Nabokov and the Real World by Alter Robert;

Author:Alter, Robert;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2020-12-23T00:00:00+00:00

This is beautiful, and it is also wittily complicated in a peculiarly satisfying way. The verbal portraitist is attentive to the fine modulations of color, texture, and odor in his subject, with the oddly adverbial “shining brownly” intimating the suggestively kinetic sense of hue that a gifted colorist can produce in a subtle composition. (Ada’s hair is actually black, but Nabokov is aware of the way colors assume different values when orchestrated together and depending on the source of the light.) Thus, through individual, magically detailed imagination, Ada at the game table, otherwise elusive as all objects of memory are elusive, is forced into the sensuous center. What she means to the imagination of her enraptured beholder infinitely transcends the arithmetic scores of the anagrammatic game they have been playing; and the reference to past, present, and future is strategically important, because Ada as a luminous image treasured in the memory of the artist becomes an eternal present, beyond the ravages of time, and serves as the fulfilled quest of the novel as a whole. This evocation of Ada is not only artful, but, like most of what happens in the novel, it is set against another artwork: the translucent lakescape of the parchment lampshade with its Japanese dragons. The most immediate function of this detail is to contribute to the scenic realization of the moment, but it is also, like so many other artworks that Nabokov introduces, an analogue and an inverted reflection of the world of the novel. The lampshade painting is executed, one assumes, with reticent Oriental brushstrokes, quite unlike the Boschean descriptive vividness of the novel’s technique. Instead of the serpents of Ada’s Eden, there are Japanese dragons; instead of Ardis’s rural streams, a lake.

A more elaborate instance of Ada’s being set off against serpentine art occurs earlier in the novel, when she is a still virginal, though already distinctly nubile, twelve-year-old:

His sentimental education now went fast. Next morning, he happened to catch sight of her washing her face and arms over an old-fashioned basin on a rococo stand, her hair knotted on the top of her head, her nightgown twisted around her waist like a clumsy corolla out of which issued her slim back, rib-shaded on the near side. A fat snake of porcelain curled around the basin, and as both the reptile and he stopped to watch Eve and the soft woggle of her bud-breasts in profile, a big mulberry-colored cake of soap slithered out of her hand, and her black-socked foot hooked the door shut with a bang which was more the echo of the soap’s crashing against the marble board than a sign of pudic displeasure. (p. 60)

As in the scene of Ada by the lamp, painterly attention is given to shading and color, with that wonderful mulberry-colored soap somehow bringing the whole scene into bright focus and, at the same time, introducing a delicate suggestion of gustatory delight (the berries) into the vision of soapy Ada in her ritual of ablution.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.