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In "The World of Nabokov's Stories" ( University of Texas
Press,2000 ) Maxim Shrayer describes Nabokov's metaphysical
dimension by his focus on the otherworldly "hereafter" (potustoronnost)
and ennamoration.
Shrayer regards "the otherworld as a priviledged space in the textual
memory that positions the reader vis-à-vis the text of a Nabokov short
story", ontologically akin to "the domain beyond the looking glass":
"an antiworld with respect to the reality of this world" (pages 21-22).
There are parallels that extend from VN's short stories to his
novels by links that are not as clear as in the creation of "Zembla" or
the edenic paradise of "Ardis" (with the "p","a" and "e" cast off on
the grass), but which weave their subterranean course of estrangement
and wonder to affect the reader's textual memory, now linked to the
reader's particular aesthetic experiences.
Far from considering that any road will lead us to the Rome of a
Nabokovian novel, but still trying to map out Zembla, as recollected by
Kinbote in his cave, I reached Samuel Johnson, in "The History of
Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia", where the sosia of John Shade describes
a place that is very similar to Coleridge's Xanadu
Johnson tells us about Rasselas, "the fourth son of the
mighty emperor, in whose dominions the Father of Waters ( Nile) begins
his course (...) in a place "which the wisdom or policy of antiquity
had destined for the residence of the Abyssinian princes" in a spacious
valley in the kingdom of Amhara, surrounded on every side by mountains,
of which the summits overhang the middle part. The only passage, by
which it could be entered, was a cavern that passed under a rock, of
which it has long been disputed wheter it was the work of nature or...
The outlet of the cavern was concealed by a thick wood, and the mouth
which opened into the valley was closed with gates of iron... From the
mountains on every side, rivulets descended that filled all the valley
with verdure and fertility, and formed a lake in the middle ...This
lake discharged its superfluities by a stream which entered a dark
cleft of the mountain on the norther side...All the diversities of the
world were brought together, the blessings of nature were collected,
and its evils extracted and excluded.(...) The house was (...) built as
if suspicion herself had dictated the plan. To every room there was an
open and secret passage, every square had a communication with the
rest, either from the upper storeys by private galleries, or by
subterranean passages from the lower apartments. Many of the columns
had unsuspected cavities, in which a long race of monarchs had
reposited their treasures... recorded their accumulations in a book
which was itself concealed in a tower not entered but by the emperor...
( Wordworth Classics, pages 3-6).
Samuel Johnson's story sugests paradisal valleys, lakes, secret
passages and Abyssinia, but the similarity with Colereidge's Xanadu,
the "abyssinian maid "and "cedarn covers" ends right in the first
pages. Different from Coleridge, with his underground of sensuousness
and erotism, in SJ's book we move through more abstract landscapes
and, at last, we also lose track of Coleride's Xanadu with its Alph
river and Zembla's "nylotic blues" and its geography which, at times,
suggests a caress on an earthly "mystic book" ( John Donne,elegy XX).
The disappearance of the emotional sensuous link with reason, in Samuel
Johnson's story, might explain why his role in "Pale Fire" is
downplayed.
We know Nabokov was well acquainted with the Alph river
and Alpheus, as we may gather from what he wrote in "Bend Sinister":
"Krug's anecdote has the desired effect. Ember stops
sniffling. .. Finally, she enters into the spirit of the game. Yes, she
was found by a shepherd. In fact her name can be derived from that of
an amorous shepherd in Arcadia. Or quite possibly it is an anagram of
Alpheios, with the 'S' lost in the damp grass - Alpheus
the rivergod, who pursued a long-legged nymph until Artemis changed her
into a stream, which of course suited his liquidity to a tee (cp.
Winnipeg Lake, ripple 585, Vico Press edition).
Although Nabokov employs many "Parnassian motives", his criticism
of the romantic and the parnassian English and French poets (and
their return to mythological and biblical imagery) is presented soon
after Krug's anedocte: "(...)
Speaking of the word-droppings on a German scholar's decrepit hat,
Krug suggests tampering with Hamlet's name too. Take 'Telemachos,' he
says (...). Prune it, remove the unnecessary letters, all of them
secondary additions, and you get the ancient 'Telmah'. Now read it
backwards. Thus does a fanciful pen elope with a lewd idea and Hamlet
in reverse gear becomes the son of Ulysses slaying his mother's lovers.
Worte, worte, worte (...).
A fanciful "penelope", indeed, running
through anagrams, lewd reversals and puns that require an 'S' lost in
the damp grass - like Shade's brown shoe or "The Enchanter Hunters"
poet? Do the spores of such sporadic inclusions point to a
transformation of enchanted sceneries into a kernel of fictional
truth? Can we travel from "pigment to figment" and back again to the
ordinary level - with a changed experience of potustoronnost - after
the enchanter worked inside the reader's own mental scenery?
I'll borrow from M. Shrayer's retelling of a
specific short story, "La Veneziana" (1924) to forward my idea. Sharyer
describes how "Simpson walks into the space of the portrait, where the
beautiful Maureen/La Veneziana offers him a lemon", while in the
following morning a portrait of Simpson appears in the painting, next
to the woman's face. The collector ( Mcgore) then scrapes Simpson's
presence off the canvas and tosses the rags out of the window. A little
later we encounter a lemon, complete with Simpson, lying on the
lawn outside. Simpson had had a "monstrous dream"...(28-31) Not the
reader, though.
Jansy