For years and years I puzzled over Van's plans to stand "a metaphor
on its head," although several fragmentary items were examined
separately.
"It was Ada’s castle of cards. It was the standing of a
metaphor on its head not for the sake of the trick’s difficulty, but in order to
perceive an ascending waterfall or a sunrise in reverse: a triumph, in a sense,
over the ardis of time." (ADA or Ardor)
Shame on me! The solution
is quite simiple. The author employs the woird "metaphor"
...metaphorically! My silly puzzlement resulted from a too
literal reading. So, now, what's the intended final thought or image? We
know that when the subject perceives "an ascending waterfall or a sunrise in
reverse" he is inhabiting a different perspective from his cotidian one, but
that's not enough. As soon as we remember that the sentence is "metaphorical,"
we mustn't just stop there. Metaphors arise from comparisons
and "intercambiation" (exchange, swapping) of two distinct elements.
What are they here? .
There's gravity, allied to an "organical performance"(a misleading
factor that invites the literal reading), as testified by the rest of the
quoted sentence: "...Thus the rapture young Mascodagama
derived from overcoming gravity was akin to that of artistic revelation in the
sense utterly and naturally unknown to the innocents of critical appraisal...Van
on the stage was performing organically what his figures of speech were to
perform later in life — acrobatic wonders that had never been expected from
them and which frightened children." Yes, gravity, because
"Van gripped with splayed hands the brow of
gravity."* in defiance of physical death that may be connected, not
to figures of speech now, but to the ardis of time: death as
a "total surrender to gravity"**
Perhaps another element, besides gratvity, may be added (never
space!). After all, as Van confesses: "
I delight sensually
in Time, in its stuff and spread, in the fall of its folds, in the very
impalpability of its grayish gauze, in the coolness of its continuum. I wish to
do something about it; to indulge in a simulacrum of possession. I am aware that
all who have tried to reach the charmed castle have got lost in obscurity or
have bogged down in Space. I am also aware that Time is a fluid medium for the
culture of metaphors." (nb: cf. Ignoring Van's personal distate
of Einstein's General relativity theory, I'm
now considering
"gravity as a geometric property of space and time, or spacetime"). However, there's still something
missing in the present metaphorical mix. As S.E.Sweeney notes, for Nabokov
"locomotion is a metaphor for human thought" and we may expect plenty of
references related to moving bodies and metaphors. Will there be one that
fits into one of the lacunae in our puzzle?
When Nabokov analyses Joyce's allegories, symbols and style (style is what
matters in this case, when its resources bring about shifts
of perspective.), we get closer to a solution when Nabokov writes in
his lecture about "Ulysses": "Each chapter
is written in a different style, or rather with a different style
predominating. There is no special reason why this should be - why one
chapter should be told straight, another through a stream-of-consciousness
gurgle, a third through the prism of a parody. There is no special reason but it
may be argued that this constant shift of the viewpoint conveys a more
varied knowledge, fresh vivid glimpses from this or that side. If you have
ever tried to stand and bend your head so as to look back between your knees,
with your face turned upside down, you will see the world in a totally different
light. Try it on the beach: it is very funny to see people walking when
you look at them upside down.They seem to be, with each step, disengaging their
feet from the glue of gravitation, without losing their dignity. Well, this
trick of changing the vista, of changing the prism and the viewpoint, can be
compared to Joyce's new literary technique, to the kind of new twist through
which you see a greener grass, a fresher world
(...)". Young Van's legs hoisted like "Tarantine sails"
is a confirmation for this link (item already discussed in the List and in
B.B's Annotations to ADA).
Some movements described in VN's novels are quite "harmless," as
in the image of deambulatory ear-soles (Pnin, p.22) "Then Timofey's torso was bared, and to it Belochkin
pressed the icy nudity of his ear and the sandpapery side of his head. Like the
flat sole of some monopode, the ear ambulated all over Timofey's back and chest,
gluing itself to this or that patch of skin and stomping on to the next." Others gain in complexity by the vistas that are opened
by a parenthetical image, such as "punchinello" who emphasizes
the mobile tongue in speech): "The organs concerned in the production of English speech sounds are the
larynx, the velum, the lips, the tongue [that punchinello in the troupe), and,
last but not least, the lower jaw.".
Kinbote's wanderings are rendered in different
ways in PF. Using binoculars to chase Shade's movements
inside his house, he follows "the contours of his (Shade's) inspiration"(1)
while the length of his walks towards his neighbor's house and to Wordsmith
College expresses the "dull pain of distance" by "a series
of foreshortened sentences" (2). When he examines book
shelves, spreading "along a flight of stairs" and getting
progressively more disorganized, he finds that they have "burst an appendix
in the attic"(3). In all, Kinbote's imaging powers resemble the activities of the
unconscious and of what Freud describes for the "dream work."#
It would be interesting to compare aspects of V's style ["a
whistle blew, a rush of warm white smoke raced its shadow across the brown snow
on the platform"] to his brother's, to Shade's and
to Vadim's (LATH), when the latter makes his movements
coincide with his writings: "I got up a minute
ago to recurtain the moon that peeped between the folds of two
paragraphs," since his novels provide more than a
rough material for his memoirs "None of those
books exceeded ninety thousand words but my method of choosing and blending them
could hardly be called a time saving expedient." John
Shade and V.(RLSK) both suffer the caprices of birdlike words: "For there are those mysterious moments when/
Too weary to delete, I drop my pen;/ I ambulate — and by some mute command/ The
right word flutes and perches on my hand." PF "I felt immensely
sorry for him and longed to say something real, something with wings and a
heart, but the birds I wanted settled on my shoulders and head only later when I
was alone and not in need of words." RLSK - aso...
I always find it hard to reach a definite conclusion
concerning motion-thought and VN's tropes. I suffer from occasional "eclipses"
... "The day was darkening; a beaming vestige of sunlight lingered in a
western strip of the overcast sky: we have all seen the person who after gaily
greeting a friend crosses the street with that smile still fresh on his face —
to be eclipsed by the stare of the stranger who might have missed the cause and
mistaken the effect for the bright leer of madness. Having worked out that
metaphor, Van and Ada decided it was really time to go
home.
...........................................................................
*
Later, there's a return to the theme of hands (and another sort of
"maniambulation") related to Ada's cards: "..‘I
remember the cards,’ she said, ‘and the light and the noise of the rain, and
your blue cashmere pullover — but nothing else, nothing odd or improper, that
came later. Besides, only in French love stories les messieurs hument
young ladies.’ / ‘Well, I did while you went on with your delicate work. Tactile
magic. Infinite patience. Fingertips stalking gravity. ...You see I was hoping
that when your castle toppled you would make a Russian splash gesture of
surrender and sit down on my hand.’ / ‘It was not a castle. It was a Pompeian
Villa with mosaics and paintings inside, because I used only court cards from
Grandpa’s old gambling packs. Did I sit down on your hot hard hand?’.."
And, as metonymy enables us to travel, we return also do ADA's first chapter, in
the attic scene [.‘Good for you, Pompeianella (whom you saw
scattering her flowers in one of Uncle Dan’s picture books, but whom I admired
last summer in a Naples museum). Now don’t you think we should resume our shorts
and shirts and go down...]
** "In an amateur parody, at Van’s birthday party
fifteen years ago, his father had made himself up as Boris Godunov and shed
strange, frightening, jet-black tears before rolling down the steps of a
burlesque throne in death’s total surrender to gravity." ( reminiscent of
Jean Cocteau's epigram: "La vie est une chute horizontale")
Or,
going back to ADA, we find "levitation" and an idea/feeling transposed to
gesture "fourteen-year- old Van treated us to the
greatest performance we have ever seen a brachiambulant give.Not the faintest
flush showed on his face or neck! Now and then, when he detached his organs of
locomotion from the lenient ground,(...) one wondered if this dreamy indolence
of levitation was not a result of the earth's canceling its pull in a fit of
absentminded benevolence.. Incidentally, one curious consequence of certain
muscular changes and osteal reclick' caused by the special training with
which Wing had racked him was Van's inability in later years to shrug his
shoulders."
(1)"I had learned exactly when and where to find the
best points from which to follow the contours of his inspiration. My binoculars
would seek him out and focus upon him from afar in his various places of labor:
at night, in the violet glow of his upstairs study."
(2) -"I wish to convey, in making this reference to
Wordsmith briefer than the notes on the Goldsworth and Shade houses, the fact
that the college was considerably farther from them than they were from one
another. It is probably the first time that the dull pain of distance is
rendered through an effect of style and that a topographical idea finds its
verbal expression in a series of foreshortened sentences"
(3)"family books which were also all over the house —
four sets of different Children’s Encyclopedias, and a stolid grown-up one that
ascended all the way from shelf to shelf along a flight of stairs to burst an
appendix in the attic. "
# - Wikipedia:...."It has been argued that the two poles of
similarity and contiguity are fundamental ones along which the human brain is
structured; in the study of human language... the two poles have been called
metaphor and metonymy, while in the study of the unconscious they have been
called condensation and displacement... The couple metaphor-metonymy had a
prominent role in the renewal of the field of rhetoric in the 1960s.[ ] In
Freud's work (1900), condensation and displacement (from German
Verdichtung and Verschiebung) are two closely linked concepts.
In 1957, Jacques Lacan, inspired by an article by linguist Roman Jakobson,
argued that the unconscious has the same structure of a language, and that
condensation and displacement are equivalent to the poetic functions of metaphor
and metonymy."
[References: Roman Jakobson and Halle, Morris (1956) Two Aspects
of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances in Fundamentals of Language.
The Hague & Paris: Mouton, sectionThe Metaphoric and Metonymic
Poles; Grigg, Russell () Lacan, language, and philosophy, chapter 11 Lacan
and Jakobson - Metaphor and Metonymy pp.151-2, 160; Lacan [1957] The Agency
of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason Since
Freud.]