Jansy: "I suppose
that Laurece Hochard.is responding to your description of Joe Wright's "Anna
Karenina,"...
Laurence Hochard:No, I simply wanted to
highlight VN's "writing strategy": How he makes the uncomfortable but delighted
reader share Van's and Ada's coarse (however sophisticated it may be) sensual
avidity, regardless of its consequences. Once the reader has realized how far
his complicity has gone (often after a second reading), he can hardly adopt a
moralistic stance (if he has some intellectual honesty); this Nabokovian way of
involving the reader in his characters' actions -through seemingly absent,
actually well-hidden in full view! authorial comment- also enables him as an
author to avoid the moralistic stance he loathes. Also, all these outrageous
double-entendres in Lucette's speech, in addition to being funny, reveal her
helpless hysteria, due to her early exposure to Van's and Ada's
sensuality.
Jansy Mello: I see your point, sorry
for having strayed so far from the theme related to VN's "writing
strategy". It's present in Ada, as you point out, and in
Lolita as well, when the reader falls prey to a kind of
cumplicity that reveals every reader's conflictual traits. Lucette,
poor girl, had silly Mlle Ida as a governess, was in part neglected by her
mother and fondled by her father's pink paws...We learn very little about her
childhood and adolescence (school, studies, tastes), except for her passion for
her cousin and her pains.
.................................................................................................................
While I was going through "oak" stories in ADA (scenery
of one of the Leitmotifs in the novel, according to Darkbloom), I was
again reminded of a possible link to Goethe's Mignon (in a way, as
neglected as Lucette has been), born from an incestuous relation between
cousins, if I'm not mistaken. Acrobacies, Italy, Hamlet, hopeless
love... all this is part of her story. (but I think she wasn't Italian, despite
her song about "the land where the limes are in bloom")
ADA: "Overhead the arms of a linden
stretched toward those of an oak, like a green-spangled beauty flying to meet
her strong father hanging by his feet from the trapeze. ...Something rather
acrobatic about those branches up there, no?’ he said, pointing./‘Yes,’ she
answered. ‘I discovered it long ago. The teil is the flying Italian lady, and
the old oak aches, the old lover aches, but still catches her every
time."
I read that "Bildungsroman"
(Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre ) a long long time ago.
What carries me over to ADA is chiefly Mignon's nostalgia (it's only
her songs that I can remember, probaboly because they were set
to music by Schubert, perhaps also Schumann), Van and Ada's regrets towards
Lucette and some of the Romantic interludes in VN's novel... (I also
discovered, again, Goethe's poem about the Gingko biloba, an important plant
that arises in ADA and, in PF, one of the poems written by Shade
( I don't think Ada translated it, but she was dedicated to the poet
anyway ) .
In
Bk. VIII Mignon, who has secretly loved Wilhelm, dies, and it is discovered that
she is the daughter, by an act of incest, of the harper, who kills himself.
The
novel contains eight of Goethe's finest songs, ‘Kennst du das Land’, ‘Nur wer
die Sehnsucht kennt’, ‘Heiß mich nicht reden, heiß mich schweigen’, and ‘So laßt
mich scheinen, bis ich werde’ (sung by Mignon), ‘Wer nie sein Brot mit Tränen
aß’, ‘Wer sich der Einsamkeit ergibt’, ‘An die Türen will ich schlei-chen’ (sung
by the harper), and ‘Singet nicht in Trauertönen’ (sung by Philine). Also
included are the ballad ‘Der Sänger’
and the satirical poem ‘Ich armer Teufel, Herr Baron’.Read more: http://www.answers.com/topic/wilhelm-meisters-lehrjahre#ixzz2SFPNJYVk
Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre