Dear List,
As we can see from the items listed
below* (Dolinin's echoing title; the background-figure fusion
comparing VN's text and C.P.Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper"; Baudelaire's
"Correspondances" and VN's description of "a system where a
main story is woven into, or placed behind" a more superficial one), as
readers we are invited to diminish the light shining on VN's "lithography" (
following D.B. Johnson's beautiful find and illustration) to be able to
apprehend this story's holographic or three-dimensional
image.
Although we have Kinbote's hints about "an
underside of the weave" for "Pale Fire", in "Signs and Symbols" we
could try to look simultaneously at two superimposed images ( the
hidden main story and the semitransparent one), instead of focusing either on
its superficial or its main level, on either background or
figure.
Up to now we've been using both perspectives
but I still haven't been able to get at the "holographic" one that would enable
us to continually oscillate and change perspectives.
My private overall impression arises from a
dejected emotional response to its basso continuo message: "Homo
homini lupus" - and an impeding darkness on the move. And yet, my
unexpected reaction doesn't fit in with Nabokov's
prevalently nacreous writings.
Jansy
Mello
..................................................................................................
* 1.Alexander
Dolinin: "Signs and Symbols in Nabokov's "Signs and Symbols"
2. LFGallego: "...she remembers his fears
about dangerous images in a wallpaper and in an etching. I was reminded of
"The Yellow Wallpaper" (1892) by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. In
this story, like in VN's, there is a merging of background and figure, a fusion
of its main theme and the rest."
3. Baudelaire
"Correspondances" (Les Fleurs du
Mal)
4. In a letter dated March 17, 1951 and addressed
to the New Yorker editor Katharine A. White, Nabokov alluded to "Signs and
Symbols" by mentioning the story of an old Jewish couple and their sick boy,
saying: "Most of the stories I am contemplating [. . .] will be composed
on these lines, according to this system wherein a second (main) story is woven
into, or placed behind, the superficial semitransparent one."