AB wrote: "Now that
strikes me as an excellent point, and one that hadn’t occurred to me. I mean the
idea of Shade as the versipel. The more I think of it, the better it
sounds."
He was answering my
comment:
"Now what about this for a
"versipel":
"His
misshapen body, that gray mop of abundant hair, the yellow nails of his pudgy
fingers, the bags under his lustreless eyes, were only intelligible if regarded
as the waste products eliminated from his intrinsic self by the same forces of
perfection which purified and chiseled his verse. He was his own
cancellation." ?
Now, I'll dare to advance
one step further. How about the novel "Pale Fire" itself for a
"versipel"?
Only in "ADA" did Nabokov
fully develop his idea, initially elaborated in "Lolita",
about immortality as the end-result of an author's shedding his corporeal
presence to emerge like a butterfly in the shimmering pages of his
writing ( and this, as an idea, is common enough, but not how VN rendered it in
his writing!).
As I see it a "versipel"
is achieved when the physical body is transmuted (
"cancelled") into the "body of the letter" in a poem or novel
(or when we reach "the underside of the weave", using Kinbote's expression
).
In Kinbote's sentence (
quoted in blue) we see clearly how VN described the mistery of
artistic creation - when it is not the author, his characters, his
own philosophy or any particular "message" ( the waste products) that
establish the 'perfection which purifies and chisels the
verse"...
Jansy