Speak Memory, pages 11-12 ( Foreword)
"Certain tight parentheses have been
opened and allowed to spill their still active contents. Or else an object,
which had been a mere dummy chosen at random and of no factual significante in
the account of an important event, * kept bothering me every time ...
until the arbitrary spectacles were metamorphosed into a clearly
recalled oystershell-shaped cigarette case... my father had netted a Peacock
butterfly very scarce..." .
Any PF reader could proceed
associatively from, say, decoy onto nacreous, iridule, spectacles and
death, either closing a circle, or admitting a spiraling thrust leading
nowhere.
The sentence above could close the mystery about
any pink mother-of pearl's lights on a shell by choosing, instead of the
word that begins with a nacreous "mother" some more paternal synonim like
"oystershell".
Then the allusions in PF would be merely indicating
a hawkmoth and a peacock butterfly on "The Chemin du Pendu".
But our hangman ( an important Tarot-card?) may go
for a nap and allow us to go on, perhaps searching for Bera range and
an iridule hovering over its glittering summits and hiding a
fountain ...
Initially I saw the cigarette case ( which makes
its appearance I cannot recollect now where, if in Bend Sinister or in Pale Fire
itself) shaped as a shell, not as an indeterminate oval or
rectangle. Therefore I imagined for it the ever present Botticellian
Lolita rising from the foam on a madeleine, instead of recognizing the material
box...
Jansy
*- I'm certain that well-read anti-Freudian Nabokov
is here indirectly referring to Freud's article on "Paramnesia" in which an
insignificant object is used to hide from our memory another important
scene.