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Fw: Brian Boyd on Scatology in ADA
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----- Original Message -----
From: "Stringer-Hye, Suellen" <suellen.stringer-hye@vanderbilt.edu>
> ---------------- Message requiring your approval (200
lines) ------------------
> This passage has always seemed to me one in which Nabokov's high
> moral contempt for Van's indifference to "inferiors" is so strong
> that it nearly breaks the narrative surface and the author is
> exposed.
>
> --On Wednesday, January 14, 2004 9:15 PM -0800 "D. Barton Johnson"
> <chtodel@cox.net> wrote:
>
> > ----- Original Message -----
> > From: "Brian Boyd (FOA ENG)" <b.boyd@auckland.ac.nz>
> > To: "'D. Barton Johnson '" <chtodel@cox.net>
> > Sent: Wednesday, January 14, 2004 5:58 PM
> > Subject: RE: Scatology in ADA
> >
> >
> > From Brian Boyd:
> >
> > As Abdel Bouazza notes, I have referred to the ?structurally
> > perfect stool? example in Nabokov?s ADA (2001 ed, p. 197). There
> > is more that could be said about this, but (pace Jansy de Souza)
> > I don?t think it has anything to do with Lucette.
> >
> > Let?s look at exhibit B, from Ada II.3: 355:
> >
> > Cherry, the only lad in our next (American) floramor, a little
> > Salopian of eleven or twelve, looked so amusing with his copper
> > curls, dreamy eyes and elfin cheekbones that two exceptionally
> > sportive courtesans, entertaining Van, prevailed upon him one
> > night to try the boy. Their joint efforts failed, however, to
> > arouse the pretty catamite, who had been exhausted by too many
> > recent engagements. His girlish crupper proved sadly defaced by
> > the varicolored imprints of bestial clawings and flesh-twistings;
> > but worst of all, the little fellow could not disguise a state of
> > acute indigestion, marked by unappetizing dysenteric symptoms
> > that coated his lover?s shaft with mustard and blood, the result,
> > no doubt, of eating too many green apples. Eventually, he had to
> > be destroyed or given away.
> >
> > I will offer two kinds of answers, a quick pointer for those who
> > want to find their own way, and a long explanation for those who
> > prefer a tour guide.
> >
> > The pointer: the central and right-hand panels of Bosch?s Garden
> > of Earthly Delights.
> >
> > Now don?t read any further, if you want to explore and think
> > things through for yourself.
> >
> > The tour guide:
> >
> > Disgust is a key human emotion, one of seven recognized
> > cross-culturally as one of the seven basic human emotions
> > (happiness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise, contempt and
> > disgust). Art aims to elicit response, and Nabokov, like other
> > writers and artists, avails himself from time to time of disgust
> > as one note in his emotional keyboard. (A rare exception like
> > Swift can make it the central emotion in his whole oeuvre.)
> >
> > Feces produce a reaction of disgust in humans, and Nabokov
> > occasionally uses them in ways that make them fresh and
> > unappetizing, not mere ?shit? that has become dry and odorless
> > through long exposure but, for instance, the ?bright pat of dog
> > dirt somebody had already slipped upon,? which the New Yorker
> > censored out of the first publication of Chapter 3 of Pnin. In
> > that case, it?s simply a vivid?unpleasantly vivid, but for that
> > reason highly evocative?detail. But the case of Cherry whose
> > ?dysenteric symptoms . . . coated his lover?s shaft with mustard
> > and blood? is an affront to the imagination, and, when it leads
> > to the flip but brutal ?Eventually, he had to be destroyed or
> > given away,? to the moral sense.
> >
> > Throughout Ada Nabokov plays on the tension between, on the one
> > hand, Van and Ada?s belief that Ardis is their private paradise
> > of love and sex, and on the other, their awareness, and his own,
> > that love and sex are rather more complicated. The very
> > repetition of lovemaking makes Ardis blissful for the young
> > lovers, but the repeatability of the act of love also has its
> > sordid side, as Van finds out in 1888, when he discovers Ada?s
> > infidelity, or as we see here in the Villa Venus chapter, which
> > replays Ardis?s rampant sexuality in much darker tones.
> >
> > Remember that according to Eric Veen?s stipulations a Villa Venus
> > patron can avail himself of a boy only ?between two sequences of
> > three girls each, all possessed in the course of the same week.?
> > The frantic repetitiveness of sex in the Villa Venus, and the
> > ghastly and nightmarish consequences in the case of Cherry, make
> > it seem not one of the ?parodies of paradise? Eric and his
> > grandfather have planned, but hellish. And in that Nabokov is
> > building on and evoking Bosch?s Garden of Earthly Delights, which
> > he introduces explicitly in Ada II.10, to which he compares Ada
> > as a whole (SO 306), and which, I argue (in ?Ada, The Bog and the
> > Garden,? in the next Nabokov Studies), he had in mind as a
> > structural foundation for the novel before he began writing Ada.
> >
> > Cherry has eaten too many green apples. The fruits recalls the
> > hundred or so fruits (including many cherries) in the central
> > panel of Bosch?s triptych (Demon lingers on just one detail from
> > the painting, a fruit: ?the woman-sized strawberry that you
> > embrace with? one of the figures in the foreground, II.10: 437).
> > That central panel evokes a world of repetitive sensual and
> > sexual pleasure that seems both paradisiac (a garden, like Eden
> > in the left panel) and yet by its focus on the fruit?sweet and
> > succulent but also reminding us of the fruit of the Tree of
> > Knowledge and Adam and Eve?s expulsion from paradise for tasting
> > it?also implying the consequences of sin, which become explicit
> > in the Hell on earth of the right-hand panel. And there is good
> > reason to think that the Villa Venus chapter comes as close to
> > Bosch?s vision of hell in The Garden of Earthly Delights or The
> > Last Judgment (also evoked in detail by Demon) as Nabokov could
> > without merely transposing. The paragraph on Cherry alone can be
> > read in conjunction with the right-hand panel of the Garden of
> > Earthly Delights: the shafts of various kinds penetrating many a
> > rectum, the unsavory anal and oral discharges, the ?bestial
> > clawings.?
> >
> > The casual horror of Van?s ?Eventually he had to be destroyed or
> > given away??the smartness, the indifference, the disproportion
> > between his unruffled self-concern and the damage that has been
> > done?compound the hellishness even for a first-time reader. Is
> > Nabokov as offhand about Cherry?admittedly only an incidental
> > character, coming to life and facing a grisly death within the
> > space of a paragraph?as his hero is?
> >
> > Not at all. In fact he links Cherry repeatedly with others much
> > more central to the novel who are wrecked by sex, especially
> > Lucette.
> >
> > The redness of a cherry (and the boy?s ?copper curls?) and the
> > greenness of the apples bring to mind the red-green combination
> > associated with Lucette throughout the novel: her red hair, the
> > green clothes she wears to complement it. Indeed, Lucette too has
> > ?copper curls? (I.36: 226) and the green-red combination recurs
> > in reference to her in the one further ?copper curl? in Ada (?a
> > pair of green eyes and a copper curl,? II.8: 421).
> >
> > Cherry is slang for ?virginity,? and Lucette?s virginity is a key
> > focus in the novel: her technical virginity (no ?intromission of
> > the male member,? to echo Joyce), but her actual initiation into
> > sex in various ways by Van and Ada, from eight (visually), at
> > twelve (her being fondled and kissed by Van as an ostensible sop
> > to Lucette and decoy for Marina and Mlle Larivière but mostly as
> > an escape route for Ada to meet Percy), and at fourteen, her
> > lesbian relationship with Ada. Lucette describes her
> > entanglements with Ada in intimate and gymnastic terms; it is the
> > most detailed description of homosexual activity in the novel,
> > and an Opheliac Lucette?s thrusting on Van such a description in
> > such a way itself shows how unbalanced she has already become.
> > The other most elaborate description of homosexual sex in the
> > novel is here, in Van?s damaging encounter with Cherry.
> >
> > Cherry has a ?girlish crupper?; that word occurs once elsewhere
> > in the novel, referring to Lucette?s ?little crupper? (I.32:
> > 198). Nabokov here focuses on another link. Van takes Ada
> > repeatedly from behind, and Lucette, who has seen them
> > love-making again and again, naively wonders, after sitting on
> > his knee on the return from the 1888 picnic, if she has been
> > impregnated by him. There is in fact a ?behind? motif associated
> > with sex and its dangers throughout Ardis (see Nabokov?s Ada
> > 2001: 134-44), and here in the Villa Venus it reaches its sickest
> > form. Part of the ?behind? motif is Lucette?s nickname ?Pet?
> > (from the French for ?fart,? but with a play on the sexual
> > petting used to appease and confuse Lucette); Cherry disappears
> > from the novel as if he had been no more than a pet (?had to be
> > destroyed or given away?).
> >
> > Cherry appears to have eaten ?too many green apples??unripe
> > apples, as if the fruits of the Tree of Knowledge have been
> > savored before they are ready. Cherry and Lucette both taste the
> > fruits of sex too early, and to fatal effect. Ada may begin with
> > Ardis?s ?parod[y] of paradise,? but like the Garden of Earthly
> > Delights, it grades into the hellish as we move from left to
> > right.
> >
> > Lucette?s suicide as a result of her being embroiled in the love
> > of Van and Ada repeats Aqua?s suicide as a result of her being
> > caught up in Demon and Marina?s amours. Cherry is ?a little
> > Salopian,? a little lad from Shropshire, echoing A.E. Housman?s A
> > Shropshire Lad, with its wistful songs in praise of dead ?lads.?
> > (No wonder Kinbote rates it so highly.) (Nabokov also plays on
> > the French salope, ?slattern, slut.?) There is one other allusion
> > to A Shropshire Lad in Ada, as part of Aqua?s decline into
> > madness, as she hears water speak, echoing, perhaps, ?a bit of
> > poetry heard at a lecture, my lad, my pretty, my love, take pity?
> > (A Shropshire Lad, V: ?Be kind, have pity, my own, my pretty?).
> > Before she sank into madness, Aqua believed in ?sweet Terra? as a
> > kind of heaven, unlike those who saw it as full of ?vicious
> > monsters, disgusting devils, with the black scrota of carnivora
> > and the fangs of serpents, reviler and tormentors of female souls?
> > (I.3: 21). But she slips into her own private hell, and Nabokov
> > keeps her in mind when he places the ?pretty? ?Salopian? in an
> > infernal Villa Venus. Van may have pity for Aqua, but he seems to
> > feel none for Cherry; Nabokov invites our pity for them both, and
> > for all for whom the heaven of love becomes a personal hell.
>
>
>
> ---------------------------------------
> Stringer-Hye, Suellen
> Vanderbilt University
> Email: suellen.stringer-hye@Vanderbilt.Edu
From: "Stringer-Hye, Suellen" <suellen.stringer-hye@vanderbilt.edu>
> ---------------- Message requiring your approval (200
lines) ------------------
> This passage has always seemed to me one in which Nabokov's high
> moral contempt for Van's indifference to "inferiors" is so strong
> that it nearly breaks the narrative surface and the author is
> exposed.
>
> --On Wednesday, January 14, 2004 9:15 PM -0800 "D. Barton Johnson"
> <chtodel@cox.net> wrote:
>
> > ----- Original Message -----
> > From: "Brian Boyd (FOA ENG)" <b.boyd@auckland.ac.nz>
> > To: "'D. Barton Johnson '" <chtodel@cox.net>
> > Sent: Wednesday, January 14, 2004 5:58 PM
> > Subject: RE: Scatology in ADA
> >
> >
> > From Brian Boyd:
> >
> > As Abdel Bouazza notes, I have referred to the ?structurally
> > perfect stool? example in Nabokov?s ADA (2001 ed, p. 197). There
> > is more that could be said about this, but (pace Jansy de Souza)
> > I don?t think it has anything to do with Lucette.
> >
> > Let?s look at exhibit B, from Ada II.3: 355:
> >
> > Cherry, the only lad in our next (American) floramor, a little
> > Salopian of eleven or twelve, looked so amusing with his copper
> > curls, dreamy eyes and elfin cheekbones that two exceptionally
> > sportive courtesans, entertaining Van, prevailed upon him one
> > night to try the boy. Their joint efforts failed, however, to
> > arouse the pretty catamite, who had been exhausted by too many
> > recent engagements. His girlish crupper proved sadly defaced by
> > the varicolored imprints of bestial clawings and flesh-twistings;
> > but worst of all, the little fellow could not disguise a state of
> > acute indigestion, marked by unappetizing dysenteric symptoms
> > that coated his lover?s shaft with mustard and blood, the result,
> > no doubt, of eating too many green apples. Eventually, he had to
> > be destroyed or given away.
> >
> > I will offer two kinds of answers, a quick pointer for those who
> > want to find their own way, and a long explanation for those who
> > prefer a tour guide.
> >
> > The pointer: the central and right-hand panels of Bosch?s Garden
> > of Earthly Delights.
> >
> > Now don?t read any further, if you want to explore and think
> > things through for yourself.
> >
> > The tour guide:
> >
> > Disgust is a key human emotion, one of seven recognized
> > cross-culturally as one of the seven basic human emotions
> > (happiness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise, contempt and
> > disgust). Art aims to elicit response, and Nabokov, like other
> > writers and artists, avails himself from time to time of disgust
> > as one note in his emotional keyboard. (A rare exception like
> > Swift can make it the central emotion in his whole oeuvre.)
> >
> > Feces produce a reaction of disgust in humans, and Nabokov
> > occasionally uses them in ways that make them fresh and
> > unappetizing, not mere ?shit? that has become dry and odorless
> > through long exposure but, for instance, the ?bright pat of dog
> > dirt somebody had already slipped upon,? which the New Yorker
> > censored out of the first publication of Chapter 3 of Pnin. In
> > that case, it?s simply a vivid?unpleasantly vivid, but for that
> > reason highly evocative?detail. But the case of Cherry whose
> > ?dysenteric symptoms . . . coated his lover?s shaft with mustard
> > and blood? is an affront to the imagination, and, when it leads
> > to the flip but brutal ?Eventually, he had to be destroyed or
> > given away,? to the moral sense.
> >
> > Throughout Ada Nabokov plays on the tension between, on the one
> > hand, Van and Ada?s belief that Ardis is their private paradise
> > of love and sex, and on the other, their awareness, and his own,
> > that love and sex are rather more complicated. The very
> > repetition of lovemaking makes Ardis blissful for the young
> > lovers, but the repeatability of the act of love also has its
> > sordid side, as Van finds out in 1888, when he discovers Ada?s
> > infidelity, or as we see here in the Villa Venus chapter, which
> > replays Ardis?s rampant sexuality in much darker tones.
> >
> > Remember that according to Eric Veen?s stipulations a Villa Venus
> > patron can avail himself of a boy only ?between two sequences of
> > three girls each, all possessed in the course of the same week.?
> > The frantic repetitiveness of sex in the Villa Venus, and the
> > ghastly and nightmarish consequences in the case of Cherry, make
> > it seem not one of the ?parodies of paradise? Eric and his
> > grandfather have planned, but hellish. And in that Nabokov is
> > building on and evoking Bosch?s Garden of Earthly Delights, which
> > he introduces explicitly in Ada II.10, to which he compares Ada
> > as a whole (SO 306), and which, I argue (in ?Ada, The Bog and the
> > Garden,? in the next Nabokov Studies), he had in mind as a
> > structural foundation for the novel before he began writing Ada.
> >
> > Cherry has eaten too many green apples. The fruits recalls the
> > hundred or so fruits (including many cherries) in the central
> > panel of Bosch?s triptych (Demon lingers on just one detail from
> > the painting, a fruit: ?the woman-sized strawberry that you
> > embrace with? one of the figures in the foreground, II.10: 437).
> > That central panel evokes a world of repetitive sensual and
> > sexual pleasure that seems both paradisiac (a garden, like Eden
> > in the left panel) and yet by its focus on the fruit?sweet and
> > succulent but also reminding us of the fruit of the Tree of
> > Knowledge and Adam and Eve?s expulsion from paradise for tasting
> > it?also implying the consequences of sin, which become explicit
> > in the Hell on earth of the right-hand panel. And there is good
> > reason to think that the Villa Venus chapter comes as close to
> > Bosch?s vision of hell in The Garden of Earthly Delights or The
> > Last Judgment (also evoked in detail by Demon) as Nabokov could
> > without merely transposing. The paragraph on Cherry alone can be
> > read in conjunction with the right-hand panel of the Garden of
> > Earthly Delights: the shafts of various kinds penetrating many a
> > rectum, the unsavory anal and oral discharges, the ?bestial
> > clawings.?
> >
> > The casual horror of Van?s ?Eventually he had to be destroyed or
> > given away??the smartness, the indifference, the disproportion
> > between his unruffled self-concern and the damage that has been
> > done?compound the hellishness even for a first-time reader. Is
> > Nabokov as offhand about Cherry?admittedly only an incidental
> > character, coming to life and facing a grisly death within the
> > space of a paragraph?as his hero is?
> >
> > Not at all. In fact he links Cherry repeatedly with others much
> > more central to the novel who are wrecked by sex, especially
> > Lucette.
> >
> > The redness of a cherry (and the boy?s ?copper curls?) and the
> > greenness of the apples bring to mind the red-green combination
> > associated with Lucette throughout the novel: her red hair, the
> > green clothes she wears to complement it. Indeed, Lucette too has
> > ?copper curls? (I.36: 226) and the green-red combination recurs
> > in reference to her in the one further ?copper curl? in Ada (?a
> > pair of green eyes and a copper curl,? II.8: 421).
> >
> > Cherry is slang for ?virginity,? and Lucette?s virginity is a key
> > focus in the novel: her technical virginity (no ?intromission of
> > the male member,? to echo Joyce), but her actual initiation into
> > sex in various ways by Van and Ada, from eight (visually), at
> > twelve (her being fondled and kissed by Van as an ostensible sop
> > to Lucette and decoy for Marina and Mlle Larivière but mostly as
> > an escape route for Ada to meet Percy), and at fourteen, her
> > lesbian relationship with Ada. Lucette describes her
> > entanglements with Ada in intimate and gymnastic terms; it is the
> > most detailed description of homosexual activity in the novel,
> > and an Opheliac Lucette?s thrusting on Van such a description in
> > such a way itself shows how unbalanced she has already become.
> > The other most elaborate description of homosexual sex in the
> > novel is here, in Van?s damaging encounter with Cherry.
> >
> > Cherry has a ?girlish crupper?; that word occurs once elsewhere
> > in the novel, referring to Lucette?s ?little crupper? (I.32:
> > 198). Nabokov here focuses on another link. Van takes Ada
> > repeatedly from behind, and Lucette, who has seen them
> > love-making again and again, naively wonders, after sitting on
> > his knee on the return from the 1888 picnic, if she has been
> > impregnated by him. There is in fact a ?behind? motif associated
> > with sex and its dangers throughout Ardis (see Nabokov?s Ada
> > 2001: 134-44), and here in the Villa Venus it reaches its sickest
> > form. Part of the ?behind? motif is Lucette?s nickname ?Pet?
> > (from the French for ?fart,? but with a play on the sexual
> > petting used to appease and confuse Lucette); Cherry disappears
> > from the novel as if he had been no more than a pet (?had to be
> > destroyed or given away?).
> >
> > Cherry appears to have eaten ?too many green apples??unripe
> > apples, as if the fruits of the Tree of Knowledge have been
> > savored before they are ready. Cherry and Lucette both taste the
> > fruits of sex too early, and to fatal effect. Ada may begin with
> > Ardis?s ?parod[y] of paradise,? but like the Garden of Earthly
> > Delights, it grades into the hellish as we move from left to
> > right.
> >
> > Lucette?s suicide as a result of her being embroiled in the love
> > of Van and Ada repeats Aqua?s suicide as a result of her being
> > caught up in Demon and Marina?s amours. Cherry is ?a little
> > Salopian,? a little lad from Shropshire, echoing A.E. Housman?s A
> > Shropshire Lad, with its wistful songs in praise of dead ?lads.?
> > (No wonder Kinbote rates it so highly.) (Nabokov also plays on
> > the French salope, ?slattern, slut.?) There is one other allusion
> > to A Shropshire Lad in Ada, as part of Aqua?s decline into
> > madness, as she hears water speak, echoing, perhaps, ?a bit of
> > poetry heard at a lecture, my lad, my pretty, my love, take pity?
> > (A Shropshire Lad, V: ?Be kind, have pity, my own, my pretty?).
> > Before she sank into madness, Aqua believed in ?sweet Terra? as a
> > kind of heaven, unlike those who saw it as full of ?vicious
> > monsters, disgusting devils, with the black scrota of carnivora
> > and the fangs of serpents, reviler and tormentors of female souls?
> > (I.3: 21). But she slips into her own private hell, and Nabokov
> > keeps her in mind when he places the ?pretty? ?Salopian? in an
> > infernal Villa Venus. Van may have pity for Aqua, but he seems to
> > feel none for Cherry; Nabokov invites our pity for them both, and
> > for all for whom the heaven of love becomes a personal hell.
>
>
>
> ---------------------------------------
> Stringer-Hye, Suellen
> Vanderbilt University
> Email: suellen.stringer-hye@Vanderbilt.Edu