Continuing the discussion of typographic icons and
extending it from punctuation marks to letters (alphabetic icons) in the cases
below), VN used the device as a thematic motif in _Invitation to a Beheading_.
In the example below, the Greek gamma projects the image of a gallows (although
Cincinnatus is to be beheaded rather than hung.
[A] Nothing will come of what I am trying to tell,
its only vestiges being the corpses of strangled words, like hanged men ...
evening silhouettes of gammas and gerunds, gallow crows. (_Invitation to a
Beheading_, chpt -
8)
-----------------------------------------------------------
Nabokov was far from the first to use this sort of
imagery. Last evening I ran across an example in Victor Hugo's melodramatic
warhorse _Ninety-Three_ , the year of the Terror in the French
revolution The allusion here is, of course, to the guillotine. The Hebrew
letter is presumably the "he" or "heth" which resembles the Greek "pi" -- the
shape of the guillotine frame. What the Greek hieroglyph might be, I don't
know.
[B]It had been put there during the night. It had
been erected rather than built. Seen from a distance, it was a shape made of
hard straight lines having the appearance of a Hebrew letter or one of those
Egyptian hieroglyphics which were part of the alphabet of the ancient enigma
(Book 7, section 6 of Victor Hugo's _Ninety-Three_, trans Lowell
Blair.
-----------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------