Subject
[THOUGHTS] TOOL- ADA
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Date
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"Only by identifying her with an unwritten, half-written, rewritten difficult book could one have to render at last what contemporary descriptions of intercourse so seldom convey...Readers are directed to that book - on a very high shelf, in a very bad light - but already existing, as magic exists, and death, and as shall exist, from now on, the mouth she made automatically..." (TOOL,p.22/3)
Nabokov indicates, from within the folds of TOOL, an ideal vision of this novel while he promises to convey, from Lolita to Laura, unparalleled descriptions of literary erotic intercourse. I gather he is not thinking of TOOL as a rival of any existing erotic novels and poems (Catullus, Donne, Baudelaire, Miller, Bataille, aso...), but referring to the gradual accumulation of details towards a "synthesis", one which he may not have had time to set down on paper. Perhaps "Ada" might reveal clues about such a metamorphosis, passing from the materially physical into the flesh of the written word ( standing metaphors upside down#)
Brian Boyd's annotations when he mentions the continuation of "comic overlaps set me on a specific trail [ 142.15-143.04: While the comfortably resting lady was describing the bank of a brook where little Rockette liked to frolic, Ada sat reading on a similar bank . . . Lucette . . . on the brink of the brook . . . a fetus-sized rubber doll: The comic overlaps between the governess's own writing and the action at Ardis, of which she seems serenely unaware, continue.] ."
Here are looping excerpts from a recurrent scene constituted by two pairs of eyes, written recollections, brooks and toes mingled to the young girl's governess, Mlle de la Rivière, while she tries to set on paper "Les Enfants Maudits":
"The crazy governess had observed it once when he carried Ada across a brook and kissed her because she had hurt her toe.* [...] 'She once saw me carrying Ada across the brook** and misconstrued our stumbling huddle'.***"
* Don Juan's Last Fling: "Wheezy but still game, Juan carries her across a brook (her bare toe acrobatically tickling his face) and sets her down, top up, on the turf of an olive grove. Now they stand facing each other. She fingers voluptuously the jeweled pommel of his sword, she rubs her firm girl belly against his embroidered tights, and all at once the grimace of a premature spasm writhes across the poor Don's expressive face..."
** "Mists have long since hidden the links and loops of consecutive events, but ...Van found himself standing on the brink of the brook (which had reflected two pairs of superposed eyes earlier in the afternoon) ..." [ ... ] "...She caught at the twin cock crosses, thus involuntarily increasing the sympathetic volume of the water's noise, and Van emitted a long groan of deliverance, and now their four eyes were looking again into the azure brook of Pinedale..."
*** - When he returned from a swim in the broad and deep brook beyond the bosquet...He had resolved to deal first of all with her legs which he felt he had not feted enough the previous night; to sheathe them in kisses from the A of arched instep to the V of velvet; and this Van accomplished as soon as Ada and he got sufficiently deep in the larchwood which closed the park on the steep side of the rocky rise between Ardis and Ladore.
B.Boyd:129.03-14: he returned from a swim in the broad and deep brook beyond the bosquet, with wet hair. . . . between Ardis and Ladore: Cf. 525.04-05: "the black tuft recalled Van's head when he was fourteen and wet, having just taken a dip in the brook." The scene between Van and Ada that ensues, not so much in the Bower as in the seclusion of the larchwood, is recorded in seven rapid shots by Kim Beauharnais's camera, 405.15-406.04. In view of the strongly Edenic overtones of Kim's photographs (406.02-03: "her Adam stood over her, a frond or inflorescence veiling his thigh with the deliberate casualness of an Old Master's device to keep Eden chaste"), the "bosquet" at 129.04 seems to evoke the bosquet from which Hieronymus Bosch derived his surname (436.28-32: "that ducal bosquet . . . that other triptych, that tremendous garden of tongue-in-cheek delights"). Four years later Ada sits "with a book on her lap. . . . She was not really reading, but nervously, angrily, absently flipping through the pages of what happened to be that old anthology-she who at any time, if she picked up a book, would at once get engrossed in whatever text she happened to slip into 'from the book's brink' with the natural movement of a water creature put back into its brook" (208.15-23). This is the anthology of English poems that Van gives Lucette and that she keeps in the Ardis nursery (see 145-46 below and nn.)
...........................................................................................................................
# Mascodagama's "standing of a metaphor on its head ...in order to perceive an ascending waterfall or a sunrise in reverse: a triumph, in a sense, over the ardis of time. Thus the rapture young Mascodagama derived from overcoming gravity was akin to that of artistic revelation in the sense utterly and naturally unknown to the innocents of critical appraisal, the social-scene commentators, the moralists, the ideamongers and so forth. Van on the stage was performing organically what his figures of speech were to perform later in life - acrobatic wonders that had never been expected from them and which frightened children."
Cf. also in TOOL:... "Her exquisite bone structure immediately slipped into a novel - became in fact the secret structure of that novel, besides supporting a number of poems (15)...Her frail, docil frame when turned over by hand revealed new marvels - the mobile omplates of a child being tubbed...(19)..."This is Flora ...recollecting in her midtwenties fragments of her past, with details lost or put back in the wrong order, TAIL between DELTA and SLIT, on dusty dim shelves, this is she. Everything about her is bound to remain blurry, even her name...made expressly to have another one modelled upon it by a fantastically lucky artist..."(85)
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Nabokov indicates, from within the folds of TOOL, an ideal vision of this novel while he promises to convey, from Lolita to Laura, unparalleled descriptions of literary erotic intercourse. I gather he is not thinking of TOOL as a rival of any existing erotic novels and poems (Catullus, Donne, Baudelaire, Miller, Bataille, aso...), but referring to the gradual accumulation of details towards a "synthesis", one which he may not have had time to set down on paper. Perhaps "Ada" might reveal clues about such a metamorphosis, passing from the materially physical into the flesh of the written word ( standing metaphors upside down#)
Brian Boyd's annotations when he mentions the continuation of "comic overlaps set me on a specific trail [ 142.15-143.04: While the comfortably resting lady was describing the bank of a brook where little Rockette liked to frolic, Ada sat reading on a similar bank . . . Lucette . . . on the brink of the brook . . . a fetus-sized rubber doll: The comic overlaps between the governess's own writing and the action at Ardis, of which she seems serenely unaware, continue.] ."
Here are looping excerpts from a recurrent scene constituted by two pairs of eyes, written recollections, brooks and toes mingled to the young girl's governess, Mlle de la Rivière, while she tries to set on paper "Les Enfants Maudits":
"The crazy governess had observed it once when he carried Ada across a brook and kissed her because she had hurt her toe.* [...] 'She once saw me carrying Ada across the brook** and misconstrued our stumbling huddle'.***"
* Don Juan's Last Fling: "Wheezy but still game, Juan carries her across a brook (her bare toe acrobatically tickling his face) and sets her down, top up, on the turf of an olive grove. Now they stand facing each other. She fingers voluptuously the jeweled pommel of his sword, she rubs her firm girl belly against his embroidered tights, and all at once the grimace of a premature spasm writhes across the poor Don's expressive face..."
** "Mists have long since hidden the links and loops of consecutive events, but ...Van found himself standing on the brink of the brook (which had reflected two pairs of superposed eyes earlier in the afternoon) ..." [ ... ] "...She caught at the twin cock crosses, thus involuntarily increasing the sympathetic volume of the water's noise, and Van emitted a long groan of deliverance, and now their four eyes were looking again into the azure brook of Pinedale..."
*** - When he returned from a swim in the broad and deep brook beyond the bosquet...He had resolved to deal first of all with her legs which he felt he had not feted enough the previous night; to sheathe them in kisses from the A of arched instep to the V of velvet; and this Van accomplished as soon as Ada and he got sufficiently deep in the larchwood which closed the park on the steep side of the rocky rise between Ardis and Ladore.
B.Boyd:129.03-14: he returned from a swim in the broad and deep brook beyond the bosquet, with wet hair. . . . between Ardis and Ladore: Cf. 525.04-05: "the black tuft recalled Van's head when he was fourteen and wet, having just taken a dip in the brook." The scene between Van and Ada that ensues, not so much in the Bower as in the seclusion of the larchwood, is recorded in seven rapid shots by Kim Beauharnais's camera, 405.15-406.04. In view of the strongly Edenic overtones of Kim's photographs (406.02-03: "her Adam stood over her, a frond or inflorescence veiling his thigh with the deliberate casualness of an Old Master's device to keep Eden chaste"), the "bosquet" at 129.04 seems to evoke the bosquet from which Hieronymus Bosch derived his surname (436.28-32: "that ducal bosquet . . . that other triptych, that tremendous garden of tongue-in-cheek delights"). Four years later Ada sits "with a book on her lap. . . . She was not really reading, but nervously, angrily, absently flipping through the pages of what happened to be that old anthology-she who at any time, if she picked up a book, would at once get engrossed in whatever text she happened to slip into 'from the book's brink' with the natural movement of a water creature put back into its brook" (208.15-23). This is the anthology of English poems that Van gives Lucette and that she keeps in the Ardis nursery (see 145-46 below and nn.)
...........................................................................................................................
# Mascodagama's "standing of a metaphor on its head ...in order to perceive an ascending waterfall or a sunrise in reverse: a triumph, in a sense, over the ardis of time. Thus the rapture young Mascodagama derived from overcoming gravity was akin to that of artistic revelation in the sense utterly and naturally unknown to the innocents of critical appraisal, the social-scene commentators, the moralists, the ideamongers and so forth. Van on the stage was performing organically what his figures of speech were to perform later in life - acrobatic wonders that had never been expected from them and which frightened children."
Cf. also in TOOL:... "Her exquisite bone structure immediately slipped into a novel - became in fact the secret structure of that novel, besides supporting a number of poems (15)...Her frail, docil frame when turned over by hand revealed new marvels - the mobile omplates of a child being tubbed...(19)..."This is Flora ...recollecting in her midtwenties fragments of her past, with details lost or put back in the wrong order, TAIL between DELTA and SLIT, on dusty dim shelves, this is she. Everything about her is bound to remain blurry, even her name...made expressly to have another one modelled upon it by a fantastically lucky artist..."(85)
Search archive with Google:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
Visit "Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
Manage subscription options: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/