PPS: "When I
returned to Nabokov's original this time, there was one word that,
again, struck a chord. Namely "skiagrapher." ... I decided to explore
its synonimous "shadowgraph" (keeping in mind Pnin's "shadow behind the heart").
This second return to the theme was prompted by a
surprising information on shadowgraphy which I noticed and forgot to
comment. There is a reference to Jean-Paul Marat's studies about
fire*
In one of Nabokov's shoe boxes with his cards (cf.SO), one of
his interviewers found a note about Marat, who
" collected butterflies." In Ada and in Lolita Marat's murder is mentioned
indirectly (Cora Day).** We know that, like Nabokov, Marat relieved
the discomfort caused by psoriasis by immersions in a bath
tub.*** and I remember that in a past N-L posting there was
information about J-P Marat's scientific pretensions, in relation to the French
Academy of Sciences, to his theories about the ether and the
phlogyston, which had been thwarted by Lavoisier. Somehow, all these invisibilities and shadowy tails, seem
to converge in Nabokov's dispersed observations about shadows and color.
If we connect Victor Wind's little poem about
Leonardo's "nun-pale ... Mona Lisa’s lips
that you had made so red,"
and the closing lines of Lolita
where Humbert Humbert mentions "the secret of durable pigments":
"And do not pity C.Q. One had to choose between him and H.H., and one
wanted H.H. to exist at least a couple of months longer, so as to have him make
you live in the minds of later generations. I am thinking of aurochs and angels,
the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this
is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita." ( Lolita), there
might be other hints about light and color deserving further
examination.
Almost ten years ago I read a thriller by the Argentine writer Federico Andahazi, more widely known through his novel "The Anatomist." The plot of El secreto de los flamencos (The Secret of the Flemish,2002 ),set at the beginning of the Renaissance, departs from a bloody struggle between the Florentine painters (who guarded the secrets of perspective),and the Flemish (who kept to themselves their knowledge about durable pigments). Andahazi assimilates Borges's "Aleph" to what he describes as "Coloris in Status Purus" (its radiation blinds, after marvelllous revelations, those who look at its emanations from a golden chalice, where it is kept under seven keys and codes). The novelist makes reference to Aristotle's De Anima, ch VII, De Sensu et Sensibili and De Coloribus. In a way, although I couldn't find any specific information in relation to Leonardo's Mona Lisa, Aristotle's writings, as quoted by Andahazi, may lead us back to the issue of the invisble and the ether.# I have no idea if Nabokov was familiar with Jean-Paul Marat's theories about fire and ether, or if he had read Aristotle before he developped his ideas about a color wheel (actually, Prof. Lake's and his dreams about Rennassaince skiagraphy and velvety pigment grinders, in Pnin).
......................................................................................................................
*
(wiki) "Shadowgraph is a type of flow
visualisation...The plume of hot air rising from a fire, for example, can be
seen by way of its shadow cast upon a nearby surface by the uniform sunlight
[ ]... it was Robert Hooke who first scientifically demonstrated the
sunlight shadowgraph and Jean-Paul Marat who first used it to study
fire "
** - "He struggled to keep back his tears, while AAA blew his fat
red nose, when shown the peasant-bare footprint of Tolstoy preserved in the clay
of a motor court in Utah where he had written the tale of Murat, the Navajo
chieftain, a French general's bastard, shot by Cora Day in his swimming pool.
What a soprano Cora had been!" (Cf. B.Boyd's Annotation to
*** On the "Annotated Lolita,",p.; 344, Alfred Appel also indicated
Pale Fire's lines 893-894: "Sit like a king there, and like Marat
bleed" Appel (in 1970) equally indicates the
links of Tolstoy's Hadji Murad,
and of Napoleon's brother in law General Murat, to Marat.
# Aristotle 418b2–419b27, book II, ch. 7:
Sight, How color is Seen
"...What
is without colour is the transparent and the invisible, or what is barely seen,
being dark. The transparent is precisely of this nature when it is not in act,
but in potency... Not all visible things, however, are visible in light...There
are certain things which are, indeed, not seen in light, but which produce a
sensation in darkness, such as those which burn or are luminous...Such are the
fungi of certain trees, horn, fish-heads, scales, and eyes. But the colour
proper to each of these is not perceived...But fire is seen in both darkness and
light: necessarily, for the transparent is made light by it. § 436
Thomas Aquinas: In Aristotelis De
Anima Commentarium: English
dhspriory.org/thomas/DeAnima.htm
'. . . The
essence of color, in fact, consists of being the agent that sets the transparent
into motion in actuality and the entelecia of the
transparent is, in turn, light . . .'
light is the entelecia of the
transparent and it is what makes it possible, in the last instance (final
cause). for things to be seen.
www.bu.edu/wcp/Papers/Anci/AnciDono.htm