David Krol: The garden pavilion of the
elegant American Embassy (the Schoenborn Palace) in Prague is also know as the
Glorietta. It rests halfway up the Petrin Hill and has a wonderful view of
Prague Castle and the city. Prague, of course, is also the resting place of VN's
mother.
JM: An elegant link to the American
Embassy's Glorietta in Prague, proudly displaying the American flag. In
several languages, flags and banners
are designated "pavilions" and, although equally glorious they can
serve as an example of linguistic travelings extending into
multiverses (etymological time travels?). This is why my plight with
these words (gloriette, arbor, pavilion), happening at the same time as
Sklyarenko's insistence on Mesmer and hypnotism, led me onto very strange
lands, teeming with Nabokovian questions.
In "Transparent Things" there is a
material "return to the past" when Hugh (like Chorb) turns
in his tracks leading onto somnambulism and murder.
There's also "another world" in it, co-existing with the one in
which its character is moving about. Already in "Lolita" and in
"Pale Fire" the reports of a madman are intermingled with a "common-sense world"
text, unfoding almost independently from a fantasy world (Zembla,
Elfland, the Faerie). In "Ada" the memoirists's effort to recreate his past
mingle fantastic events and historical facts while the reader
is informed about Terra and Anti-Terra right from start, before he
learns about dorophones, Lettro-calamity, jikkers or mermaids. In
most of the novels, ghostly influences are hinted at, with the power
to dissolve boundaries between worlds and those lying
in fiction's fiction.
My first project this morning was to
retrieve the plot of the delightful-awful movie about
the hypnotist "Svengali," mostly aiming at the captivating
moments of comedy one also finds in it. But the I was carried to Francis,
in "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligaris" (with its murderous sonambulist
Cesare and its 1920 narrative twist*). Before I
could get a grip onto my chair, I was led to Wells's time travels, Sherlock
Holmes's ressuscitation ("the Woman in Green, based onSir Arthur Conan
Doyle's "The Empty House), "The Three Faces of Eve" and... The Wizzard of
Oz, DC Comics heroes such as Superman and Wonder Woman, Swift's
Gulliver, Lewis Carroll's "Through the Looking-Glass", Xanadu,
Kalevala, C.S. Lewis' Narnia, J.L Borges' 1941 "The Garden of
Forking Paths," moving from a parallel universe onto multiverses and SciFi.
The extensive entries in wikipedia related to these
themes didn't mention any novel by Nabokov: a strange omission **.
..................................................................................................................................................
* "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (German: Das Kabinett
des Doktor Caligari) is a 1920 silent horror film directed by Robert Wiene from
a screenplay by Hans Janowitz and Carl Mayer. It is one of the most influential
of German Expressionist films and is often considered one of the greatest horror
movies of the early times. This movie is cited as having introduced the twist
ending in cinema" [...] Francis discovers that "Caligari" is actually the
director of the local insane asylum, and... that he is obsessed with the story
of a mystic called Caligari, who, in 1793, visited towns in northern Italy and
used a somnambulist to murder people in a similar fashion. After being
confronted with the dead Cesare, Caligari reveals his mania and is imprisoned in
his asylum [...] A "twist ending" reveals that Francis' flashback is actually
his fantasy: he, Jane and Cesare are all inmates of the insane asylum, and the
man he says is Caligari is his asylum doctor, who, after this revelation of the
source of his patient's delusion, says that now he will be able to cure
Francis.
** - Self-reference, infinite return and the tactics of
involution (as those ascribed to "Lolita" by Alfred Appel Jr. in his
foreword) are commented in the wiki entry for "multiverses": "These
stories often place the author, or authors in general, in the same position as
Zelazny's characters in Amber. Questioning, in a literal fashion, if writing is
an act of creating a new world, or an act of discovery of a pre-existing
world.
Occasionally, this approach becomes self-referential, treating the
literary universe of the work itself as explicitly parallel to the universe
where the work was created. Stephen King's seven-volume Dark Tower series hinges
upon the existence of multiple parallel worlds, many of which are King's own
literary creations. Ultimately the characters become aware that they are only
"real" in King's literary universe (this can be debated as an example of
breaking the fourth wall), and even travel to a world — twice — in which (again,
within the novel) they meet Stephen King and alter events in the real Stephen
King's world outside of the books." (in a vein like Max Beeerbohm's earlier
'Enoch Soames")