PS to "
Keats and fictional Shade were working on the assurance of spiritual
survival over the material world (the ashen fluff) and they were attunded
to the mysteries of "representation." ( like HH's confidence (Lolita)
in cave-painted aurochs and
angels?)."
Jansy Mello: So many different quotes come to my
mind that it's hard to track them down since I'm not writing a paper, but simply
sharing several conjectures with the VN-L. Here
are HH's closing lines in
"Lolita":
"I am
thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic
sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may
share, my Lolita."
HH acknowledges art as a refuge that's
dependent on "durable pigments" and "prophetic sonnets" ("Lolita") or, as
in Pushkin or in Keats, it relies on the physical survival of durable
pigments, nightingales and singing poets.
Survival, then, is not simply some
undefined "spiritual continuity." Althougu art transcends the
individual, it still relies on what seems to be "the survival of the
species" and there'll be nothing left when Humanity and animal life disappear
from the Earth. Art needs interlocution?
Cf.VN's "In Paradise" (1927) when "classificatory tags" are
meaningless in Paradise since there are no humans to pay heed to them. Cf
Vladimir Nabokov, Poems And Problems (New York: McGraw-Hill,
1970. Or as poem 12, p.46/47, in the French Gallimard
edition: "Poèmes et
Problèmes" (1970_.
In
Paradise: " My soul, beyound distant death/ your
image I see like this;/a provincial naturalist/an eccentric lost in paradise. //
There, in a glade, a wild angel slumbers/ [ ]then - but there are no
learned journals,/ nor any readers in paradise!/[ ] whom will you
tell, whom?"
Perhaps, on the more literal and inspired level,
this is why Hazel's ghost offers ineffective warnings and still
presses on to move the pen of poets like John Shade,
or their shadows, like Charles Kinbote? .
(In the meantime I found other
interesting sets of lines by Nabokov that contradict HH's despair and solve
the problem of animal classification. In
Speak, Memory (SO,pg 90), VN offers a
"a map of three country estates with a winding river
and a figure of the butterfly Parnassius mnemosyne for a cartographic
cherub..." Cherubs, Parnassus and
Mnemosyne!