Subject
typographic icons
From
Date
Body
Continuing the discussion of typographic icons and extending it from punctuation marks to letters (alphabetic icons) in the cases below), VN used the device as a thematic motif in _Invitation to a Beheading_. In the example below, the Greek gamma projects the image of a gallows (although Cincinnatus is to be beheaded rather than hung.
[A] Nothing will come of what I am trying to tell, its only vestiges being the corpses of strangled words, like hanged men ... evening silhouettes of gammas and gerunds, gallow crows. (_Invitation to a Beheading_, chpt -
8)
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Nabokov was far from the first to use this sort of imagery. Last evening I ran across an example in Victor Hugo's melodramatic warhorse _Ninety-Three_ , the year of the Terror in the French revolution The allusion here is, of course, to the guillotine. The Hebrew letter is presumably the "he" or "heth" which resembles the Greek "pi" -- the shape of the guillotine frame. What the Greek hieroglyph might be, I don't know.
[B]It had been put there during the night. It had been erected rather than built. Seen from a distance, it was a shape made of hard straight lines having the appearance of a Hebrew letter or one of those Egyptian hieroglyphics which were part of the alphabet of the ancient enigma (Book 7, section 6 of Victor Hugo's _Ninety-Three_, trans Lowell Blair.
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[A] Nothing will come of what I am trying to tell, its only vestiges being the corpses of strangled words, like hanged men ... evening silhouettes of gammas and gerunds, gallow crows. (_Invitation to a Beheading_, chpt -
8)
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Nabokov was far from the first to use this sort of imagery. Last evening I ran across an example in Victor Hugo's melodramatic warhorse _Ninety-Three_ , the year of the Terror in the French revolution The allusion here is, of course, to the guillotine. The Hebrew letter is presumably the "he" or "heth" which resembles the Greek "pi" -- the shape of the guillotine frame. What the Greek hieroglyph might be, I don't know.
[B]It had been put there during the night. It had been erected rather than built. Seen from a distance, it was a shape made of hard straight lines having the appearance of a Hebrew letter or one of those Egyptian hieroglyphics which were part of the alphabet of the ancient enigma (Book 7, section 6 of Victor Hugo's _Ninety-Three_, trans Lowell Blair.
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