Vladimir Nabokov

NABOKV-L post 0005864, Wed, 28 Mar 2001 08:42:19 -0800

Subject
Brian Boyd on Rosebud, Baudelaire, Ada's wjfhm
Date
Body
>From Brian Boyd:

I have been away during a lively period on Nabokv-L. May I add some
little
beads to a few threads?

ROSEBUD:

I doubt that VN is alluding to Welles in LOLITA's "rosebud," but given
the
proximity of another film pioneer (and the focus on framing, such a
feature
of "Citizen Kane"), it would be less improbable that there is a covert
allusion in the "rosebud" in ADA I.6 (43.01-10):

Of the many ancestors along the wall, she pointed out her favorite, old
Prince Vseslav Zemski (1699-1797), friend of Linnaeus and author of
Flora
Ladorica, who was portrayed in rich oil holding his barely pubescent
bride
and her blond doll in his satin lap. An enlarged photograph, soberly
framed,
hung (rather incongruously, Van thought) next to the rosebud-lover in
his
embroidered coat. The late Sumerechnikov, American precursor of the
Lumiere
brothers, had taken Ada's maternal uncle in profile with upcheeked
violin, a
doomed youth, after his farewell concert.

Still, the local context suffices, so I doubt any Welles allusion.


BAUDELAIRE:

(Apologies if these references have been noted)

Baudelaire crops up in ADA, in, for instance, I.17, with his blood
intermingled with Chateaubriand's: "Chateaubriand (Charles) . . . . 'Mon
enfant, ma soeur, / Songe a l'epaisseur / Du grand chene a Tagne; /
Songe a
la montagne, / Songe a la douceur'" [an echo of course of both
Chateaubriand's "Romance a Helene" and Baudelaire's "L'Invitation au
voyage"]; near the end of I.28: "Rosy aurora was shivering in green
Serenity
Court" [an echo of "Le Crepuscule du Matin," which VN also echoes in BS
ch
7, in the Hamlet discussion: "l'aurore grelottante en robe rose et
verte";
and in Lolita II.2, 164 or 166]; and near the end of II.9, "Dawn, en
rose
robe et verte" [ditto].

It's interesting to note that VN's allusions are so focused on
"L'Invitation
au voyage" and "La Crepuscule du Matin," as his allusions to Goethe are
so
decidedly to "Erl-Konig": what does this suggest?


ADA'S CODE:
I could add to Don Johnson's note that "wjfhm" (I.25) is present also in
the
bound galley proofs and in the first and third printings of the first
McGraw-Hill edition as well as in the first English edition (and in the
error-prone 1969 626-page McGraw-Hill Book Club reprinting). The Library
of
America edition (p. 783) states that "The text of Ada printed here is
that
of the first McGraw-Hill printing," which was indeed supposed to be the
case, but the "wifhm" in the Vintage edition and in the Library of
America
edition suggests that it was the pages of the former that were used as
copy
text for the latter. How the "wifhm" entered the Vintage edition (surely
not
from the Fawcett edition; perhaps from the deterioration of type - a "j"
deteriorating to an "i" is relatively frequent - on a hardback
reprinting:
but if so, which?) is unclear. This is the sort of detail that is the
nightmare of editors and the dream of bibliographers and collectors.

Kiran Krishna wonders if the error is intentional on VN's part. The
evidence
is that it is not VN's error (although "xlic" rather than "xliC" in the
same
code was his or his-and-Vera's, and was corrected by him in his copy of
the
first edition). The two cases offer a further example of the danger of
assuming a single typographical character that could be a mere error on
VN's
part or a typist's (Vera's or Jaqueline Callier's) or a printer's can be
the
basis of an interpretation, especially such a major reinterpretation as
the
claim that the last third of LOLITA is Humbert's hallucination, on the
basis
of "November 16" rather than "November 19" (see NABOKOV STUDIES 2).