Subject
Re: Gingko and muscat
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Jansy Mello: Although our EDNOTE informs that " Mary Efremov sends these responses. I suggest that we end this thread. -- SES" I want to ask her that this one comment is posted before the thread is adequately knotted down.
Mary informs that "the gingko fruit or nut, resembles a muscat grape in shape and color... the gingko fruit has a nauseating odor." - thereby proving my assumption (that she compared muscat grapes and "silver apricots" gingkos because of their smell) to be wrong.
Nabokov was such a careful observer of nature. Why would he have Shade make a comparison that is rather imprecise? Although the gingko fruit resembles some kinds of muscat grapes in shape and color, the two are widely different by their smell, taste, visually apprehended clusterings and, most of all, by their texture.
The muscat grapes are pinkish-yellow, green, purple and they are wonderully translucent and satiny to the eye, besides being sweet to the tongue and nose. The gingko seems to be rough, opaque, covered with a white dust and "smelly."
I imagine that John Shade's imprecision must help to emphasize the "mouse-cat" hypothesis, as if VN's penchant for puns and wordplay had gotten the better hand.
To compensate for having insisted to dwell on this down-trodden path, I'll quote two more Nabokov conjuring tidbits which rely on senesthesy:
In the first one, an ice-cream cone is suggested inspite of the overall context, due to its geometrical shape, to the proximity of words and sounds, to evocation of a tactile sensation of cold -
"The deafening cone of an ice-cold shower "
The other one is striking because it appears in the same short-story (Wingstroke), with a similarly noisy conical shape, now allied to heat, gusty movement and fogginess -
"He exhaled a megaphone of smoke"
And... I'll just add another one, because it's related to, but not dependentof, smells:
"Who can tell, today, just what emanations gently greeted a guest entering a Pompeian atrium? A half-century from now no one will know the smells that prevailed in our streets and rooms. They will excavate some military hero of stone, of which there are hundreds in every city, and heave a sigh for Phidias of yore."
(Gods)
Am I forgiven?
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