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Re: QUERY: Love and lust in VN's stories?
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More on Signs and Symbols (and apologies for my awkward English):
The part played by lust in S&S is
not obvious. It's difficult to imagine the husband , an old broken
man (but is he really that old? he can't be more than 55 or 60)
chasing girls or indulging in lustful fantasies.
Yet, although adultery is not
explicitely mentioned, unmistakable Nabokovian clues hint at it. In
order to read these clues, one must decipher Nabokov's grammar , as
Champollion deciphered the Rosetta Stone, by observing the
constellations of images and situations:
This unpleasant German maid whose photo
insistently pops up while the wife is examining pictures in a family
album where she doesn't belong, it is literally the forced
introduction of another woman in the family circle, another woman
together with her own world (embodied by the bestial beau) which
literally means Hell for this Jewish family.
This call from the girl with a dull,
toneless voice trying to get to 'Charlie' in the middle of the night,
the heart of intimacy embodies the blind, stubborn obstinacy of sensual appeal any 'Charlie' is forever tempted to
answer.
VN literalizes the metaphor and merely
juxtaposes elements which have a cause-effect relationship (the
presence of another woman and the vanishing of intimacy), thus
avoiding being explicit, the very juxtaposition being the comment,
and achieving a much more powerful emotional effect on the reader.
This blandly nightmarish world of
violated intimacy and estrangement of the loved ones must be
understood as the consequence of the husband's (past?) infatuation
with girls. As cave paintings rapidly pale and vanish when exposed to
the daylight, the intimacy and family life of this couple has been
emptied of its substance because of its constant exposition to alien
intrusions. And the wife's unfailing tenderness is condemned to be
'either crushed or wasted'.
I'm well aware that my interpretation
must seem flimsy and unconvincing, only gappily supported by the text
and relying too much on an arbitrary interpretation. Yet if we look
at otherVN stories we can't fail to notice similar constellations of
juxtaposed images and situations: oppressive or downright
nightmarish atmosphere, estranged or dead wife and / or children,
sensually attractive girl / woman. The different elements are
diversely developped but this pattern is meaningful because of its
reccurence.
The closest example occurs in Bend
Sinister, where David is torn away from his father Krug (and
'entrusted' to a very similar team of nurses and doctors) as soon as
he lays hands on Mariette, a girl whose lusterless eyes are a visual
equivalent of the anonymous girl's dull toneless voice of S&S,
and a maid with a bestial beau too.
This constellation has spawned numerous
fictional variations in VN's imagination. Another one of them occurs
in Spring in Fialta, although very different in tone and imagery: The
narrator's wife and daughters "are always present in the clear
north of [his] being ... but yet keeping on the outside of [him]
most of the time", in other words: exiled while he finds himself
in the humid, warm, misty, cloudy, intensely sensual world where the
woman he is attracted to dwells.
Vadim's daughter Bel, in Look at The
Harlequins, is abruptly taken away from him (and afterwards exposed
to a noxious influence) just after an adulterous tryst with a young
woman (I forget her name) who draws him into her nightmarish world.
Albinus's daughter, in Laughter in the
Dark, literally dies of her father's affair with Margot.
Even in Pale Fire, the theme of the
damaged child as a consequence of disharmony in the couple of the
parents still lingers, although only brushed past ...
Laurence Hochard
Date: Wed, 26 Dec 2012 13:17:47 -0200
From: jansy@AETERN.US
Subject: Re: [NABOKV-L] QUERY: Love and lust in VN's stories?
To: NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU
Jansy Mello: [ ].Vladimir Nabokov short
stories concerned with the dangers of love, lust, beauty, or
desire?
Laurence Hochard: Odd as it may seem, I'd
suggest "Signs and Symbols", as a short story concerned with lust as the
threshold to Hell.
Jansy Mello: [LH] started by
noting that it would seem “odd” and I couldn’t agree more with him. Where lies
the lust of the lost in it? Perhaps Laurence could remind us of anything
particular he found in the photos, or does it lie in the similarity between a
vision of a lovable arm that connects it to a scene in Lolita? (I have no access
to the quotations now). I thought the original question was, itself, quite
intriguing once we agree that everything in life is positively dangerous.
Would any Nabokovian character have ever found himself hindered by the
dangers of love, lust or beauty?
Alexander
Drescher: Odd? Certainly not obvious. Please
explicate.]
Laurence Hochard: "I'll do it willingly but
a few days after Christmas if you don't mind, as I won't have access to
Nabokov-L in the next few days and I don't have time right now. (to Jansy): Yes
it does have something to do with the photos As for the "lovable arm", I don't
see what scene in Lolita you have in mind, and the naked arm in Signs and
Symbols is not at all lovable."
Jansy Mello: How interesting. I couldn't
find now, while perusing Symbols and Signs, the reference to the
naked arm I had in mind - and which LH acknowledged (for him it "is not at
all lovable." ) I suppose he is referring to:
"Across the narrow courtyard, where the rain
tinkled in the dark against some ash cans, windows were blandly alight, and in
one of them a black-trousered man, with his hands clasped under his head and his
elbows raised, could he seen lying supine on an untidy bed. She pulled the blind
down and examined the photographs" (from the New Yorker edition on line),
and some other previous reference that gave a particular meaning to these
lines.
I associated it with Lolita's:
' I could list a great number of these one-sided diminutive
romances. Some of them ended in a rich flavor of hell. It happened for instance
that from my balcony I would notice a lighted window across the street and what
looked like a nymphet in the act of undressing before a co-operative mirror.
Thus isolated, thus removed, the vision acquired an especially keen charm that
made me race with all speed toward my lone gratification. But abruptly,
fiendishly, the tender pattern of nudity I had adored would be transformed into
the disgusting lamp-lit bare arm of a man in his underclothes reading his paper
by the open window in the hot, damp, hopeless summer night."
Although I now
have access to the necessary quotations, I must confess that the
connections I made were mainly the result of special vague recollections. In
this case, a similarity in spirit between the equivocal lovely arm, that turns
into something repulsive both in novel and in story. I'm alsmost certain
this theme has already come up once in the List, but couldn't reach it thru my
usual sources.
Any
help to settle these matters is very welcome!
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