PS (partially related to "Pale Fire's multiple
entries related to "caves."...and the special: ."..we undo
the work of the ages, the history of the gradual elaboration of poetical
description and construction, from the treeman to Browning, from the caveman to
Keats. What if we awake one day, all of us, and find ourselves utterly unable to
read?")
Jansy Mello:
Refering to Lolita's chapter 25, about
"Dolores Disparue," Alfred Appel writes (note
253/2):
" In the first French edition of Proust's great
novel [ "À la Recherche du Temps Perdu"], Albertine disparue is the
next-to-last volume. The definitive Pléiade edition (1954) has restored Proust's
own title for it, La Fugitive... " He
also indicates (note 254/3)that the "auctioneered Viennese bric-à-brac¨ indicates
"Freudian trappings, secondhand symbols." He refers us to his notes 32/2 and 16/4.
In (16/4)
Alfred Appel mentions, in relation to HH's "Proustian
theme." the letters of John Keats to B.Bailey.
He adds
"In Pale Fire, Kinbote measures the progress of
poetry "from the caveman to Keats" and HH's
Proustian theme is, no doubt, on the nature of time and memory.
AA's note covers various references to
Proust in VN's novels (besides Lolita and PF- from which he quotes Shade's lines
on eternity in "talks/With Socrates and
Proust...", RLSK and ADA).
A peripheric reading led me to special quotes
from Proust ("Sobretudo de Proust, História de uma obsessão
literária" by Lorenza Foschini, 2010) and these enabled me to question
if HH's lines, about "auctioneered Viennese bric-à-brac," means means
exclusively "secondhand symbols" as suggested by AA, and, to wonder if HH's
"Proustian theme" is, indeed, "on the nature of time
and memory."
In my opinion, HH and John Shade might have been
indicating their preoccupations with the "hereafter," re-incarnation in
animals and objects and the fate of personal memory.
The particular quotes selected by
L.Foschini from the Recherche explains the narrator's
opinion about how reasonable is "the Celtic belief about the soul of
the dead being captured by an inferior being, an animal, a vegetable, an
inanimate object... and that, one day one may happen to pass by a tree,
or possess the object that is their prison. Now the souls tremble and call
us and, as soon as we have recognized them, the enchantment is broken. Having
been set free by us, they will have vanquished death and start to live among us,
again." (the next lines describe the famous epiphany related to a
madeleine¨
(NB:Alfred Appel explains HH's reference to the "Madeleine"
without linking it to Proust's famous "madeleine" shell-shaped cakes and
"involuntary memory". The auctioned and sold objects pertaining, in fiction, to
Aut Léonie - which inspired Proust's lines about "re-incarnation" - are
retaken by the L.Foschini when she works over the destinies of
Proust's own furniture, manuscripts and overcoat, before they were saved and
collected by Jacques Guérin).
« Je trouve très raisonnable la croyance celtique
que les âmes de ceux que nous avons perdus sont captives dans quelque être
inférieur, dans une bête, un végétal, une chose inanimée, perdues en effet pour
nous jusqu’au jour, qui pour beaucoup ne vient jamais, où nous nous trouvons
passer près de l’arbre, entrer en possession de l’objet qui est leur prison.
Alors elles tressaillent, nous appellent, et sitôt que nous les avons reconnues,
l’enchantement est brisé. Délivrées par nous, elles ont vaincu la mort et
reviennent vivre avec nous.//Il en est ainsi de notre passé. C’est peine perdue
que nous cherchions à l’évoquer, tous les efforts de notre intelligence sont
inutiles. […] un jour d’hiver, comme je rentrais à la maison, ma mère, voyant
que j’avais froid, me proposa de me faire prendre, contre mon habitude, un peu
de thé. Je refusai d’abord et, je ne sais pourquoi, me ravisai. Elle envoya
chercher un de ces gâteaux courts et dodus appelés Petites Madeleines qui
semblent avoir été moulés dans la valve rainurée d’une coquille de
Saint-Jacques. Et bientôt, machinalement, accablé par la morne journée et la
perspective d’un triste lendemain, je portai à mes lèvres une cuillerée de thé
où j’avais laissé s’amollir un morceau de madeleine […]. » Du Côté de
chez Swann
After the narrator donated some of the
furniture he'd inherited from his aunt Léonie to the owner of a brothel, he
began to feel that he'd violated the vertues that surrounded the aunt's
room in Combray. Her furniture seemed, then, to live on like the apparently
inanimate objects of a Persian story, begging for their liberation. At this
moment, when he mentions the re-encarnation of the
soul , the idea of "being emprisoned in objects" was
already entertained. However, the illusion of a rebirth was
retained. In contrast, in the later "Albertine Disparue," as pointed
out by Mariolina Bongiovanni Bertini**, "the same belief will arise with an
inverted signal, subdued by the context that eliminates any hope in
a ressurrection, bringing out the terror and the anxiety that
is associated to a definite shape of survival that will be excluded
from redemption."
"Mais — et la suite le montrera davantage,
comme bien des épisodes ont pu déjà l’indiquer — de ce que l’intelligence n’est
pas l’instrument le plus subtil, le plus puissant, le plus approprié pour saisir
le vrai, ce n’est qu’une raison de plus pour commencer par l’intelligence et non
par un intuitivisme de l’inconscient, par une foi aux pressentiments toute
faite. C’est la vie qui peu à peu, cas par cas, nous permet de remarquer que ce
qui est le plus important pour notre cœur, ou pour notre esprit, ne nous est pas
appris par le raisonnement mais par des puissances autres. Et alors, c’est
l’intelligence elle-même qui, se rendant compte de leur supériorité, abdique par
raisonnement devant elles et accepte de devenir leur collaboratrice et leur
servante."
Proust's own furniture, manuscripts, overcoat suffered
a similar destiny as aunt Léonie's, begging deliverance.. How things
are solved will be expressed elsewhere, when the narrator develops the idea that
it's living, as an experience, that teaches about the superiority of "other
powers" when intelligence begins to accept her role as a collaborator or
servant.
Compare to quotes from
PALE FIRE:
Keeping the ephemeral in
suspension between the first lines and the conclusion of his ideas, from lines
520 to 535, John Shade passes from "foul piles of
crumpled names, phone numbers and foxed files" to a chance reincarnation
as flowerlet or fat fly (he'll later return to defenseless
mites, toads and a bear by a burning pine * ). He intends to
refuse this new state if it makes him forget... :"And I’ll
turn down eternity unless/ The melancholy and the tenderness/ Of mortal life;
the passion and the pain;/..../this good ink, this rhyme,/this inex
card.../ Are found in Heaven by the newlydead/ Stored in its strongholds
through the years...The IPH, however, "assumed it
might be wise/ Not to expect too much of
paradise:."(540)
LOLITA:
Humbert makes a direct reference to
Proust ["A paper of mine entitled "The Proustian theme in a
letter from Keats to Benjamin Bailey..."] and there's another
paragraph, in Ch. 25, where he suggests Proust's "Albertine Disparue":
"This book is about Lolita; and now that I have reached the
part which (had I not been forestalled by another internal combustion martyr)
might be called "Dolorès Disparue," there would be little sense in analyzing the
three empty years that followed.... I would bind myself, dentures fractured or
hopelessly mislaid, in horrible chambres garnies ...that generally ended with
Charlotte or Valeria weeping in my bleeding arms ...in a dream disorder of
auctioneered Viennese bric-à-brac...One day I removed from the car and destroyed
an accumulation of teen-magazines...Et moi qui t'offrais mon génie... Other
things of hers were harder to relinquish. Up to the end of 1949, I cherished and
adored, and stained with my kisses and merman tears, a pair of old sneakers, a
boy's shirt she had worn, some ancient blue jeans ..., a crumpled school cap,
suchlike wanton treasures. Then, when I understood my mind was cracking, I
collected those sundry belongings, added to them what had been stored in
Beardsley — a box of books, her bicycle, old coats, galoshes — and on her
fifteenth birthday mailed everything as an anonymous gift to a home for orphaned
girls on a windy lake, on the Canadian border." .
...........................................................................................................................
* - 559-567 " How to keep sane in
spiral types of space./ Precautions to be taken in
the case/ Of freak
reincarnation: what to do/On suddenly discovering that you/Are now a young and vulnerable
toad/ Plump in the
middle of a busy road,/Or a bear cub beneath a burning pine,/ Or a book mite in a revived
divine."
Although the Institute refuses paradise, we learned in lines 550-556) how
it borrows "peripheral debris/ From
mystic visions; and it offered tips/.../
How not to panic when you’re made a ghost:/.../
Meet solid bodies and glissade right through,/Or let a person
circulate through you." (this theme shall be picked up again in
TT)
**- in "Sobretudo de
Proust.." by Lorenza Faschini (extracted from p.46 and 67-68).
I found the words in French
using the internet (I read Italian Faschini, in Portuguese...) and I may
have quoted incorrect words and references because I haven't checked them
against Proust's originals (a must in an academic article).