Subject
Cinderella grays
From
Date
Body
Dear List,
I'd like to thank Mike Donohue for setting me straight on who was the "old Lesbian" alluded to by Joan Clements in "Pnin".
Lester Yeo also wrote to suggest that the word "Lesbian" came in capital letters "presumably because Lesbian is a proper noun, meaning (originally) a person from Lesbos." but, obvious as it may be, I still find it a strange choice.
Continuing on the "Pnin" thread I'd like to bring up the importance of the color "gray" and its various "shades" for VN, by selecting a description that I found particularly delightful:
"Among the many exhilarating things Lake taught was that the order of the solar spectrum is not a closed circle but a spiral of tints from cadmium red and oranges through a strontian yellow and a pale paradisal green to cobalt blues and violets, at which point the sequence does not grade into red again but passes into another spiral, which starts with a kind of lavender gray and goes on to Cinderella shades transcending human perception. He taught that there is no such thing as the Ashcan School or the Cache Cache School or the Cancan School. That the work of art created with string, stamps, a Leftist newspaper, and the droppings of doves is based on a series of dreary platitudes. That there is nothing more banal and more bourgeois than paranoia. That Dali is really Norman Rockwell's twin brother kidnapped by gipsies in babyhood. That Van Gogh is second-rate and Picasso supreme, despite his commercial foibles; and that if Degas could immortalize a calèche, why could not Victor Wind do the same to a motor car? (page 96,Vintage edition)"
We only need to remember that Cinderella derives from "cinders", "ashes" to fully enjoy the transition from Ash-can to Can-can with the intervening sound of "cache" ( hidden) or "cache-cache" ( hide-and-seek).
( Other links between Cinderella grays, "vair", "crystal slippers" and "squirrels" are well studied by Barabtarto, Blackwell, Naiman and VN himself)
As John Shade wrote in Pale Fire (ed.CK, line 29) " All colors made me happy: even gray" and, except for the description about the spiral of colors and a mention about victor's dreams ("his back to the emerald-and-gray window, the King sat listening to a masked messenger"..." gray almost always appears connected to old age or wasted efforts:" athletic supporters -a beastly gray tangle"; "the conductor, a gray-headed fatherly person with steel spectacles" or "the gray-headed conductor sank into the opposite seat"," a kind gray-head" . He "squandered a decade of gray life on an erudite work; "His life(...)as at the earth-smelling florist's when the rain makes gray and green mirrors of Easter day (...) "From then on to the end of the voyage that had turned from green and silver to a uniform gray". Also we find " pale gray walls";" bloated gray clouds".
Gray is also chosen for the clothing worn by various fellow professors, Hopper's "clerical gray" and even Victor: " his striped tie dangling out of the front of his gray jacket, his bulky gray flannelled knees parted" - or Liza: " looking svelte and strange in a charming new dress as dove-gray as Paris, and wearing a really enchanting new hat with a blue bird's wing".
Pnin himself is described as a "bespectacled old fellow with scholarly strands of steel-gray hair falling over the right side of his small but corrugated brow, and with a deep furrow descending from each side of his sharp nose to each corner of his long upper-lip" who wittily named "a chalk-clouded blackboard", "a grayboard."
We also find gray squirrels and pigeons: " a gray squirrel sitting on comfortable haunches" and "a picture postcard representing the Gray Squirrel"; "an elliptic flock of pigeons, in circular volitation, soaring grey, flapping white, and then gray again, wheeled across the limpid, pale sky"
We should not forget other Cinderellas in "Ada", perhaps even remember "Cincinnatus" ( Stan K-B, would I now be in danger of "referential mania"?) or variations with "dove-color", "lead" or "plumbeous".
Following VN's vision of colored letter would "gray" correspond?
Jansy
Search the archive: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/archives/nabokv-l.html
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu,chtodel@cox.net
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
I'd like to thank Mike Donohue for setting me straight on who was the "old Lesbian" alluded to by Joan Clements in "Pnin".
Lester Yeo also wrote to suggest that the word "Lesbian" came in capital letters "presumably because Lesbian is a proper noun, meaning (originally) a person from Lesbos." but, obvious as it may be, I still find it a strange choice.
Continuing on the "Pnin" thread I'd like to bring up the importance of the color "gray" and its various "shades" for VN, by selecting a description that I found particularly delightful:
"Among the many exhilarating things Lake taught was that the order of the solar spectrum is not a closed circle but a spiral of tints from cadmium red and oranges through a strontian yellow and a pale paradisal green to cobalt blues and violets, at which point the sequence does not grade into red again but passes into another spiral, which starts with a kind of lavender gray and goes on to Cinderella shades transcending human perception. He taught that there is no such thing as the Ashcan School or the Cache Cache School or the Cancan School. That the work of art created with string, stamps, a Leftist newspaper, and the droppings of doves is based on a series of dreary platitudes. That there is nothing more banal and more bourgeois than paranoia. That Dali is really Norman Rockwell's twin brother kidnapped by gipsies in babyhood. That Van Gogh is second-rate and Picasso supreme, despite his commercial foibles; and that if Degas could immortalize a calèche, why could not Victor Wind do the same to a motor car? (page 96,Vintage edition)"
We only need to remember that Cinderella derives from "cinders", "ashes" to fully enjoy the transition from Ash-can to Can-can with the intervening sound of "cache" ( hidden) or "cache-cache" ( hide-and-seek).
( Other links between Cinderella grays, "vair", "crystal slippers" and "squirrels" are well studied by Barabtarto, Blackwell, Naiman and VN himself)
As John Shade wrote in Pale Fire (ed.CK, line 29) " All colors made me happy: even gray" and, except for the description about the spiral of colors and a mention about victor's dreams ("his back to the emerald-and-gray window, the King sat listening to a masked messenger"..." gray almost always appears connected to old age or wasted efforts:" athletic supporters -a beastly gray tangle"; "the conductor, a gray-headed fatherly person with steel spectacles" or "the gray-headed conductor sank into the opposite seat"," a kind gray-head" . He "squandered a decade of gray life on an erudite work; "His life(...)as at the earth-smelling florist's when the rain makes gray and green mirrors of Easter day (...) "From then on to the end of the voyage that had turned from green and silver to a uniform gray". Also we find " pale gray walls";" bloated gray clouds".
Gray is also chosen for the clothing worn by various fellow professors, Hopper's "clerical gray" and even Victor: " his striped tie dangling out of the front of his gray jacket, his bulky gray flannelled knees parted" - or Liza: " looking svelte and strange in a charming new dress as dove-gray as Paris, and wearing a really enchanting new hat with a blue bird's wing".
Pnin himself is described as a "bespectacled old fellow with scholarly strands of steel-gray hair falling over the right side of his small but corrugated brow, and with a deep furrow descending from each side of his sharp nose to each corner of his long upper-lip" who wittily named "a chalk-clouded blackboard", "a grayboard."
We also find gray squirrels and pigeons: " a gray squirrel sitting on comfortable haunches" and "a picture postcard representing the Gray Squirrel"; "an elliptic flock of pigeons, in circular volitation, soaring grey, flapping white, and then gray again, wheeled across the limpid, pale sky"
We should not forget other Cinderellas in "Ada", perhaps even remember "Cincinnatus" ( Stan K-B, would I now be in danger of "referential mania"?) or variations with "dove-color", "lead" or "plumbeous".
Following VN's vision of colored letter would "gray" correspond?
Jansy
Search the archive: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/archives/nabokv-l.html
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu,chtodel@cox.net
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm