Subject
Fw: scarlet pimpernell
From
Date
Body
----- Forwarded message from jansy@aetern.us -----
Date: Fri, 8 Apr 2005 00:46:04 -0300
From: Jansy Berndt de Souza Mello <jansy@aetern.us>
Reply-To: Jansy Berndt de Souza Mello <jansy@aetern.us>
Subject: Fw: scarlet pimpernell
To: Vladimir Nabokov Forum
Don and List,
While still working on the "Bellevue" scene in ADA, there was a sentence that
called my attention in particular.
There is Dorothy Vinelander who
"thought fit to interrupt her narrative (which had to do with the eruption of a
dream volcano) "
This simple sentence brings together "interrupts/erupts" and shows the words in
a special way if one hears the word "inter" not only as "coming in between"
but also as "inter/interred/ interring" which means to cover with earth, to
deposit a corpse, to bury.
This links with her husband´s "digs" ( in "what treasures he dug up"...).
There is also a reference mentioning "gravemen" in "laymen and lemans...grave
men/gravemen".
Is there a special secret connected with Dorothy that needs to be brought to
light? ( by contrasting "inter" and "erupt").
Blackmailing Dorothy may know a secret about a "buried lover/leman"? There is
a mildly toxic plant named " Scarlet Pimpernel" ( the Stabia/
Pompeianella/Pimpernella link, plus the Sorcière´s owner, Ms. Scarlet )
( Plant name: Scarlet Pimpernel Toxic portions: Foliage,flowers and fruit.
Toxicity: Curcubitacins in Scarlet pimpernel may cause digestive and kidney
inflammation. Caged birds and sheep are reported to have died from eating
Anagallis arvensis)
The paragraph that informs us about Dorothy and her marriage reads:
"Dorothy Vinelander retired to a subarctic monastery town (Ilemna, now
Novostabia) where eventually she married a Mr Brod or Bred, tender and
passionate, dark and handsome, who traveled in eucharistials and other
sacramental objects throughout the Severnïya Territorii and who subsequently
was to direct, and still may be directing half a century later, archeological
reconstructions at Goreloe (the 'Lyaskan Herculanum'); what treasures he dug up
in matrimony is another question".
Brian Boyd ( Nabokov´s Ada, the place of consciousness, page 31) explained that
Nabokov fused in "Ilemna/Novostabia" both Lake Il´men and Iliamna, a local
volcano.
Other associations present in VN´s text bring up Freud again by a curious chain
of associations:
"Ilemna" and Leman, Laymen and Lemans, Sig Leymanski as Dr.Froit , or Dr. Signy
Mondieu Mondieu.
excerpts from "ADA"
1. " as the Bear-Foot, B,E,A,R, my love, not my foot or yours, or the Stabian
flower girl's - an allusion, which your father, who, according to Blanche, is
also mine, would understand (...) 'Good for you, Pompeianella (whom you saw
scattering her flowers in one of Uncle Dan's picture books, but whom I admired
last summer in a Naples museum).
2. According to the Sunday supplement of a newspaper that had just begun to
feature on its funnies page the now long defunct Goodnight Kids, Nicky and
Pimpernella (sweet siblings who shared a narrow bed)...
3... our frolicsome Pimpernel and Nicolette found in the same attic a reel box
containing what turned out to be (according to Kim, the kitchen boy, as will be
understood later) a tremendous stretch of microfilm...
4. ... Theresa maddened with her messages a scientist on our easily
maddened planet; his anagram-looking name, Sig Leymanksi, had been partly
derived by Van from that of Aqua's last doctor. When Leymanski's obsession...
5. The details of the L disaster (and I do not mean Elevated) in the beau milieu
of last century, which had the singular effect of both causing and cursing the
notion of 'Terra,' are too well-known historically, and too obscene
spiritually, to be treated at length in a book addressed to young laymen and
lemans - and not to grave men or gravemen.
6.... and then staying for a while in autumn at a hotel on a mountain slope
above Leman Lake (where Karamzin and Count Tolstoy had roamed) (...) Both
girls had scarlet fever in Cannes...
7. We shall always remember Little Lemantry near Rantchester or the Pseudotherm
in the lovely cul-de-sac south of the viaduct
8. Mount Russet, the forested hill behind the town, lived up to its name and
autumnal reputation, with a warm glow of curly chestnut trees; and on the
opposite shore of Leman, Leman meaning Lover, loomed the crest of Sex Noir,
Black Rock.
9A Dr Froid, one of the administerial centaurs, who may have been an émigré
brother with a passport-changed name of the Dr Froit of Signy-Mondieu-Mondieu
in the Ardennes or, more likely, the same man, because they both came from
Vienne, Isère (...) The astorium in St Taurus, or whatever it was called (who
cares - one forgets little things very fast, when afloat in infinite
non-thingness) was, perhaps, more modem, with a more refined desertic view,
than the Mondefroid bleakhouse horsepittle, but in both places a demented
patient could outwit in one snap an imbecile pedant.
10. he bought a villa for himself et ma cousine, and had supper with the former
owner, a banker's widow, amiable Mme Scarlet and her blond, pimply but pretty,
daughter Eveline.
11. Van kissed her leaf-cold hand and, letting the Bellevue worry about his car,
letting all Swans worry about his effects and Mme Scarlet worry about Eveline's
skin trouble...
----- End forwarded message -----