I had always been intrigued by the title "in Aleppo
once" and my curiosity was satisfied after I read, somewhere, that the
title was a reference to Shakespeare. To Othello, I think. Unfortunately,
in the middle of my muddle I lost the indication and forgot its source. Does any
one know?
After I said: Thank you, Alexey, for your patience,
A.Sklyarenko inquired back: What patience, Jansy? Or do you
mean that by forming new words from the same letters I'm indulging in a kind of
card patience (solitaire)?
JM: Now that you ask,
Alexey, I must think about why not only I thanked you, but added
"patience". The game "solitaire" had not crossed my mind at any time, but
you have a point.
Nabokov often stimulates in those readers that speak
more than one language, those that have a particular love for geography,
history ( entomology, philosophy, childhood reminiscences, literary
production...) into pursuing an almost solitary quest. Sharing such
moments of "wild research" with the VN- List is comforting and I
think this must have been what I meant: thank you for sharing and, in a way,
inviting a commentary into that quest.
Anthony Stadlen [answering "A
real scientist would search for other numerical references ( twelve, fourteen,
twenty, ninety-two...) ... A terrible woman aged forty, or a man? Forty
diamonds, forty lies, forty thieves?] added another example of "forty"
from "Signs and Symbols" and promised a feed-back about the meeting held in
London with the final disclosure about this short-story: Yes, brother
Isaac was "a real American of almost forty years
standing." This is one of the peculiarities of Nabokov's style. It
plays with what in Gestalt theory is called "closure effect": when people
tend to remember information that remains incomplete, vague, expecting it to
"close". In VN it almost never closes, but for me this knowledge is
useless because the allusion keeps rebounding and gaining momentum
with every casual reference that returns to the "incomplete" or "unresolved"
issue. Those sparse items ( the "forty" in this case) are repeated at
random in various contexts, recurring like a musical Leitmotiv that
often (in VN's case) announces any particular entrance or character
but engender a sensation of volume and increasing
sonority.