Gary Lipon: Researching iridule. I got it in my head that
most readers interpreted iridules as sundogs, also called parhelion. Google
somewhat surprisingly returned a Fri, 19 Jun 2009 22:00:42 -0400 post from
the archives from Jerry Friedman..."An iridescent cloud is one thing, a
parhelion is another, and a mother-of-pearl cloud is yet another. I still
suspect that Nabokov saw a parhelion and a rainbow at the same time and thought,
or let Shade think, that the former was a reflection of the latter. In that case
Kinbote, of all people, would be right." I disagree with the
conclusion...shimmering pastels sounds rather rare and wonderful to me, and
would be something likely to be remembered.The definition that Shade gives is to
be taken metronymic-ally: serving merely to associate iridule and rainbow, the
container and the contained.I'm voting for cloud iridescence.
JM: Thanks to Gary Lipon because he returned to the
fantastic "iridule" image in PF: "The iridule —
when, beautiful and strange, / In a bright sky above a mountain
range/ One opal
cloudlet in an oval form/ Reflects the rainbow of a thunderstorm/
Which in a distant valley has been staged ..."
I've seen rainbows in Brasilia that look like wide
open three-dimensional arch-ways (not flat ribbons),
something perhaps caused by our location in relation to the
setting sun. Parhelions lie "parhelially," ie, usually at the opposite
side of a rainbow and, mostly, against a "bright sky" as
Shade's "iridule".
Incessant rain over wide watery surfaces, in the setting sun, extend
the rainbow-colors all over the landscape (once, driving over a bridge, I felt I
was inside an iridescent crystal hemisphere) and, in this
particular case, they differ from "cloud iridescence" for there's
no cloud standing in isolation, nor the refraction takes on the shape
of a bow*. However (who knows?) this peculiarity may be
tied with the formation of Shade's cloudy iridule, since a
rainbow can also be reflected onto a glistening surface right
under one's feet. I'd have believed in the "physical reality" of Shade's
description were it not for his powerful metaphor (the turmoils of a
distant thunderstorm can be reflected as a deceitful peaceful
scenery, for example...)
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*- perhaps Nabokov is indicating the unattentive insistence
when applying the word "bow" automatically when, what the eye is
then registering, is only an "iridescence".