ROBERT ALTER
623
for its picture in a puddle." The wit says a good deal about observation
and representation in Nabokov's imaginative world. It is not merely that
the rain-puddle reflecting the gloomy sky is a synecdoche for the whole
dreary scene but that framing and mirroring are the means of capturing
the fleeting moment. It sometimes seems in Nabokov as though the data
of experience were no more than the raw material of artistic representa–
tion, the majolica shards awaiting the expert hand that will assemble
them in the wholeness of a pattern, and this sense is caught in the image
of the rainy day posing for its picture in the puddle. The idea of a careful
photographic composition in grays and dingy browns is then carried
forward in the patently composed quality of the prose (quite unlike the
next paragraph on the sunny day), which locks all the descriptive terms
into a network of alliterated l's and s's and d's - "line of dull light,"
"leaden sky," "sodden sand," gruel-like/lilacs" - complemented by two
subseries of b's and fs - "broken brown blossoms," "flat, fallow lea("
None of this can properly be described as onomatopoeic, but the effect
is to proffer an illusion of all the words somehow being contaminated by
the bleak light of the scene to which they belong, dissolving into one
another in a gray impasto, a "gruel-like mess." One begins to see why
Nabokov can imagine his prose as bronze rivets, holding pieces firmly
together.
The paragraph on the bright day puts aside these artifices of pho–
netic orchestration partly for contrapuntal reasons, in order not to
overdo a single device, and partly because, in this full frontal vision of the
illuminated scene, the writer now wants to concentrate on the precise
visual texture of what the light reveals, stressing painterly words instead
of mood-evoking sound-clusters. The suddenness of the invasion of
sunlight when the shutters are flung open is realized in a theatrical
gesture, the metaphorical blow that cleaves the room into light and
shade. Then we are invited by the chromatic specification of the
language to look out the window with the young Vladimir on a visual
composition - the delicately defined "translucent green tone of grapes"
of the birch leaves set against "the dark velvet" of the fir and the intense
blue of the sky. The last of these color-values is given neither a tone nor
a texture but an emotive label ("extraordinary intensity"), perhaps
because its location on the spectrum is to be inferred from its relation to
the translucent green and the velvet darkness, perhaps because the
intensity, confirmed by the rediscovery in Colorado, is the main point.
One might note that the Proustian moment of involuntary memory, the
unlooked-for recurrence of the sky over Vyra years later in the Sierras, is
not the object of representation but an element in the rhetoricai
structure that fixes the vividness of the primary memory. Nabokov's
cunning strangeness with English plays a strategic part in putting this final
