In TOoL there is a quick
reference to "asparagus" when Flora's mother has to go out herself to get
"aspirins" because the maid had bought asparagus in their stead. As a wordplay,
it is not very apt or funny. But I remembered other references to "asparagus"
and decided to explore this choice of vegetable or sound: the spinning soup
in Transparent Things and a description of Proust's novel in PF.
Nabokov, in TOoL, twice mocked Proust's
"involuntary memory" through its first report of a madeleine immersed
in an infusion of linden (tilleuil)leaves. In his essay about Proust,
Samuel Beckett counted six such experiences and wrote extensively about Proust's
theories. Nabokov, so it seems to me, insists that such magical recollections
may happen at will, not merely by a chance combination of
ingredients.
The link of asparagus and Proust, though, is
most intriguing (I only recollect, together with the madeleine, a spoon
with a crinkling napkin and a vague distant glassy noise as the
other triggering elements of a synesthetic memory in Proust).
Here they are:
PF (Kinbote,note to line
181)"Speaking of novels,'I said,'you remember we decided
once, you, your husband and I, that Proust’s rough masterpiece was a huge,
ghoulish fairy tale, an asparagus dream, totally unconnected
with any possible people in any historical France, a sexual travestissement and
a colossal farce, the vocabulary of genius and its poetry, but no
more...mechanical Dostoevskian rows and Tolstoian nuances of snobbishness
repeated and expanded to an unsufferable length, adorable seascapes, melting
avenues...light and shade effects rivaling those of the greatest English poets,
a flora of metaphors, described — by Cocteau, I think — as ‘a mirage of
suspended gardens’..."
ADA:
(Marina) "contented
herself with...what she remembered... as being his favorite food — zelyonïya
shchi... After that...there would be bread-crumbed sander (sudak) with boiled
potatoes, hazel-hen (ryabchiki) and that special asparagus (bezukhanka)
which does not produce Proust’s After-effect, as cookbooks say."
Transparent Things: "...trying to induce a dream ...On the printed page the words "likely"
and "actually" should be italicized too, at least slightly, to indicate a slight
breath of wind inclining those characters (in the sense of both signs and
personae)...Human life can be compared to a person dancing in a variety of forms
around his own self: thus the vegetables ...encircled a boy in his dream - green
cucumber, blue eggplant, red beet, Potato pere, Potato fils, a girly
asparagus, and, oh, many more, their spinning ronde going faster and
faster and gradually forming a transparent ring of banded colors around a dead
person or planet...One should bear in mind, however, that there is no mirage
without a vanishing point, just as there is no lake without a closed circle of
reliable land."
From Nabokov's childhood fevers and
dellirium (aspirins?) we reach a Proustian asparagus ( fairy-tales and dreams?)
with an invasion of chaotic spinning sensations. So what?
Any ideas?
Jansy