Two recent youtube videos stimulated me to use them
as illustrations for my "birthday hommage" to Vladimir Nabokov.
The first one was a particular interpretation of "Swan Lake."
After I sent the link to our ED, SES, she sent me the
second link**. My original idea had been to write about
"Mademoiselle" and the dying swan in that story. Or to explore Nabokov's
interest in bodily language and expression, as he demonstrates it
by Mascodagama's ambition to transform movement into language. (upside
down metaphors and "performing words"). However, a swan song is not an
adequate theme to develop for a birthday celebration. The second idea
seemed to be more easily presented, but it proved to be wrong because a sample
of his sentences about his character's movements in space awoke in me
***, unexpectedly, an intense discomfort which I associated to a
feeling of "the uncanny" #, similar to what audiences and children exmperienced
after Mascodagama flipped over to stand on his real feet.
Fortunately, after a lot of hesitancy, I discovered something that might
be worth sharing with the VN-L.
When people speak about "tongues of fire" they are making an analogy
between two distinct events, it's not a "personalization." When Nabokov
writes about an obsequious flamelet, it is ( "excuse
me, said a polite flamelet holding open the door he was vainly trying to
close"). However, I soon realized that Nabokov, in contrast to what
we often find in Disney movies and cartoons, doesn't attribute
human feelings to living nature, only to inanimate objects. It occurred to me
that his work as a poet-scientist might have impeded him to treat "real life" as
an object that could be exploited by
a puppeteer's control as the one he exerted over his fictional
characters ( his "galley slaves"). I don't think that this facet of Nabokov's,
in his respect and awe towards life, has been sufficiently
exposed. Now I was able to understand what he meant when he chose
to "serve a triumphant life sentence between the covers
of a book." (LS ix-x).
While musing about the day of Vladimir Nabokov's birth I can only wish that
the cycle of his life has been as triumphantly experienced as the one he
condemned his characters to live, although closer to heaven, to
some unlabeled angels and tagged butterflies, than to the destiny he chose
for most of his fictional creatures, caged by the covers of a book in
lieu of living on, flying on, "in the
reflected sky." that arises when a reader opens his novel and,
finally, encounters the Author.
.................................................................................................................................
** - "And here's a link in return, mentioned in a recent New Yorker article
on avant-garde puppetry. It's devastastingly sad but very Nabokovian, I
think, in one sense: -
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SphHaiW7fzg
*** Cf. "Backwards, Upwards, Contrariwise, Downside Up:- Thinking in
Different Directions in Nabokov"
Susan Elizabeth Sweeney (read at Brian
Boyd's Nabokov Upside Down conference, 2012)