Don and List,
While still working on the "Bellevue" scene in ADA, there
was a sentence that called my attention in particular.
There is Dorothy Vinelander who
"thought fit to interrupt her narrative (which had to do with
the eruption of a dream volcano) "
This simple sentence brings together
"interrupts/erupts" and shows the words in a special way if one hears the
word "inter" not only as "coming in between" but also as "inter/interred/
interring" which means to cover with earth, to deposit a corpse,
to bury.
This links with her husband´s "digs" ( in
"what treasures he dug up"...). There is also a reference mentioning
"gravemen" in "laymen and lemans...grave men/gravemen".
Is there a special secret connected with
Dorothy that needs to be brought to light? (
by contrasting "inter" and "erupt").
Blackmailing Dorothy may know a secret about a "buried
lover/leman"? There is a mildly toxic plant named " Scarlet
Pimpernel" ( the Stabia/ Pompeianella/Pimpernella link, plus the Sorcière´s
owner, Ms. Scarlet )
( Plant
name: Scarlet Pimpernel Toxic portions: Foliage,flowers and fruit.
Toxicity: Curcubitacins in Scarlet pimpernel may
cause digestive and kidney inflammation. Caged birds and sheep are reported to
have died from eating Anagallis arvensis)
The paragraph that informs us about Dorothy and her
marriage reads:
"Dorothy Vinelander retired to a subarctic monastery town
(Ilemna, now Novostabia) where eventually she married a Mr Brod or Bred, tender
and passionate, dark and handsome, who traveled in eucharistials and other
sacramental objects throughout the Severnïya Territorii and who subsequently was
to direct, and still may be directing half a century later, archeological
reconstructions at Goreloe (the ‘Lyaskan Herculanum’); what treasures he dug up
in matrimony is another question".
Brian Boyd ( Nabokov´s Ada, the place of consciousness, page
31) explained that Nabokov fused in "Ilemna/Novostabia"
both Lake Il´men and Iliamna, a local volcano.
Other associations present in VN´s text bring up Freud
again by a curious chain of
associations:
"Ilemna" and Leman, Laymen and Lemans, Sig
Leymanski as Dr.Froit , or Dr. Signy Mondieu Mondieu.
excerpts from "ADA"
1. " as the
Bear-Foot, B,E,A,R, my love, not my foot or yours, or the Stabian flower girl’s
— an allusion, which your father, who, according to Blanche, is also mine, would
understand (...) ‘Good
for you, Pompeianella (whom you saw scattering her flowers in one of
Uncle Dan’s picture books, but whom I admired last summer in a
Naples
museum).
2.
According to the Sunday supplement of a newspaper that had just begun to feature
on its funnies page the now long defunct Goodnight Kids, Nicky and Pimpernella
(sweet siblings who shared a narrow bed)...
3... our
frolicsome Pimpernel and Nicolette found in the same attic a reel box containing
what turned out to be (according to Kim, the kitchen boy, as will be understood
later) a tremendous stretch of
microfilm...
4. ...
Theresa maddened with her messages a scientist on our easily
maddened
planet; his anagram-looking name, Sig Leymanksi, had been
partly
derived
by Van from that of Aqua’s last doctor. When Leymanski’s
obsession...
5. The
details of the L disaster (and I do not mean Elevated) in the beau milieu
of last century, which had the singular effect of both causing and cursing
the notion of ‘Terra,’ are too well-known historically, and too obscene
spiritually, to be treated at length in a book addressed to young laymen and
lemans — and not to grave men or gravemen.
6.... and
then staying for a while in autumn at a hotel on a mountain slope above Leman
Lake (where Karamzin and Count Tolstoy had roamed) (...)
Both girls had scarlet fever in Cannes...
7.
We shall always remember Little Lemantry near Rantchester or the Pseudotherm in
the lovely cul-de-sac south of the viaduct
8. Mount
Russet, the forested hill behind the town, lived up to its name and autumnal
reputation, with a warm glow of curly chestnut trees; and on the opposite shore
of Leman, Leman meaning Lover, loomed the crest of Sex Noir, Black
Rock.
9A Dr
Froid, one of the administerial centaurs, who may have been an émigré brother
with a passport-changed name of the Dr Froit of Signy-Mondieu-Mondieu in the
Ardennes or, more likely, the same man, because they both came from Vienne,
Isère (...) The astorium in St Taurus, or whatever it was called (who cares
— one forgets little things very fast, when afloat in infinite non-thingness)
was, perhaps, more modem, with a more refined desertic view, than the Mondefroid
bleakhouse horsepittle, but in both places a demented patient could outwit in
one snap an imbecile
pedant.
10.
he bought a villa for himself et ma cousine, and had supper with the
former owner, a banker’s widow, amiable Mme Scarlet and her blond, pimply but
pretty, daughter Eveline.
11.
Van
kissed her leaf-cold hand and, letting the Bellevue worry
about his car, letting all Swans worry about his effects and Mme Scarlet worry
about Eveline’s skin
trouble...