Creating convergences between the books friends select or send to me, and Nabokov, lead me this time to Paul Valèry's "Eupalinos, or the Architect," particularly when one considers that Valèry is too important a poet and critic to be ignored by Nabokov.

Although VN made it easy for the non-francophones to spot Hugo, Baudelaire, Rimbaud or Chateaubriand, I don't recall any particular mention to PV in the VN-L offering clues to his work or name - so here are various links that may serve to connect PV and "Pale Fire," a novel where style and literary structure usually refer to an architectural design*, words and bodily movements are closely associated by the rythm of a sentence**, and inquiries about the Afterlife include conversations with either Aristotle (Kinbote) or Socrates (Shade).***

Another connection is related to the importance given to details by Eupalinos and its further developments into Nabokov's "divine details."#

An amusing task for the week-end!

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* - and in which Daedalus comes in twice as a mythical architect and a designer of labirynths, and later on, as one of ADA's ancestors.

Cf.PF "I recall seeing him ...burning a whole stack ...But he saved those twelve cards...Perhaps, he vaguely expected to replace certain passages in the Fair Copy with some of the lovely rejections in his files, or, more probably, a sneaking fondness for this or that vignette, suppressed out of architectonic considerations..."

"True, in this canto he has unburdened himself pretty thoroughly, and his picture of Hazel is quite clear and complete; maybe a little too complete, architectonically, since the reader cannot help feeling that it has been expanded and elaborated to the detriment of certain other richer and rarer matters ousted by it. "

(962) I am not slave! Let be my critic slave.
I cannot be. And Shakespeare would not want thus.
Let drawing students copy the acanthus,
I work with Master on the architrave!

** - "We shall accompany Gradus in constant thought, as he makes his way from distant dim Zembla to green Appalachia, through the entire length of the poem, following the road of its rhythm, riding past in a rhyme, skidding around the corner of a run-on, breathing with the caesura, swinging down to the foot of the page from line to line as from branch to branch, hiding between two words (see note to line 596), reappearing on the horizon of a new canto, steadily marching nearer in iambic motion, crossing streets, moving up with his valise on the escalator of the pentameter, stepping off, boarding a new train of thought, entering the hall of a hotel, putting out the bedlight, while Shade blots out a word, and falling asleep as the poet lays down his pen for the night."

*** "So why join in the vulgar laughter? Why/Scorn a hereafter none can verify:/The Turk’s delight, the future lyres, the talks/ With Socrates and Proust in cypress walks..."

"One of the five cabins of which this motor court consists is occupied by the owner... He said wait a minute — and took from a bedside..." the Letters of Franklin Lane. "[ ] Here is a passage that curiously echoes Shade’s tone at the end of Canto Three...."And if I had passed into that other land, whom would I have sought? ...Aristotle! — Ah, there would be a man to talk with! What satisfaction to see him take, like reins from between his fingers, the long ribbon of man’s life and trace it through the mystifying maze of all the wonderful adventure.... The crooked made straight. The Daedalian plan simplified by a look from above — smeared out as it were by the splotch of some master thumb that made the whole involuted, boggling thing one beautiful straight line."

# - In the prefatory notes to a 1995 bilingual edition of Valèry's Eupalinos, Joaquim Guedes writes about a socratic "Inhabited Geometry" to develop the thesis that "Physis is the logos." For him, Valèry's rigorous and complex writings offer precise enigmas and illuminated labyrinths... that stimulate the reader to hunt for multiple develpments and meanings, beginning with the socratic answer in the opening lines of Eupalinos, related to the importance of details. Socrates cryptically says: "I understand and I cannot understand."

J. Guedes describes parts of the exchanges between Phedro and Socrates in Hades, where they discuss their present limitations as disembodied shadows and Socrates presents his architectural discursive method. Guedes believes (following R.Meyer) that the sentence often attributed to Mies Van der Rohe ( "God is in the detail"), might have been inspired by Eupalinos. Cp. V.Nabokov (Lectures on Literature): "Caress the details, the divine details."