V--2nd, Chap 9 sferics

[alice wellintown]

When we were casting books into the ring to vote for, I suggested, Ada
or Ardor.

And as Virginia inspired Poe's "Annabel Lee," so Poe's Annabel
inspired Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita. It was originally titled, "Kingdom
by the Sea," and Humbert Humbert's first nymphet was Annabel Leigh --
though they were both thirteen-somethings at this point. Their seaside
almost-consummation was interrupted by other swimmers; when Annabel
died four months later of typhus, Humbert was stamped him for life:

I recall the scent of some kind of toilet powder-I believe she stole
it from her mother's Spanish maid-a sweetish, lowly, musky perfume. It
mingled with her own biscuity odor, and my senses were suddenly filled
to the brim; a sudden commotion in a nearby bush prevented them from
overflowing.... But that mimosa grove -- the haze of stars, the
tingle, the flame, the honey-dew, and the ache remained with me, and
that little girl with her seaside limbs and ardent tongue haunted me
ever since -- until at last, twenty-four years later, I broke her
spell by incarnating her in another.
http://www.todayinliterature.com/stories.asp?Event_Date=10/9/1849

On Mon, Oct 11, 2010 at 2:41 PM, alice wellintown
<alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:
> Conrad's _Heart of Darkness_ is always mentioned but it is _Victory_
> that this chapter is most indebted to. Who is Sarah? Well, as with the
> other biblical names in _V._ we can look this one up. One thing we
> will discover is that, as with Esther's name, God changed  Sarah's.
> Esther, as I noted, is a key to unlocking the Adams influence, and
> originally named Hadassah or "myrtle" in Hebrew, she also links the
> nose job to the valley of ashes and to Myrtle Wilson, the Virgin who,
> during her tranmogrification to an American Dynamo is run down by one
> in Fitzgerald's _The Great Gatsby_. Back to Sarah and Victory, where
> more name changing takes place, we have Alma/Lena. The story, like
> this one here in _V._ is influenced by Romance, and the specifically,
> the only American Romance Shakespeare wrote, _The Tempest_.
> Nabokov? Adam Gillon and Raymond Brebach have proposed that Vladimir
> Nabakov's rejection of Conrad's "souvenir-shop style, and bottled
> ships and shell necklaces of romanticist cliches" resulted in Conrad's
> Victory being "one of the principal sources of inspiration" for Lolita
> through what they call "typical Nabakovian reversal."
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victory_(novel)
>
>
>> But there also seems to be a touch of the horror show in the proceedings
>> here, more than a little bit of Joseph Conrad as well. In earlier Pynchon
>> there is more of a concern/obsession with Entropy. I've already suggested
>> elsewhere that the author started out with the usual level of fear
>> concerning the bomb. By the time he got away from Bomarc News Service, he
>> must have just about as freaked out at the prospects of nuclear annihilation
>> as anyone on the planet.  Of course, Pynchon already knows that the history
>> of Bomarc is intimately tied to the history of young German engineers such
>> as Mondaugen -- here lie the seeds of Gravity's Rainbow. The attachment of
>> the "Heart of Darknesss" horrorshow with Moundaugen's explorations of songs
>> of the upper atmosphere appear as an anarchist miracle. There is a sense
>> that another world has already intruded into our own, and the mess that
>> results is not good.
>