To Alexey: following your line of
associations, I remembered the "gory trophy" ( you mentioned
both gory, torfu and trophies in your last postings...) that was
carried by a dachshund and which uncle Dan innocently ( freudianly?) saw
as being the consequence of a "guillotined" thumb, and not, quite probably,
the bloody trophy (?) for Ada's loss of
her maidenhead.
To J. Aisenberg, here are several
extracts from VN's Gogol, illustrating tactics also found in ADA
through Bout,Blanche, etc:
"Note how the newborn Anonymous
Vlassovich manages to grup up and live a whole life in the space of a second"
(page 47) ..."This secondary world, bursting as it were through the background
of the play, is Gogol's true kingdom [...] all these creatures whose lively
motion constitues the very material of the play, not only do not interfere with
what theatrical managers call"action" but apparently assist the play to be
eminently playable[...] Not only live cr eatures swarm in that irrational
background but numerous objects are made to play a part as important as that of
the characters..." (page 52) Gogol's "genius deals not in the intrinsic
qualities of computable chemical matter ( the "real life" of literary critics)
but in the mimetic capacities of the physical phenomena produced by almost
intangible particles of recreated life" (page 56)
Underside of the weave, the hidden "real" story in
Gogol, as described by VN: (page 144)..."This is all in the
way of plot, but of course the real plot ( as always with Gogol) lies in the
style, in the inner structure of his transcendental anecdote(sic) "
or (pg 148) "A piece of most important information, the main
structural idea of the story is here deliberately masked by Gogol ( because all
reality is a mask).".."in Gogol's books the real plots are behind the obvious
ones" (page 152)
Here we also find what will become, in Pale
Fire, Gradus' movements in conformity with the development of John
Shade's poem:
"The peripheral characters of his
novel are engendered by the subordinate clauses of its various metaphors,
comparisons and lyrical outbursts[...]mere forms of speech directly giving rise
to live creatures" (page 78)
Btw, if anyone should feel stirred by
this extraneous cutting, I now offer another curious tidbit on numbers
1000 and 999 (Pale Fire:length of poem
through a glass, darkly; Lolita: Quilted Quilty's persecution
and paper-chase; E.O, Ada or TT's references to
translation,aso):
"I sometimes think that these old
English 'translations' are remarkably similar to the so-called Thousand Pieces
Execution which was popular at one time in China. The idea was to cut out from
the patient's body one tiny square bit the size of a cough lozenge, say, every
five minutes or so until bit by bit ( all of them selected with discrimination
so as to have the patient live to the nine hundred ninety ninth
piece) his whole body was delicately removed".
(unfortunately I couldn't find the description and page
references, to the metmorphosing carriage, in VN's text on Gogol, to
compare it to a similar transmorphing in
ADA)