JM: So many discrepant things pop up
once our attention is invited to dwell on Nabokovian references and particular
words.
My first reaction to Lake's reproduction of "The
Pilgrims of Emmaus" was a futuristic one: I'd recently finished reading
Alessandro Baricco's* "Emmaus," a novel that's distant in style and spirit
from those other works of his that I read before ("Silk", "Ocean Sea,"
"Without Blood"). In this novel, the theme about the Emmaus pilgrims and
"resurection" are elaborated through the experiences lived by a group
of students in a Catholic School. They roughly divide into "the
common bourgeois Catholics" and "the rich and decadent Atheists." This
experience helped me to shun the indications about uncertainties related to
Lake's painters (Veronese?Rembrandt?), to search for something else,
although still related to Nabokov (who was fascinated by King Charles II,
the Restoration, his father's Afterlife, Resurection and even,possibly,the
Portuguese Sebastianists belief in a second coming).
From the Wiki on Emmaus: "Some interpreters have
concluded that Mark's intended readers already knew the traditions of Jesus'
appearances, and that Mark brings the story to a close here to highlight the
resurrection and leave anticipation of the parousia (Second Coming)....Some have
argued that this announcement of the resurrection and Jesus going to Galilee is
the parousia (see also Preterism), but Raymond E. Brown argues that a parousia
confined only to Galilee is improbable.." I ( of course) searched for
"Preterism"..."a Christian eschatological view that interprets prophecies of the
Bible, especially Daniel and Revelation, as events which have already happened
in the first century A.D. Preterism holds that Ancient Israel finds its
continuation or fulfillment in the Christian church at the destruction of
Jerusalem in AD 70. The term preterism comes from the Latin praeter, which is
listed in Webster's 1913 dictionary as a prefix denoting that something is
"past" or "beyond," signifying that either all or a majority of Bible prophecy
was fulfilled by AD 70. Adherents of preterism are commonly known as
preterists."
When I returned to Pale Fire's lines about "preterists" I
was surprised at the secondary link between PF and Pnin.
John Shade: "I have a
thousand parents. Sadly they/ Dissolve in their own virtues and
recede,/ But certain words, chance words I hear or read,/ Such as "bad
heart" always to him refer,/And "cancer of the pancreas" to her./A preterist:
one who collects cold nests."
Pnin: "... One had to forget —
because one could not live with the thought that this graceful, fragile, tender
young woman with those eyes, that smile, those gardens and snows in the
background, had been brought in a cattle car to an extermination camp and killed
by an injection of phenol into the heart...And since the exact form of her death
had not been recorded, Mira kept dying a great number of deaths in one's mind,
and undergoing a great number of resurrections, only to die again and again, led
away by a trained nurse, inoculated with filth, tetanus bacilli, broken glass,
gassed in a sham shower-bath with prussic acid, burned alive in a pit on a
gasoline-soaked pile of beechwood.."
(hint: Shade's "a thousand parents" and
Mira who "kept dying a great number of deaths in one's mind and undergoing a
great number of resurrections.")
The second link was differently oriented. I noticed
that in Lake's studio there were reproductions of an ancient photograph
and an ancient painting, i.e., there were two different medias, in a
copy, lying side by side. This fact became meaningful to me
because I'd been recovering Walter Benjamin's essays related to the
"aura,"** particularly his writings about Baudelaire,Proust and "la mémoire
involontaire" *** (strangely connected to Kinbote's Biblical "in a glass, darkly"). For Benjamin, "to experience the
aura of a phenomenon means that it invites the eyes to be raised upwards...
it's the unrepeatable manifestation of distance." (there are many other
descriptions which I didn't translate)
Benjamin quotes Proust's commentary about the emptying of
sensations related to the repetition of the simple name, "Venice," in
connection to his discovery that the objects which arise by
an "involuntary memory" possess an "aura," whereas daguerreotypes and
photographic reproductions effect the "decadence of the aura" by
their reproducibility, imitation and, most of all, by the vacant
indifferent look that the spectator encounters (this oily blankness is
masterfully described by Baricco in his Emmaus
novel). #
......................................................................
* - Alessandro Baricco (born January 25, 1958 in Turin,
Piedmont) is a popular Italian writer, director and performer. His novels have
been translated into a wide number of languages. He currently lives in Rome with
his wife and two sons....After receiving degrees in philosophy (under Gianni
Vattimo) and piano, he published essays on music criticism: Il genio in fuga
(1988) onGioachino Rossini, and L'anima di Hegel e le mucche del Wisconsin
("Hegel's Soul and the Cows of Wisconsin", 1992) on the relation between music
and modernity. He subsequently worked as musical critic for La Repubblica and La
Stampa, and hosted talk shows on Rai Tre. Baricco debuted as a novelist with
Castelli di rabbia (translated as Lands of Glass) in 1991...In 1993 he
co-founded a creative writing school in Turin, naming it Scuola Holden after J.
D. Salinger's Holden Caulfield. The Scuola Holden hosts a variety of courses on
narrative techniques including screenwriting, journalism, videogames, novels and
short stories...In the following years his fame grew enormously throughout
Europe, with his works topping the Italian and French best-seller lists. Larger
recognition followed the adaptation of his theatrical monologue Novecento into
the movie The Legend of 1900, directed by Academy Award-winning director
Giuseppe Tornatore....He has also worked with the French band Air, releasing
"City Reading", a mix of the band's music with Baricco's reading of his novel
City. He has directed the film Lezione 21 on Beethoven's Fifth Symphony and its
critical reception. Novels: Castelli di rabbia, Rizzoli 1991, Tascabili Bompiani
1994; Lands of Glass, Penguin 1992. Awarded with Prix Médicis étranger — France
;Oceano Mare, Rizzoli 1993; Ocean Sea, ISBN 0375703950, 1993. Awarded with
'Palazzo al Bosco' — Italy ;Novecento. Un monologo, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli
Editore, Milan, 1994; Novecento: pianist, 1994.;Seta, Rizzoli 1996; Silk, ISBN
9780307277978, 1996. (See Silk (2007 film) for the film adaptation.);City
(original title), ISBN 9780375725487 (edition in English), Rizzoli
1999.;Constellations (Mozart, Rossini, Benjamin, Adorno) (original title), 1999.
Senza sangue, Rizzoli 2002; Without Blood ISBN 1400034787, 2002. (Also published
in revised form in The New Yorker)
Questa storia, Fandango 2005. Emmaus,
Feltrinelli 2009;Mr Gwyn, Feltrinelli 2011.(wikipedia)
** - related to shadowgraphs, lythophanies and
recollecting: Stan Kelly-Bootle's past VN-L posting (recently quoted) notes
that: "Yet am I the first to report the following suggestive support for DZ’s
“ombriole” derivation ? [...] from VN’s Russian translation of “Speak
Memory” [his mum is picking mushrooms, (II:3)] ... Clearly, VN’s “second
thoughts” transformed the mundane “mist all around her” into the magical дымчатого
ореола. It’s at least arguable that
“aureole” graced a favoured place in VN’s
lexis"
*** - "A modernidade e os Modernos," Ed.
Tempo Brasileiro, 1975,RJ from the German Das Argument n. 46,
Verlag,1967 and Schriften,
Suhrcamp,Verlag,1955
# - Fredson Bower's prologue to "Lectures on
Russian Literature" quotes John Simon (n.xi) "But Nabokov does demand, for
all his rejection of crude reality - 'those farcical and fraudulent characters
called Facts' - a powerful semblance of reality which, as he himself might have
put it, is not the same as a re/semblance. " And here we have a link bt.
semblance-re/semblance, le vrai/ le vrai-semblable to the evanescent
quality that's manifested in special episodes that set them outside
historical time and which may bring about, or most probably destroy,
by its fake repetition, an "aura." ( I wonder now about what VN saw in
the relation he established bt. Art and Mimetism, but I suppose the latter
doesn't refers to the process of simple
imitation)