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Vladimir Nabokov et la France

 | 
Yannicke Chupin
, 
Agnès Edel-Roy
, 
Monica Manolescu
, 
et al.

III. Langue française et modèles culturels français

Proust, Nabokov and “the language of rainbows”

Emily Eells

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  • 1 Nabokov plays on the homophony in Lolita when he transliterates the way one of the American charact (...)

1“Marcel saw sounds in color”: that is how Nabokov punctuated one of his quotations from À la recherche du temps perdu during the class he taught on Proust at Cornell after his appointment there in 1948 (Lectures on Literature, 235). He recognized that Proust’s narrator shared his own gift of chromesthesia, or what he called “audition colorée,” (Speak, Memory, 29) in which a sound heard is converted into a colored visual effect. This form of synesthesia is put into play in Rimbaud’s poem “Les Voyelles,” in which each vowel is associated with a particular color. Significantly, Nabokov paired the poet’s name with the word “rainbow” in an example of paronomasia which imitates how the English word “rainbow” would sound like a close homophone of “Rimbaud” if it were pronounced as a French word.1 Synesthesia and the rainbow are both key motifs in Nabokov’s writing, beginning with the passage of Speak, Memory he called “the confessions of a synesthete” (30). In Ada, Nabokov relates “audition colorée” to memory when he presents the medical case of a man born eyeless but with the ability to tell the color of pencils by the feel of the wood. The narrator in Ada is equally sensitive to the “elongated boxes of new, unsharpened, colored-chalk pencils” whose mere evocation triggers the memory to “speak in the language of rainbows” (368). Nabokov’s reading of Proust in the lecture he gave many times at Cornell offers insight into what he meant by “the language of rainbows.” It has subsequently been published under the title “The Walk by Swann’s Place,” and contains the following caveat:

The book that the narrator in Proust’s books is supposed to write is still a book-within-the-book and is not quite In Search of Lost Time— just as the narrator is not quite Proust. There is a focal shift here which produces a rainbow edge: this is the special Proustian crystal through which we read the book.
(
Lectures on Literature, 210)

2According to Nabokov, Proust’s narrator refracts the author’s words and in the process of that focal shift furnishes the colors which will delineate his prose. Proust’s “language of rainbows” is thus composed by refraction of both artistic sensitivity and subjective memory. This essay presupposes the deconstruction of established theoretical frameworks in order to adopt the “special Proustian crystal” as an interpretative paradigm. The focus here is on how the language of rainbows is reflected in Nabokov’s autobiographical Speak, Memory, which is, according to Robert Alter “as Proustian as anything Nabokov wrote,” (620) as well as in his novel Ada, characterized by J. E. Rivers as “perhaps the most steeped in Proust” (142).

I. Prismatic perception

3Literary creation involves a preliminary refraction of reality, through what Nabokov calls “the tremulous prism” of the artist’s mind (Speak, Memory, 134). His recollection of his father pinpoints how memories are refracted through the veil of the self:

My father was, indeed, a very active man, but as often happens with the children of famous fathers, I viewed his activities through a prism of my own, which split into many enchanting colors the rather austere light my teachers glimpsed.
(
Speak, Memory, 145)

  • 2 For the sake of simplicity, I am following Nabokov’s lead in calling Proust’s young narrator Marcel

4Subjective perception is doubled by the refraction of memory, as Nabokov explains in his lecture on Proust: “Proust is a prism. His, or its, sole object is to refract, and by refracting to recreate a world in retrospect” (Lectures on Literature, 208). Proust’s narrative is structured as a series of awakenings in different bedrooms which act as a spatial projection of Marcel’s2 sensitivity: they are, as he says, “rempli[es] de mon moi” (1987-89, I, 10). His hotel bedroom in Balbec is literally: “un prisme où se décomposaient les couleurs et la lumière du dehors” (1987-89, II, 64) such that a sound wave penetrating into the room can be perceived by Marcel as an indication of the weather and the atmosphere outside. When describing that same phenomenon on an early spring morning in Le Côté de Guermantes, the weather and temperature are again felt through sound:

Un matin, après quelques semaines de giboulées et de tempêtes, j’entendis dans ma cheminée—au lieu du vent informe, élastique et sombre qui me secouait de l’envie d’aller au bord de la mer—le roucoulement des pigeons qui nichaient dans la muraille: irisé, imprévu comme une première jacinthe déchirant doucement son cœur nourricier pour qu’en jaillît, mauve et satinée, sa fleur sonore, faisant entrer, comme une fenêtre ouverte, dans ma chambre encore fermée et noire, la tiédeur, l’éblouissement, la fatigue d’un premier beau jour.
(1987-89, II, 440-441)

5Here the sound enters the dark room bringing with it the warmth, brilliance and weariness of the first nice day of the season. The cooing of pigeons is related synesthetically: the budding hyacinth feels like satin before it become audible in the phrase “fleur sonore.”

6At the beginning of chapter 6 of Speak, Memory, Nabokov relives the Proustian experience of waking up in a prism of a bedroom, where the ray of light penetrating through the chink in the closed shutters is refracted into a kind of report on the weather outside:

On a summer morning, in the legendary Russia of my boyhood, my first glance upon awakening was for the chink between the white inner shutters. If it disclosed a watery pallor, one had better not open them at all, and so be spared the sight of a sullen day sitting for its picture in a puddle. How resentfully one would deduce, from a line of dull light, the leaden sky, the sodden sand, the gruel-like mess of broken brown blossoms under the lilacs—and that flat, fallow leaf (the first casualty of the season) pasted upon a wet garden bench!
But if the chink was a long glint of dewy brilliancy, then I made haste to have the window yield its treasure.
(
Speak, Memory, 94)

7For both Nabokov and Proust, the sensory experience is prismatic as the ray of white light entering their bedrooms is associated with sound, temperature, scent and affect. A similar prismatic process is at work in the way both writers experience language. In Speak, Memory, Nabokov describes his first literary production as a moment of creative iridescence:

Beyond the park, above steaming fields, a rainbow slipped into view; the fields ended in the notched dark border of a remote fir wood; part of the rainbow went across it, and that section of the forest edge shimmered most magically through the pale green and pink of the iridescent veil drawn before it. […] A moment later my first poem began.
(
Speak, Memory, 168)

8Nabokov inscribes the rainbow in his onomastics, both as the place name Raduga (derived from the Russian for rainbow), which we find on the first page of Ada, and as a character’s name in his novel Look at the Harlequins, as Iris comes from the Greek for rainbow. The word “rainbow” also functions as a kind of code word in the love affair between Van and Ada, when Ada refers to their four year separation as “our black rainbow” (Ada, 128) and again when she signs her telegram to Van:

arriving mont roux bellevue Sunday
dinnertime adoration sorrow rainbows.
(
Ada, 397)

9We hardly need to enter into the intimacy of their relationship to understand the affective force of that last word.

II. The many enchanting colors of letters and syllables

  • 3 Elsewhere he writes of the same condition: “I have this rather freakish gift of seeing letters in c (...)

10A similar prismatic process is at work in the way both writers respond to language by splitting the word or proper name into individual letters and syllables. In Speak, Memory Nabokov relates how, while playing with wooden letter blocks, he discovered he had “audition colorée” because their coloring was “wrong” in the sense that the letters were painted in colors which were not those he saw when pronouncing them.3 Nabokov’s particular interest in the science of color is evident in his explicit reference to Maerz and Paul’s Dictionary of Color, a series of 56 paired charts relating colors presented on a grid on the right-hand page to the names by which they are identified on the corresponding grid on the left-hand side. He is able to identify with the color he associates “v” as the “Rose Quartz” defined in that scientific work (Speak Memory, 29).

11Using the language of color he forged, in which the sound of each letter is perceived as a different hue, Nabokov coined his own word for rainbow: the unpronounceable acronym Kzspygv. It comprises the colors of a secondary rainbow which appears outside the primary rainbow, and reverses the normal order of the color spectrum putting the blues at the top and the reds at the bottom. In what Nabokov calls his “muddy rainbow,” the letter “k” is associated with violet or huckleberry hues; “z” with indigo or thundercloud blue, “s” with “a curious mixture of azure and mother of pearl,” “p” with the green of an unripe apple, “y” with bright golden yellow, soft “g” with orange, and finally, “v” as we have seen is associated with a pinkish red or rose quartz (Speak, Memory, 29).

12Nabokov recalls his discovery of the English word “childhood,” which he took pleasure in rolling around in his mouth, imitating that of the young Kafka who, according to and Guattari, would repeat a word he had just heard “dont le sens n’est que vaguement pressenti, pour le faire vibrer sur lui-même” (Deleuze et al., 38).

I keep repeating, in a kind of zestful, copious, and deeply gratifying incantation, the English word “childhood”, which sounds mysterious and new, and becomes stranger and stranger as it gets mixed up in my small, overstocked, hectic mind, with Robin Hood and Little Red Riding Hood, and the brown hoods of old hunch-backed fairies.
(
Speak, Memory, 22)

13Although the young child can distinguish between foreign languages, he has not yet learnt the different parts of speech and thus confuses the suffix “–hood” with the homophonous noun designating a head covering.

14Nabokov identified how Marcel first hears Gilberte’s name as fragmented syllables, when he was under the bower of flowering pink hawthorn. It is associated with the colors of the rainbow, as its very sound decomposes and “irradiates” the air in the following passage cited by Nabokov in his lecture:

Ainsi passa près de moi ce nom de Gilberte, donné comme un talisman qui me permettrait peut-être de retrouver un jour celle dont il venait de faire une personne et qui, l’instant d’avant, n’était qu’une image incertaine. Ainsi passa-t-il, proféré au-dessus des jasmins et des giroflées, aigre et frais comme les gouttes de l’arrosoir vert; imprégnant, irisant la zone d’air pur qu’il avait traversée–et qu’il isolait–du mystère de la vie de celle qu’il désignait pour les êtres heureux qui vivaient, qui voyageaient avec elle […].
(Proust, 1987-89, I, 140)

15Nabokov quoted a truncated version of C.K. Scott Moncrieff’s English translation of Swann’s Way published in 1922:

And so was wafted to my ears the name of Gilberte, bestowed on me like a talisman which might, perhaps, enable me some day to rediscover her whom its syllables had just endowed with a definite personality, whereas, a moment earlier, she had been only something vaguely seen. So it came to me, uttered across the heads of the stocks and jasmines, pungent and cool as the drops which fell from the green watering-pipe; impregnating and irradiating the zone of pure air through which it had passed, which it set apart and isolated from all other air, with the mystery of the life of her whom its syllables designated to the happy creatures that lived and walked and travelled in her company […].
(
Lectures on Literature, 234)

16The translation makes explicit the way the name splits into composite sounds by introducing—and repeating—the word “syllable” which does not figure in Proust’s version. The contrast of the different media produces refraction: the air of Gilberte’s world is set apart and isolated from the air of Marcel’s world, and he fears that there will always be a seemingly impenetrable barrier separating him from familiarity with her.

III. Proper names—“Hue or who?”

17Proust’s narrator explains that his youthful fascination was not with common nouns whose meanings are tightly circumscribed, but with proper names which issue a Baudelairean “invitation au voyage” to a world of imagination and dreams:

Les mots nous présentent des choses une petite image claire et usuelle comme celles que l’on suspend aux murs des écoles pour donner aux enfants l’exemple de ce qu’est un établi, un oiseau, une fourmilière, choses conçues comme pareilles à toutes celles de même sorte. Mais les noms présentent des personnes—et des villes qu’ils nous habituent à croire individuelles, uniques comme des personnes—une image confuse qui tire d’eux, de leur sonorité éclatante ou sombre, la couleur dont elle est peinte uniformément […].
(Proust, 1987-89, I, 380)

18The young narrator dreams of a train trip stopping at towns in Normandy and Brittany, whose names give rise to distinctive images in his mind’s eye. The place names are associated metonymically with the places’ distinguishing features (Coutance and its cathedral, Vitré and its timbered buildings) and by the color associated with the sonority of the name (the last syllable of “Bayeux” evokes old gold; the phonemes of the name of Lamballe are the same as in the word “blanc,” just as the last syllable of “Coutances” determines the color association of name and place, as it rhymes with “rance,” the French word for rancid, yellow butter).

19In his lecture on Proust, Nabokov focuses his attention on the way the narrator apprehends a particular person through the colors associated with their name: “When the name of Guermantes is mentioned for the first time, that romantically noble family emerges from the inner colors of the church” (Lectures on Literature, 227). In the opening pages of Du Côté de chez Swann, the young narrator is transported by the name Guermantes which, as Nabokov reminds his students, descends from Geneviève de Brabant, the heroine of the first magic lantern show Marcel watched in his bedroom in Combray. The name Brabant resonates in his ears with deep brass tones, or what he calls a “sonorité mordorée” (1987-89, I, 9). It belongs to the same chromatic field as the name of the Dutch painter whose palette is characterized by lustrous bronze tones in what Proust would have called la “phrase-type mordorée de Rembrandt:”

[Le duc et la duchesse de Guermantes étaient] toujours enveloppés du mystère des temps mérovingiens et baignant comme dans un coucher de soleil dans la lumière orangée qui émane de cette syllabe: “antes”.
(1987-89, I, 169)

20Just as the young Nabokov apprehended language through its parts (latching onto the syllable “hood”), so Marcel builds an image of the Duchesse de Guermantes based on the sound of the last syllable of her name. Nabokov quotes the passage relating the first time Marcel saw her:

[cette image] qui n’était pas de la même nature, n’était pas colorable à volonté comme celles qui se laissaient imbiber de la teinte orangée d’une syllabe, mais était si réelle que tout, jusqu’à ce petit bouton qui s’enflammait au coin du nez, certifiait son assujettissement aux lois de la vie […].
(1987-89, I, 173)

21He adds the parenthetical aside “Marcel saw sounds in color” to the translation:

an image which was not of the same nature, was not colorable at will, like those others that allowed themselves to be suffused by the orange tint of a sonorous syllable [Marcel saw sounds in color], but which was so real that everything, even to the fiery little pimple at the corner of her nose, gave an assurance of her subjection to the laws of life […].
(
Lectures on Literature, 235)

22The learning lesson for Marcel here is that the real person does not correspond to the image the proper name gives rise to in the mind’s eye: reality subdues the evocative power of the name. Nabokov is quoting from the English translation, which adds a note of synesthesia to Proust’s text by slipping in the adjective “sonorous” to further qualify the orange tint of the syllable. It is tempting to think that the tinted syllable at the end of the name Guermantes was ringing in Nabokov’s ears when he wrote in Ada a couple of decades later: “Remembrance, like Rembrandt, is dark but festive. Remembered ones dress up for the occasion and sit still. Memory is a photo-studio de luxe on an infinite Fifth Power Avenue” (Ada, 84). Be the Proustian resonance deliberate or not, these lines show Nabokov’s genius for turning word play and punning onomastics into a pithy observation.

23For Nabokov, like Proust, proper names were colored: he therefore chose to mask the identity of his girlfriend Valentina by calling her Tamara in Speak, Memory, explaining that both names are, to use his word, “concolorous” (177). In Ada, Van’s great-grandmother’s name means dark-blue in Russian, and he reveals that he is an esthete in the way he associates that color with his reading of Proust: “his favorite purple passage remained the one concerning the name “Guermantes,” with whose hue his adjacent ultramarine merged in the prism of his mind, pleasantly teasing Van’s artistic vanity” (14). Ada’s query in the margin of Van’s diary—“Hue or who?” (14)—punctuates the word play by underscoring the association of onomastics and chromatics. Only Nabokov with his chromatic consciousness linked to his capacity to pun could portray so eloquently the rainbow edge of Proust’s prose.

IV. Mauve, the color of time

24Nabokov identified pink as a leitmotif running through Proust’s novel, which blurs with the color mauve as he explains in his lecture: “there are all kinds of shadings within Proust’s flushed prism” (Lectures on Literature, 241). No more so than in the modulation of color in Proust’s depiction of asparagus:

les asperges, trempées d’outre-mer et de rose et dont l’épi, finement pignoché de mauve et d’azur, se dégrade insensiblement jusqu’au pied […] par des irisations qui ne sont pas de la terre.
(1987-89, I, 119)

  • 4 See Plate 42, colume 6H.
  • 5 See the reproduction of his drawing in Lectures on Literature, 243.

25Here the hues of the asparagus stalks melt into one another, forming a prismatic scale of colors (“des ébauches d’arc-en-ciel”) which transcend time zones as they are associated with both dawn (“ces couleurs naissantes d’aurore”) and dusk (“cette extinction de soirs bleus”). The visual is enhanced by the appeal to the senses, first of their taste and then of the distinctive smell they produce after they are digested, which Nabokov alludes to in Ada: “that special asparagus (bezukhanka) which does not produce Proust’s After-effect, as cookbooks say” (200). The mauve hue of the asparagus—like the mauve hyacinth heralding the first day of spring—is resonant with Proustian intonations as, to quote Nabokov, mauve is “the very color of time” (Lectures on Literature, 241). In Speak, Memory, he himself seems to dip into Proust’s color palette when he represents distance as “mauve remoteness” (29). Nabokov also uses mauve as a synonym to mean “reminder” when he has the narrator comment parenthetically in Ada: “mauve shades of Monsieur Proust” (50). The narrative of the love affair between Odette and Swann is bathed in shades of mauve, beginning with their coded term for love-making: “faire catleya”. There is little doubt about the sensuality of the cattleya orchid which gave its name to a color identified by Maerz and Paul.4 The flower’s color prompts Nabokov to point out that “rose-purple mauve, a pinkish lilac, a violet flush is linked in European literature with a certain sophistication of the artistic temperament” (Lectures on Literature, 241). Nabokov drew the “gorgeous mauve-coloured orchid Cattleya labiate” and noted that its genus name came from “a solemn British botanist” (Lectures on Literature, 241).5 Significantly, Penguin publishing publicized the novel’s Proustian intertext by using the Cattleya orchid as the cover illustration for the 1971 reedition of the book.

26The Proustian sensuality resonant in the word “mauve” is woven into the text of Ada, whose eponymous heroine uses chalk pencils for her botanical drawings before wetting her finger to moisten the color:

Ada on the balcony (photographed by our acrobatic voyeur from the roof edge) drawing one of her favorite flowers, a Ladore satyrion, silky-haired, fleshy, erect. […] “my flower opens only at dusk.” The one she was moistly mauving.
(
Ada, 316)

27The insistent use of the possessive pronoun “my flower” here leaves little doubt about the sexual ambiguity of Ada’s statement.

28Like the cattleya, Vinteuil’s violin sonata accompanies Odette and Swann’s lovemaking. Nabokov quotes Proust’s evocation of the piano accompaniment as “entrechoquée comme la mauve agitation des flots” (Proust, 1987-89, I, 205). For Swann, listening to the violin’s “petite phrase” produces a moment as colorful and elusive as a rainbow:

Elle était encore là comme une bulle irisée qui se soutient. Tel un arc-en-ciel, dont l’éclat faiblit, s’abaisse, puis se relève et avant de s’éteindre, s’exalte un moment […] elle ajouta d’autres cordes diaprées, toutes celles du prisme, et les fit chanter.
(1987-89, I, 346)

29The language of rainbows and its tonality translate the writer’s attempt to capture the present moment when it is intensified by a sensation from the past. That moment is like a bubble reflecting the colors of the rainbow, ready to burst after its short-lived moment of glory. The magic of the Guermantes’ name wears off as Marcel matures: when he is an adult, the name has become like a ball filled with air or gas that is so taut that it will burst at any moment, releasing the atmosphere and associations of the past (“l’air de Combray de cette année-là, de ce jour-là” [1988, 312]). The experience he describes is in fact an instance of involuntary memory in which the original orange tint of the name has lost its shine through familiarity, becoming gray and indistinct. Proust describes the way the syllables of the name have become dulled over time using the image of the spinning top decorated with colors of the rainbow, turning so fast in everyday life that it looks as if it were white:

Mais même en dehors des rares minutes comme celles-là, où brusquement nous sentons l’entité originale tressaillir et reprendre sa forme et sa ciselure au sein des syllabes mortes aujourd’hui, si dans le tourbillon vertigineux de la vie courante, où ils n’ont plus qu’un usage entièrement pratique, les noms ont perdu toute couleur comme une toupie prismatique qui tourne trop vite et qui semble grise, en revanche quand, dans la rêverie, nous réfléchissons, nous cherchons, pour revenir sur le passé, à ralentir, à suspendre le mouvement perpétuel où nous sommes entraînés, peu à peu nous revoyons apparaître, juxtaposées, mais entièrement distinctes les unes des autres, les teintes qu’au cours de notre existence nous présenta successivement un même nom.
(1987-89, II, 311-312)

30The spellbinding colors first associated with the name can only recover their original magic when the dizzying whirl of routine grinds to a halt.

V. La mémoire involontaire, or synesthesia at work

  • 6 Nabokov, “Walk by Swann’s,” in Lectures on Literature, 249.

31Nabokov’s conclusion is that for Proust “to recreate the past something other than the operation of memory must happen: there must be a combination of a present sensation (especially taste, smell, touch, sound) with a recollection, a remembrance, of the sensuous past.”6 Nabokov points to the passage in which Proust questions the relationship between an experienced sensation and its recollection:

La nature […] n’était-elle pas commencement d’art elle-même, elle qui ne m’avait permis de connaître, souvent longtemps après, la beauté d’une chose que dans une autre, midi à Combray que dans le bruit de ses cloches, les matinées de Doncières que dans les hoquets de notre calorifère à eau?
(Proust, 1987-89, IV, 468).

32Nabokov offers the following loose translation:

Was not nature herself from this point of view, on the track of art, was she not the beginning of art, she who often only permitted me to realize the beauty of an object long afterwards in another, midday at Combray through the remembered sound of its bells and the tastes of its flowers?
(
Lectures on Literature, 211)

33He exercises poetic license here by deleting the reference to Doncières with its prosaic heating apparatus and adding “the taste of its flowers” to the evocation of Combray, thus strengthening the link between synesthesia and memory. To quote Nabokov again:

“[…] a nosegay of the senses in the present and the vision of an event or sensation in the past, this is when sense and memory come together and lost time is found again”
(
Lectures on Literature, 249).

34In order to appreciate the texture of the present time, Proust’s advice is to let the spinning wheel of routine and familiarity slow down, whereas Nabokov advocates a pause in what he calls “the waiting-rooms of life’s stations” where we can concentrate on the “feeling” of time and palpate its very texture” (Strong Opinions, 289). Hence in Ada Van exercises “deliberate consciousness” to experience the “flavor, the flash, the flesh of the present” (316). It is as if he has sighted a rainbow and wants to savor its colorfulness before it dissolves into dull whiteness. Like Proust’s, Van’s literary project—which could be entitled “Write, Memory”—is fostered by synesthesia, as he explains: “Synesthesia, to which I am inordinately prone, proves to be of great help in this type of task—a task now approaching its crucial stage, the flowering of the Present” (Ada, 431).

35The sentence in Ada referring to the colored-chalk pencils whose “mere evocation […] make one’s memory speak in the language of rainbows” contains the enigmatic parenthetical exclamation: “Dixon Pink Anandel!” (368) It points to a particular color of pencil produced by the Dixon Ticonderoga Company which Nabokov recalls using as a child. With hindsight he realizes that the advertising on the box of pencils was false given the discrepancy between its promising signifier and the disappointing reality signified: “Colored pencils. Their detailed spectrum advertised on the box but never completely represented by those inside” (Speak, Memory, 79). Nabokov shared Proust’s literary ambition to equate signifiers with the signified: they strove to forge a language of rainbows that would enable them to portray the iridescence of experience and refracted memories, while capturing the sensory appeal and complexity of common words and proper names. The first stage in that artistic enterprise was drawing with the colored pencils; the young Vladimir discovered that when they were “in action,” they offered him a means of expression: “The green one, by a mere whirl of the wrist, could be made to produce […] the eddy left by a submerged crocodile” (Speak, Memory, 79). The white pencil even issued him with a passport to freedom of speech: “The white one alone, that lanky albino among pencils, kept its original length, or at least did so until I discovered that, far from being a fraud leaving no mark on the page, it was the ideal implement since I could imagine whatever I wished while I scrawled” (Speak, Memory, 79). The name of the company producing these pencils is particularly fitting, as Ticonderoga Fort was the site of a victory for the American Revolutionaries, who overcame the British Garrison quartered there in 1775. There is a certain poetic logic in the fact that Nabokov learned to show his true artistic colors through pencils whose name spells American independence. In his novel Pnin, he uses the same Iroquois Indian place-name Ticonderoga in an instance of onomatopoeia which typifies how he could infuse word play with profundity:

With the help of the janitor he [Pnin] screwed on to the side of the desk a pencil sharpener—that highly satisfying, highly philosophical implement that goes Ticonderogaticonderoga, feeding on the yellow finish and sweet wood, and ends up in a kind of soundlessly spinning ethereal void as we all must.
(
Pnin, 58)

36The shades of the language of rainbows allow Nabokov, like Proust before him, to reflect the fragile shavings of experience, the fleeting, ungraspable play of light which makes up existence. As Nabokov concludes in Speak, Memory: “A colored spiral in a small ball of glass, this is how I see my own life” (211). That marble is like a talisman endowed with mnemonic powers evoking both his own past, and Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. In Speak, Memory, Nabokov seems to rewrite a scene from Proust’s novel when he recalls playing with his childhood sweetheart, Colette, in the Champs-Elysées gardens. The “fountain choked with dead leaves” and “slender shadows cast on the graveled path by the interlaced arches of its low looped fence” (Speak, Memory, 119) conjure up the very scene of Marcel’s boyhood games with his beloved Gilberte. His memory of them is encapsulated in a marble the color of Gilberte’s eyes which seems to knock against the glass marble in Nabokov’s mind in a synesthetic recollection of the past:

The leaves mingle in my memory with the leather of her shoes and gloves, and there was, I remember, some detail in her attire (perhaps a ribbon on her Scottish cap, or the pattern of her stockings) that reminded me then of the rainbow spiral in a glass marble. I still seem to be holding that wisp of iridescence, not knowing exactly where to fit it […].
(
Speak, Memory, 119)

37Memories are as elusive as the rainbow, but the genius of both Proust and Nabokov is to have chased them in their narratives and to have succeeded in capturing them in the iridescence of their prose.

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Nabokov, Vladimir. (2000): Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle [1969]. London, Penguin Books.

Nabokov, Vladimir. (1974): Strong Opinions [1973]. London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson.

Nabokov, Vladimir. (1980): “The Walk by Swann’s Place.” Lectures on Literature. Ed. Fredson Bowers. New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, p. 206-249.

Proust, Marcel. (1987): À la recherche du temps perdu [1922], vol. I. Ed. Jean-Yves Tadié. Paris, Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade.

Proust, Marcel. (1988): À la recherche du temps perdu [1922], vol. II. Ed. Jean-Yves Tadié. Paris, Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade.

Proust, Marcel. (1989): À la recherche du temps perdu [1922], vol. IV. Ed. Jean-Yves Tadié. Paris, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, Gallimard.

Rivers, J.E. (1984): “Proust, Nabokov and Ada.” Critical Essays on Vladimir Nabokov. Ed. Phyllis Roth. Boston, G. K. Hall and Co., p. 134-157.

Notes

1 Nabokov plays on the homophony in Lolita when he transliterates the way one of the American characters understands Humbert’s literary publications to include “several books on Peacock, Rainbow and other poets” (Lolita 75) quoted by Yannicke Chupin (104).

2 For the sake of simplicity, I am following Nabokov’s lead in calling Proust’s young narrator Marcel.

3 Elsewhere he writes of the same condition: “I have this rather freakish gift of seeing letters in color. It’s called color hearing. Perhaps one in a thousand has that. But I’m told by psychologists that most children have it, that later they lose that aptitude when they are told by stupid parents that it’s all nonsense, an A isn’t black, a B isn’t brown—now don’t be absurd” (Strong Opinions, 17).

4 See Plate 42, colume 6H.

5 See the reproduction of his drawing in Lectures on Literature, 243.

6 Nabokov, “Walk by Swann’s,” in Lectures on Literature, 249.

Author

Professeur de littérature à l’université de Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense. Auteure de Proust’s Cup of Tea : Homoeroticism and Victorian Culture (Ashgate, 2002), elle travaille actuellement sur Oscar Wilde et la France, et s’intéresse particulièrement aux questions de « l’interlinguistique », c’est-à-dire de l’emprunt et l’empreinte d’une langue étrangère dans un texte d’une autre langue. Cette problématique constitue le champ d’investigation de son groupe de recherche « Confluences : Les Mots étrangers ». Elle co-dirige actuellement un volume intitulé Traduire la sonorité dans l’œuvre de Proust (à paraître chez Honoré Champion).

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