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Re: Personification in LATH
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I was puzzling over what "personifications" could be, following Ruskin's divisions under "pathetic fallacy" ("personification refers to abstractions"). Thinking, ideas, memory, moving tongue or fingers, even pain are not abstractions, whereas all of language itself fits the bill. Where would I find them in Nabokov?
A few minutes ago a friend sent me a translation of a poem by Polish Wislawa Szymborska and it teemed with emoting concepts (chance, necessity, happiness )* Perhaps that's what "personification" means. Would these be perceptible when VN finds mysterious intentions in the workings of his memory, quite often to its anthropomorphic shape as Mnemosyne. (I usually interpreted these moments as an admission of Freud's active and "malicious" unconscious!)
When VN approaches what could be a true "personification" he withdraws, somehow, emphasizing analogies or their "as if" quality so that he cannot dwell in them**, as when surly sofas hide a shy pencil or clothes dance in the wind. Are they "Harlequins"? (LATH) Are they "Jacob Gradus"? (PF)***
From LATH, a selection:
"Look at the harlequins!" [ ] "...Trees are harlequins, words are harlequins. So are situations and sums. Put two things together--jokes, images--and you get a triple harlequin. Come on! Play! Invent the world! Invent reality!" [ ] "When she cried out those four words, they came out in a breathless dactylic line with a swift lispy lilt, as if it were "lookaty," assonating with "lickety" and introducing tenderly, ingratiatingly those "harlequins" who arrived with festive force, the "bar" richly stressed in a burst of inspired persuasion followed by a liquid fall of sequin-like syllables)."
"The forefeel of fame was as heady as the old wines of nostalgia. It was remembrance in reverse, a great lakeside oak reflected so picturesquely in such clear waters that its mirrored branches looked like glorified roots. I felt this future fame in my toes, in the tips of my fingers, in the hair of my head, as one feels the shiver caused by an electric storm, by the dying beauty of a singer's dark voice just before the thunder, of by one line in King Lear."
"Oh, there it comes, the crested wave line, trotting again like white circus ponies abreast, I understood, as I perceived her against that backdrop, how much adulation, how many lovers had helped form and perfect my Iris, with that impeccable complexion of hers, that absence of any uncertainty in the profile.."
" Sometimes when I work too late and the spies of thought cease to relay messages, a wrong word in motion feels somehow like the dry biscuit that aparrot holds in its great slow hand."
"A curious form of self-preservation moves us to get rid, instantly,irrevocably, of all that belonged to the loved one we lost. Otherwise, thethings she touched every day and kept in their proper context by the act of handling them start to become bloated with an awful mad life of their own. Her dresses now wear their own selves, her books leaf through their own pages. We suffocate in the tightening circle of those monsters that aremisplaced and misshapen because she is not there to tend them. And even thebravest among us cannot meet the gaze of her mirror...At the momentof parting they appeared quite normal and harmless; I would even say theylooked taken aback.She was naked, save for her black-stockinged legs (which was strange but at the same time recalled something from a parallel world, for my mind stood astride on two circus horses). smudge of color on the dull glass of my mind; had to make twoor three lurching efforts in order to leave my overaffectionate seat the most authentic and faithful joys of my life: the colored phrase in my mind under the drizzle, the white page under the desk lamp awaiting me in my humble home, the neuralgic aches which had been spreading through my frame like an inner person of pain, all angles and claws, for the last three years, had now attained my extremities, and made the task of typing a fortunate impossibility."
"I was about to open the window and strip in front of it (at moments of raw widowerhood a soft black night in the spring is the most soothing voyeuse imaginable)"
......................... * "Under One Small Star"
My apologies to chance for calling it necessity.
My apologies to necessity if I'm mistaken, after all.
Please, don't be angry, happiness, that I take you as my due.
May my dead be patient with the way my memories fade.
** - "as if the mind, in order to go back thither, had to do so with the silent steps of a prodigal" (SM 171).;
"Beginning a salad, was to him like stepping into sea water on a chilly day, and he had always to brace himself in order to attack the fortress of an apple " or the brainy but not animated: "And to fulfill the fish wish of the womb,/ A school of Freudians headed for the tomb." (PF)
*** - "We shall accompany Gradus in constant thought, as he makes his way from distant dim Zembla to green Appalachia, through the entire length of the poem, following the road of its rhythm, riding past in a rhyme, skidding around the corner of a run-on, breathing with the caesura, swinging down to the foot of the page from line to line as from branch to branch, hiding between two words..."
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