Away from home, my chances of reaching familiar
VN books are nul, neither can I access his digitalized
novels.
I remember Alexey Sklyarenko's article in The
Nabokovian about Ada's triple dreams and, researching internet
Rimbaud, I came to "Le dormeur du val", also probably referred to in
ADA: " C'est un trou de verdure où chante une rivière,/ ...,/.. c'est un petit
val qui mousse de rayons.// Un soldat jeune, bouche ouverte, tête nue,/...Dort ;
il est étendu dans l'herbe, sous la nue,/...il dort. Souriant comme/Sourirait un
enfant malade, /../Les parfums ne font pas frissonner sa narine ;/Il dort dans
le soleil, la main sur sa poitrine,/Tranquille. Il a deux trous rouges au côté
droit."
I had plans to check two kinds of elective afinities, or sympathetic resonances
and synesthaesia:
(a) two loving hearts beating in unison,
as in MR's Glanvill lute or VN's amorandola ( explained by CK), which
have a non-romantic equivalent, a pathology described in
Psychoanalysis by M.Klein - of which VN was certainly aware since,
already in "The Enchanter", we find it described when a lady leaves the
train-compartment she shared with the seducer and his little girl
- i.e, the mechanism of "projective identification" that describes
the risks of emotional contamination from someone else's "evil" wishes, of
entering the same distorted frequency as the emittent's. Like separating a
newborn dog from its mother and checking the effect, upon the latter, of small
tortures caused to her offspring ( as in Dava Sobel's description for a measure
of longitude).
In the human sense, this represents an
involuntary kind of "sympathy"...
(b) the extension of
correspondences to the encompassing "synaesthesia", an
interchangeability and summation of sensations which may be externalized in
words, but which also carryies the risk of shutting out one's
routine relation with fellow human beings ( I remember here,
Lolita's Barber of Kasbean scene, or from TLSK, all the
conscious efforts of paying attention to someone else's emotions). It represents
the opposite of what happens in (a), an involuntary kind of lack of
empathy.
My argument derives from my hypothesis about
VN's permanent acknowledgement of conflict and the concommittance of good and
evil, as of some kind of undecided, unresolvable element in human nature.
From Luzhin's difficulties to attend school under
his father's surname ( no longer simply Alexander), we follow VN's own
oscillations from the arrow-sparrow crossing a Christian lighted hall to
cyclical time, with no definite "eschaton", final judgement with a triumph of
Word over image. In my view, the opposites in Nabokov, are not subjected to a
definite final synthesis...