And I’ll turn down eternity unless
The melancholy and the tenderness
Of mortal life; the passion and the pain;
………
... this good ink, this rhyme,
This index card, this slender rubber band
Which always forms, when dropped, an ampersand,
Are found in Heaven by the newly dead
Stored in its strongholds through the years.
(V. Nabokov)

When I try to explore the images suggested by words in V.Nabokov’s texts I’m often led away from the rhythm of a sentence, away from sound and meaning while groping towards visual puns and, equally as often, towards a new “literalness” that escapes their strictly verbal dimension and sets its value over the world of “semblance” over “essence”. Sometimes malapropisms and “mondegreens” too are in order when they disgorge a different set of figures and implications.

The signifier “moon” I learned to associate to Shakespeare/Nabokov’s “pale fire” relates to the concept of a satellite hovering around our planet and it encompasses the new moon (when it is invisible as seen from the Earth), the sighting of it during its waxing or waning phase and even its pull affecting all kinds of physical elements (including our own bodies). However, when we accept a “moondrop title,” together with the sense of  “thievery” that actually results from the habit of using analogies and references, we need to consider it as a “full moon” to be able to dwell in the present of Shade’s poetical insight.

(…and now I wonder if we also need to envisage, as A. Sklyarenko likes to repeat, a “full Botkin” instead of his waning and waxing manifestations during one of these very hypothetical phases?)

After dropping a rubber band, as does John Shade, without finding a (rhyming) ampersand or a line that shapes a number “eight,” or the sign for “infinity,” I had to remind myself of the author’s concision and of the importance he attributes to well-observed details. To be able to follow V. Nabokov’s intentions we often need to dwell on impossibles like a Penrose tribar or on slanted perspectives that suggest non-existing wholes.

(…now, & if Kinbote-Gradus-Shade are integrated only by applying a slanted Escher-like perspective that forces his figures to incessantly glide on but annulling progression or regress?)

What happens when the suggested image of the ampersand is a verbal/image trap? When, instead of eternity and instead of mathematical infinity, we delve into infinite metonymy? By exploring about the origin of the word “ampersand” I learned that it indicates what once was the 27th part of the alphabet ( Cf. http://blog.dictionary.com/ampersand/ ) and that its shape & “predates the word ampersand by more than 1,500 years”? “In the first century, Roman scribes wrote in cursive, so when they wrote the Latin word et which means “and” they linked the e and t. Over time the combined letters came to signify the word “and” in English as well.” “The word “ampersand” came many years later when “&” was actually part of the English alphabet. In the early 1800s, school children reciting their ABCs concluded the alphabet with the &. It would have been confusing to say “X, Y, Z, and.” Rather, the students said, “and per se and.” “Per se” means “by itself,” so the students were essentially saying, “X, Y, Z, and by itself and.” Over time, “and per se and” was slurred together into the word we use today - ampersand.” Fun!

The only gripping line, by its static simplicity, found in David Forster Wallace’s Brief Interviews With Hideous Men ( obtained during my initiatory reading, after Eggers, Slater and Franzen, while aiming at “contemporary American literature”) is one that I’m sure V.N would never ever have constructed. I look forward to encountering more examples of that in present day fiction (Forster informs You that his father and mother sun: “Both your parents sun” – Forever Overhead, p.6, Back Bay Books,2007 ). What a triptych.