"enchanter"

"Never before, though, had the subordinate clause of his fearsome life been complemented by the principal one, and he walked past with clenched teeth, stifling his exclamations and his moans..." (Nabokov The Enchanter 11)
This isn't the first time when Nobokov used a grammatical simile.  Or maybe it was his son, Dimitri, who translated this novella who thought it fit to sprinkle these in there.  Either way, I enjoy them very much.  The Enchanter thinks this as he sees the girl once more as he turns around from walking away after an admiringly descriptive observation of her, also very flattering and lustful, after which he continues to walk away "stifling his exclamations and his moans."

He uses very interesting adjectives to portray the girl in the description.  "Her blazing arm... her misty head... emanating a fierce, chestnut heat... losing the layer of violet that disintegrated into ashes under his terrible, unnoticed gaze."  Some of these I can understand, some of these I cannot relate.  Maybe I don't know as much of urban diction as Nobokov, but in the dictionary, violet is a herbaceous plant.  Maybe he was speaking of her skin and comparing it to the beauty of the layer of violet, but why make it disintegrate into ashes?  Maybe foreshadowing?  That his gaze will make her disintegrate into ashes?  This sort of extended simile and imagery baffles me wildly, mostly because I do not see myself writing anything so supernaturally poetic.  (Then again, that's probably my problem, my shortcomings.)  But what do these adjectives have in common?  Blazing, misty, chestnut, and violet?  Blazing arms could refer to the temperature, and that her arms were pounded by the sunlight or heat.  Misty head, maybe referring to the amount of mist that the heat is producing?  Misty head... why use a word like misty to describe the girl's head?  If it was her face he was describing, misty could mean indistinct, but I'm sure from where you can see so much detail of the girl as to see her arms blazing, her head will have a clear outline.  Chestnut—a nut or a color, probably describing the color of her hair.  Violet, an herb.  Is Nabokov using these descriptions that somehow all make references to heat to finally make that metaphor of his "terrible gaze" as something that will burn her down?

The sentence I quoted in the beginning of the blog, which is also the larger part of the quote that was in Robin's post, baffled me infinitely less.  The Enchanter refers to his life as a "subordinate clause," a clause that has all the qualifications of being a complete sentence, such as a verb and a noun, but is something that still needs a finishing idea.  An incomplete existence.  And says that it has been complemented with its most natural complement, a "principal clause," the clause that stands by itself, a complete idea and sentence, which obviously alludes to the girl.


"On the way to the station he reluctantly stopped by and learned that the person was no more."  This part struck me a little bit.  I didn't sense a bit of minimalism in Nobokov's style of writing, and even the moment when the Enchanter gets the news that the person had survived the operation wasn't at all minimalistic.  It is described as "a total success, surpassing the surgeon's every hope,"—and even an instruction on what to do next—"but that it would be best not to visit until tomorrow."  However, "the person was no more," provides no information, no explanation as to what had happened or what went wrong, missing a significant amount of detail compared to the former news, not even a respectful euphemism for death, as in she had passed away, but a simple, "was no more."  This brings me to this thought.  The Enchanter, when he hears that the person had survived the operation, needed reasons, much more reasons apparently, because that is not the outcome that he wanted, and he needed himself convinced.  But when he learns that the person had died, nothing else mattered than the ultimate fact that the person had died, and that was perfectly and clearly transferred through the text.  All that did matter was his reaction to it, which Nobokov takes a lot to describe the inner turmoil that spurs from this news.