Subject
Re: Nabokov, Garshin and Russian alphabet letters - a note on ADA
From
Date
Body
J. Aisenberg: [...]I think you are correct about Pig Pigment ... I believe there is a description of Ada's having to endure the man's atentions from behind, as he lifts or poses her or something[...] Van thinks is a work of genius justifying the painter's perversions--Van, who is loathe to believe in reality takes the notion of an even more ephemeral term like "genius" for granted; not to mention that it's funny an unpleasant freak like him should be so judgemental about other's perversions. Humbert did this as well about Gaston Godin[...]
J.M: The experience endured by Ada with Pig Pigment reminds me of a similar ordeal described by VN in the hands of Uncle Ruka (SM). And yet, I believe the term "pig" is part of a bigger game that also indicates a "perversion" which comes from the adulteration of words to make them perform in "verbal circuses".
Here is another reference to pigs: Adochka [...]and Vanichka[...]facing the kimera (chimera, camera) side by side[...] it was ordered by Marina, who had it framed and set up in her bedroom next to a picture of her brother at twelve or fourteen clad in a bayronka (open shirt) and cupping a guinea pig in his gowpen (hollowed hands); the three looked like siblings, with the dead boy providing a vivisectional alibi.
It is difficult to bring together all the innuendoes that allow me to deduce that "to cup a guinea pig" refers to fondling a child's behind. Besides, Marina's brother wears a "bayronka", a clear reference to incestuous Byron (and his daughter Ada).
Genealogies are mixed up (siblings, parents, uncles) as happens in "clinical" perversions. And yet, since the hands that form a pig-pen appear as in a "gowpen", I thought it would be interesting to google the word "gow": apparently it also indicates a Chinese trick-taking gambling game, called "Tien Gow", that is played with a set of dominoes.
The allusion to "transmongrelization" mentions those decorative, "criminal" compositions with butterfly wings.
The same association comes through Demon when he mentions "incest-insect" in relation to words and to art: ‘I would describe, in too many words no doubt, how passionately, how incandescently, how incestuously — c’est le mot — art and science meet in an insect, in a thrush, in a thistle of that ducal bosquet. Ada [...] and dear Lucette, once drew my attention, by a creepy coincidence, to certain details of that other triptych, that tremendous garden of tongue-in-cheek delights, circa 1500, and, namely, to the butterflies in it — a Meadow Brown, female, in the center of the right panel, and a Tortoiseshell in the middle panel, placed there as if settled on a flower — mark the "as if," [...] because they say that actually the wrong side of the bug is shown, it should have been the underside.
In relation to word-games, we find:
1. "Pedantic Ada once said that the looking up of words in a lexicon for any other needs than those of expression — be it instruction or art — lay somewhere between the ornamental assortment of flowers (which could be, she conceded, mildly romantic in a maidenly headcocking way) and making collage-pictures of disparate butterfly wings (which was always vulgar and often criminal). Per contra, she suggested to Van that verbal circuses, ‘performing words,’ ‘poodle-doodles,’ and so forth, might be redeemable by the quality of the brain work required for the creation of a great logogriph or inspired pun and should not preclude the help of a dictionary, gruff or complacent. That was why she admitted ‘Flavita.’ The name came from alfavit, an old Russian game of chance and skill, based on the scrambling and unscrambling of alphabetic letters."
2. "By chance, this very morning,’ said Ada, not deigning to enlighten her mother, ‘our learned governess, who was also yours, Van, and who —’
(First time she pronounced it — at that botanical lesson!) ‘— is pretty hard on English-speaking transmongrelizers — monkeys called "ursine howlers" — though I suspect her reasons are more chauvinistic than artistic and moral — drew my attention — my wavering attention — to some really gorgeous bloomers, as you call them, Van, in a Mr Fowlie’s soi-disant literal version — called "sensitive" in a recent Elsian rave — sensitive! — of Mémoire, a poem by Rimbaud ...
I have the impression that Ada is not merely describing one or two little things about Nabokov's work with his Webster's...
What surprises me in her words comes not from her depreciation of sincretic verbal collages, the blunders in bad translations or, empty pedantic thought.It lies in the importance she ascribes to "chance" together with "skill" to create "performing words" and the necessary attention to avoid falling into a facile or in a pervert trap.
Also, I don't think it was by chance, though, that she returned to the issue of her parentage when discussing "transmongrelizers" in front of her mother, nor that the words she chose were exactly similar to the ones she employed in the attic scene: She said "our learned governess, who was also yours, Van, and who -"
[ Cp. with: "an allusion, which your father, who, according to Blanche, is also mine" - an exclamation that was preceded by another: "Dr Krolik, our local naturalist, to whom you, Van, have referred*, as Jane Austen might have phrased it, for the sake of rapid narrative information (you recall Brown, don’t you, Smith?), has determined..."
.............................................................
* the reference was made in the preceding paragraph: "Marina had her own Dr. Krolik, pour ainsi dire" and, at that time Van could not have known about Ada and Dr.Krolik nor surmised that Marina's relationship with lapochka Lapiner might be of a similar nature ].
.........................................................
PS: I didn't manage to bring up the issue of "perversion in life" and "perversion in art" in a more coherent orderly fashion. Please, excuse me! Jansy
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/
J.M: The experience endured by Ada with Pig Pigment reminds me of a similar ordeal described by VN in the hands of Uncle Ruka (SM). And yet, I believe the term "pig" is part of a bigger game that also indicates a "perversion" which comes from the adulteration of words to make them perform in "verbal circuses".
Here is another reference to pigs: Adochka [...]and Vanichka[...]facing the kimera (chimera, camera) side by side[...] it was ordered by Marina, who had it framed and set up in her bedroom next to a picture of her brother at twelve or fourteen clad in a bayronka (open shirt) and cupping a guinea pig in his gowpen (hollowed hands); the three looked like siblings, with the dead boy providing a vivisectional alibi.
It is difficult to bring together all the innuendoes that allow me to deduce that "to cup a guinea pig" refers to fondling a child's behind. Besides, Marina's brother wears a "bayronka", a clear reference to incestuous Byron (and his daughter Ada).
Genealogies are mixed up (siblings, parents, uncles) as happens in "clinical" perversions. And yet, since the hands that form a pig-pen appear as in a "gowpen", I thought it would be interesting to google the word "gow": apparently it also indicates a Chinese trick-taking gambling game, called "Tien Gow", that is played with a set of dominoes.
The allusion to "transmongrelization" mentions those decorative, "criminal" compositions with butterfly wings.
The same association comes through Demon when he mentions "incest-insect" in relation to words and to art: ‘I would describe, in too many words no doubt, how passionately, how incandescently, how incestuously — c’est le mot — art and science meet in an insect, in a thrush, in a thistle of that ducal bosquet. Ada [...] and dear Lucette, once drew my attention, by a creepy coincidence, to certain details of that other triptych, that tremendous garden of tongue-in-cheek delights, circa 1500, and, namely, to the butterflies in it — a Meadow Brown, female, in the center of the right panel, and a Tortoiseshell in the middle panel, placed there as if settled on a flower — mark the "as if," [...] because they say that actually the wrong side of the bug is shown, it should have been the underside.
In relation to word-games, we find:
1. "Pedantic Ada once said that the looking up of words in a lexicon for any other needs than those of expression — be it instruction or art — lay somewhere between the ornamental assortment of flowers (which could be, she conceded, mildly romantic in a maidenly headcocking way) and making collage-pictures of disparate butterfly wings (which was always vulgar and often criminal). Per contra, she suggested to Van that verbal circuses, ‘performing words,’ ‘poodle-doodles,’ and so forth, might be redeemable by the quality of the brain work required for the creation of a great logogriph or inspired pun and should not preclude the help of a dictionary, gruff or complacent. That was why she admitted ‘Flavita.’ The name came from alfavit, an old Russian game of chance and skill, based on the scrambling and unscrambling of alphabetic letters."
2. "By chance, this very morning,’ said Ada, not deigning to enlighten her mother, ‘our learned governess, who was also yours, Van, and who —’
(First time she pronounced it — at that botanical lesson!) ‘— is pretty hard on English-speaking transmongrelizers — monkeys called "ursine howlers" — though I suspect her reasons are more chauvinistic than artistic and moral — drew my attention — my wavering attention — to some really gorgeous bloomers, as you call them, Van, in a Mr Fowlie’s soi-disant literal version — called "sensitive" in a recent Elsian rave — sensitive! — of Mémoire, a poem by Rimbaud ...
I have the impression that Ada is not merely describing one or two little things about Nabokov's work with his Webster's...
What surprises me in her words comes not from her depreciation of sincretic verbal collages, the blunders in bad translations or, empty pedantic thought.It lies in the importance she ascribes to "chance" together with "skill" to create "performing words" and the necessary attention to avoid falling into a facile or in a pervert trap.
Also, I don't think it was by chance, though, that she returned to the issue of her parentage when discussing "transmongrelizers" in front of her mother, nor that the words she chose were exactly similar to the ones she employed in the attic scene: She said "our learned governess, who was also yours, Van, and who -"
[ Cp. with: "an allusion, which your father, who, according to Blanche, is also mine" - an exclamation that was preceded by another: "Dr Krolik, our local naturalist, to whom you, Van, have referred*, as Jane Austen might have phrased it, for the sake of rapid narrative information (you recall Brown, don’t you, Smith?), has determined..."
.............................................................
* the reference was made in the preceding paragraph: "Marina had her own Dr. Krolik, pour ainsi dire" and, at that time Van could not have known about Ada and Dr.Krolik nor surmised that Marina's relationship with lapochka Lapiner might be of a similar nature ].
.........................................................
PS: I didn't manage to bring up the issue of "perversion in life" and "perversion in art" in a more coherent orderly fashion. Please, excuse me! Jansy
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/