shouldered shadow.// When the photographer (a fellow-skier and teacher of English, Mr. Vivian Badlook) had clicked the shutter and straightened up, Dreyer, still beaming, moved his left ski forward; however, as he was standing on a slight incline, the ski went further than he had intended, and with a great flourish of ski poles he tumbled heavily on his back while both girls shot past shrieking with laughter. http://cosycatastrophes.wordpress.com/tag/vladimir-nabokov /