#i feel like having a poetic title makes readers expect a certain kind of tone in what they're reading and i'm too irreverent to deliver that

[sixtypackofcrayola]

Ooooohh❤️❤️❤️ Lovesick Monkey King and Maquace are adorable!! Can we have MK, RedSon and Nezha affected by a love potion too?? Pretty please🙏🙏

well since ya asked so nicely

✰ LOVESICK (Part 2) ✰

Fandom; LEGO Monkie Kid Character List; MK, Red Son, Nezha Genre(s); big helping of Fluff for ya Pronouns; None used for Reader TW/CW; None

A/N; you can read lovesick for macaque and wukong here if ya like + i dont think nezha can get any kinda sick but its ok :smile:

🌷

-I think Nezha would realize what’s going on and try to fight the effects for a bit, but inevitably he’s done for  -And once they are completely under the effects, they’re like a mix of Wukong’s clingyness and Macaque’s nonstop flirting -Ik I say this a lot, but ohu boy -Nezha isn’t usually super touchy, but once you come around/he sees you he is all over you. Craves their partner’s touch even more, loves feeling you close to him, holding your hands or face -Put your arms around his waist they will internally lose it -They’ll gently take your hand and kiss it n call you prince/princess -He’s oddly poetic with his words sometimes when he flirts with you, expect a bit of flowery language  -Suddenly very forward but also easy to fluster so keep that in mind -Smoother tone, speaks a bit softer  -Again, expect flowers -A little more protective, kinda looms behind you. If you two happened to be in public with them disguised, they wouldn’t give anyone you talk to a dirty look per-say, but there’s definitely this aura. Not inherently scary, but enough to make someone slightly more careful with what they say to you -He seems to smile more with you too, no matter what you’re doing. They’re enthralled by how you manage to be stunning with every little movement -If he could still partially think clearly and didn’t know they were under some kind of influence, he’d think they were definitely sick. Except they don’t get sick.. so after that he’s lost -I’m not gonna say the title.  -Alternate scenario; they’re like half under the effects bc Nezha is just less affected by things like this. And they say and do all these things but occasionally after there’ll be like a moment where they partially snap out of it and just; “That was so- Gods, I’m sorry for that, I- I mean it’s not like it isn’t true! It’s just.. bolder than how I would’ve.. Sorry-” ‘n get a little flustered over what he said to you -Their thoughts are flooded with you and it’s not that they hate it, it’s just overwhelming, all these loving emotions suddenly amplified by like 20 -”When does this wear off...”

🔥

-Someone’s getting a bit possessive  -Will always try to keep you close to them, they want you to themselves -And it’s not really harmful,, they wouldn’t dare hurt you and they’re not gonna capture you or anything. If you do wanna leave they’ll eventually let you! They just really want you with them,, -Not as physically clingy as some of the others, in fact, you touching him at all especially if it’s a loving touch like holding his hands, arm, face or kissing him anywhere will set his hair aflame -And if you weren’t already together, they would try to deny at least some of what he’s feeling towards you and how their face gets so red when you merely lean on them, but inevitably they’ll break as well -Obsessed with you, everything you do, your reactions to him. They’re suddenly even more aware of every little detail that makes you you and he’s simply falling faster -Tries to impress you with his magic or one of his newer creations and if you say you like it he’s beyond happy. I can just see the floating hearts my guy -Will get you anything you ask for. Want this specific item? Say no more! Craving a certain food? I mean, in his words he’s practically a professional cook so don’t even worry about it -Also might ask you to marry them, y’know as one does. A few times throughout the day when you’re just doing anything. Lovesick, bro. -Roll credits -And later would actually approach you with a ring and everything and ask you to marry them,, like, right then. -And if you say it’s probably too early for that he’ll get a bit upset, but they’ll ask if you’ll marry them one day at least because they are absolutely in love with you and if ya say yes they’ll still give you the ring and promise to get you an even better one when you do get married! 

💫

-Basically, like father like son -Also annoyingly sweet and cheesy with all the pet names he can think of, except he’ll actually use your name sometimes -Distracted by you while doing anything. The most wholesome thoughts from this man he just really wants a bunch of kisses from you and for you to tell he’s pretty because he’ll certainly be telling you that all day! -Stares at you lovingly if you’re farther from him, heart eyes and all -Pages full of doodles of you in his sketchbook with little hearts around -If you aren’t together quite yet he will definitely be embarrassed of and hiding those from anyone after this wears off -Also gets flustered with even little touches you give him and he’s tryna play it off but... no -Praises you for just normal things you do. You could just be wiping down a counter and he’d be like; “Wow, you’re uh- Really good at cleaning! Heh-” -Attempts to flirt, half fails but it’s cute -Either he trips somehow and you catch him and the way you look at him has his heart doing flips or he’s distracted by your beautiful face when he tries to- -Will ramble about you if he’s with others even if you’re around and he’ll say the sweetest things about you but he’s been going on for several minutes -Subtly but no so subtly tries to keep you to himself for the day. He doesn’t really wanna force you to stay with him but- -”Oh haha sorry! Me and [Name] are- gonna go doing something right now! Together! Us, together! Going to- somewhere! Yep, haha- uh, my bad but we gotta go, kay byeee!”  -Wants to spend as much time near you as possible, he loves looking at your face and he definitely will say that getting lost in your eyes line or something what’d I tell ya -Give him kisses all over his face he will absolutely melt and be a flustered giggling mess it’s what he’s wanted all day -Might purposefully let you win in Monkey Mech which he would never do otherwise so it got you a little more concerned,, orrr he’d try to play his best but the way you look so confident and determined and excited while trying to beat him has him distracted again ( Fin ~  ✰ )

#lego monkie kid #lmk #lego monkie king #lmk nezha #nezha monkie kid #prince nezha #third lotus prince #nezha x reader #lmk nezha x reader #lmk red son #red son monkie kid #red son x reader #lmk red son x reader #lmk mk #monkie kid mk #qi xiaotian #lmk xiaotian #mk x reader #lmk mk x reader

[hauntedelation]

Repeat

Description - The Hammer proves to utilize surprising ways to settle down after a rough assignment.

Pairing - Black Male Reader x August Walker

A/N - This is my first male reader insert and AW fic! I wasn't sure how I should write the man but I found my August to be a little unpredictable, maybe hard. (Maybe he has some feelings, but he won't tell you what kind.)

Word Count - 2.4k

Warnings - descriptions of blood, wound tending and cleaning, anxiety, surprise fluff and maybe pining? Just partners being partners.

(no real proofreading this time y'all sorry 😅)

⊱ ───────────── ⊰

What he applied to your hand forced a pitiful sound from your body, something like a whimper subdued poorly by you.

By the sickly fluorescent light you can see it, the split that was the palm of your hand. Crimson upon crimson flooded the tissue, renewing again. 

Your insides overturned, and for the first time in your career you averted your eyes. You had to. For a reason you couldn't place your finger on, you knew you shouldn't stare. 

The way your pulse was working more warm liquid out of your hand, his fingers stained and slipping back and forth to tend, you felt unsteady. 

The spaces in your mind were gradually being occupied. So there was no shortage, no problem taking your mind off of it. 

You went back to that first mistake, back to where you foolishly under-packed. This assignment was far, but a swift turnaround. Accordingly, you thought it good to keep the amount of bags you carried to a minimum. 

A good number of things were left, a tool here and there that didn't stand out. You had done it before. One notch carved into the wood and you were null of any mistakes up until this point. 

What you couldn't grasp was that these absent devices were the key to this assignment. It hit like a ton of bricks the moment you were met with the complex screen of a security lock. 

You were deflated when your eyes met the empty space of what could have been the bypass key. There you spent upwards of an hour working through the perimeter of the place.

The next one could have happened regardless, but it didn't make you feel less inept. 

Where you went right when you should have gone left. The opponent you met was just as trained as you were: blank, unrelenting and practiced with a blade. You fell to a place where you were at a strident disadvantage. 

Would you have picked your jugular or your hand? There had to have been something better, a third choice? You should have been faster than that.

You could have.

Still, your hand caught the edge and it wasn't until much later, long after you were walking away that you could feel heat trickling down your fingers.

It's like the movies until it isn't. You've got yourself thrumming, high from the situation. You're locked in and can take anything to your vessel, then you're coming down slow. All the little details enter your mind, focusing and you notice. He noticed, actually.

With the most austere set of eyes you had ever seen, he did. 

Before you were given the chance to sit down he was standing over you, breath hot and charged from the brawl. On the top of your head you could feel it. The fabric of his suit was torn and twisted over his chest, rising and falling with his loosened tie.

He'd backed you to one of the steel tables, squinting through the dim and the dark. You had in mind that you were to be spit in the face, condemned for dragging the job to left-field. The glower had already been there.

You were bracing for it, balling both of your hands. The blunt object in your fingers collided with the brick floor. And it rang out, filling the empty spaces with a loud echo. Soon there was nothing. 

That's how it was seconds after.

A pair of boots brushed against yours before there was a hand capturing your right arm. He'd brought your dripping palm up and opened your curled fingers. Your wound was inspected with cautious eyes, the extent picked apart.

His calluses dragged around the edges of your sticky palm. You sucked in a breath when he had gone a little too close, but he ignored it. There was a drilling leer into your face before he spoke, "You were sloppy." 

The back of your throat had grown bone dry. You took a second, swallowing then pulling your eyes from his hardened face. 

That had been the first time that you'd been told that. Knowing in the very depths of you that this was the beginning to many months of second guessing, wishing you could have done better. 

You don't know why you had let this one go. Everything seemed feasible in the documents, from the time requirement to the objectives. You expected to have gone above and beyond.

That is close to what you told Sloane all those weeks ago,

⊱ ───────────── ⊰

"This one looks like it's going to be less of an issue."

She had her arms crossed in her crisp sleeves, her hip propped against the hardwood of her desk. You were called in to provide an updated report over your assignment, your feelings and projection.

It had gone to the point where you could no longer count on your fingers how many jobs you'd been on. The second anniversary from your first day recently passed, the bouquet still sitting on your dining room table.

You recall being introduced to your boss, the gratification in seeing someone like her in such an esteemed position.

(Someone who reminded you of your mother at times.)

Right then, the woman appeared to be getting ready to give a critical reply. Her brow was curled sharply but you could see the corners of her lips begin to upturn. 

"You have been assigned an associate with this task, agent."

This was of no particular issue. It was not every mission that you collaborated with another. Be that as it may, you've grown accustomed to this practice, it evolved into something that you improved with. This was your dream, and you intended to flourish.

You were sure there was no one you wouldn't be able to work with. 

When your superior uttered the name, 'Walker,' you had asked her to come again. 

"You're up and coming, still figuring things out in this line of work. I'm placing you with my best on this one," Sloane announced.

You withheld any signs of protest in front of her, flashing professional countenance and a nod. She dismissed you with a lingering gaze, most likely holding the same thing in her mind as you were. You kept up the front until you were situated at the chair by your desk. 

Upon your back touching the seat, a sigh was released, one that you felt in the pit of your stomach. 

You wanted to smile at how comical his name sounded. One would have thought you were speaking about an exotic dancer, The Hammer. You didn't think it fit at first. 

He's just a man, but he is the kind that exceeded the weight behind his title. He had discharged far more in his profession by the time you were approaching yours, taking the limits of what an agent could do to the stratosphere.

You could wax poetic about those stories, try to recount those details. But, truthfully there had been such a divide in your experience when compared to his. You could feel the pricks of uncertainty in your chest.

Perhaps you were only afraid.

He'd never once acknowledged your existence until you met on the tarmac the following Tuesday morning. The moon was leaving the twilight sky. Under an orange colored light, shining on the side of his face you could see him check his watch.

And then those eyes flicked over to you, sizing up your bags, your clothes. You think you may have even caught those blue slits drag along certain parts of you.

Your voice was weak, coughing low in your throat you tried to press out, "It's nice to finally meet, Mr. Walker."

(Ah, Mr Walker? You wanted to flinch, but you found no time.)

Then you provided him your name with a reluctant hand. It took far more composure on not showing the tremor in your limb but when the man peered down at you, securing your hand with a firm shake you knew. 

He'd felt how clammy your skin was. 

That mustache made a microscopic twitch, "Call me August, and, ditto."

⊱ ───────────── ⊰

You allowed your hand to remain elevated, but your period of self-loathing was eventually disturbed. 

The sensation of his large hands appeared, firm and wrapping around your waist before hoisting you on the surface of the steel table. There was a soft thud from your good hand landing to bear your shift in weight.

It was then that you froze, ears pricking to that steady footfall departing from the table.

You listen and—what?

What crosses your mind is maybe you hit your head back there, sometime during taking that grunt to the floor. Yet, you don't feel anything, no pounding in your skull. The musing is washed away the moment the flicker of a pale-green light shines above.

The room is revealed to have been an abandoned kitchen of sorts. Pots and pans layered in a thin veil of dust with more grime to compliment. With your good hand you wipe at the sweat falling down your temple, you'd become a little hot. 

Glass crumbles underneath his boots, he rotates his back around to you with a small kit that strongly resembles the one you stored in your bag. 

The white plastic had your name scrawled on there in your handwriting. While you could sit there wondering how August retrieved that, you are still processing the way the man picked you up. How he brought you up like you were made of feathers. Why he…

He comes in real close, your vision floods with a view of his chest, his gloved hands shedding away the garment and laying them on the metal surface.

The soft click of the first aid box click echoes out, and under the hum of the lights above August murmurs down to you, 

"At least you had enough sense to pack this."

His tone is the same, puncturing only not quite as breathy. The rise and fall of his chest had slowed far more, the dark curls on his chest soaking in the sweat running down his skin. And you blink, not realizing how enthralling the sight is.

Your pulsing hand is taken again, gingerly, by a pair of rough hands. You brace yourself on the edge of the table upon seeing the clear liquid bottle.

He's cleaning your wound throughly and you're trying not to take it like a kicked puppy. Through grit teeth, "You think I could skip stitches this time?" They never were your favorite.

"No dice," he breaths out, placing the bottle of alcohol down next to your thigh.

"You about had your hand sliced in half, Agent. You're lucky anyway. But,"

The needle and thread is pulled out, more cleansing and draining. Rinse and repeat. Walker was moving quickly, probably sensing the adrenaline in you draining by the minute.

Your communication devices buzz in unison, you don't have time to check your screen for any updates before he reaches with one hand in his pocket to retrieve his.

He sets your hand down on your own thigh and you listen to his voice shift to a formal tone. The female voice on the other line, (Sloane most likely) sounds curt and questioning. 

Your stomach begins to roll in circles. Your fingers wrapped around the table's edge tighten around the metal, almost enough to leave marks.

Through those training sessions all those months, you learned to properly squash any threats of anxiety, distraction. You could feel yourself slipping, your body seizing up in front of the man. Walker seemed to have been approaching the height of his conversation with your boss, shifting so the phone rests between his ear and shoulder. 

In the meantime, you were breathing. That familiar rhythm, flowing in and out, counting. You fall into the headspace that you became acquainted with all too well. 

You lost yourself in it, not realizing that Walker was dissolving Sloane's interrogation. Every syllable. The way in which his voice formed the words was unknowingly steadying your brain, calming your heart rate down slowly. 

All the while taking your wounded hand was taken in his, he set about cleaning it one more time before starting to close it with the thread. 

"Yes ma'am. No, he had everything in his detail under control...Yes. That's correct. The only slip up had been breaching the security wall but we successfully infiltrated."

You could feel the sharp pricks in your skin, your arm tensing after each pull to the string when closing the wound. Eventually Walker drifted, and your eyes landed on the semi-clean criss cross stitching in the palm of your hand. 

The man's eyes were dead set on his handiwork, narrowing on the lines before clearing his throat to part ways with your boss. There was a, "We will report back upon leaving this location."

He hung up the phone, and slid the device next to your thigh. You didn't think anything of it, only Walker's hand didn't leave where his phone was sitting. And you were encircled, the fabric of his shirt practically enticing his body closer to yours.

It had been a number of seconds before you could bring yourself back. The same exercise was reaching its tail end, and maybe, just maybe you could believe Sloane would not chew you a new one when you return.

Those words, It's okay, you tried your best. Everyone has bad days. You said them once again, inaudible and only in your mind. The room at this point only held the echo of the cars outside, Walker's heavy boots shifting before—

His fingertips were cold against your jaw, you almost jumped away from him. You should have, what was he doing? His thigh brushed so light against your knee, and when he guided your eyes up, you saw him already peering at your damp face.

Everything about the man's face was blank. Thick brows, lips hidden under a bushy trail of hair, all set in a firm line. You made no attempt to divert, you weren't sure he would let you. You had been planted there, decided by him your next move would be included.

Then those words fell silent. 

His fingertips pushed up your jaw, against the grain of your facial hair growing there. Then you felt him cup your cheek, strong hands dragging along your skin. 

Walker used his thumb to brush against your temple, wiping away something sticky. Red tint coated the little grooves in his skin and he pulled away, wiping his digit on the material of your pants. His tone was far more entertained then,

"Looks like you hit your head back there."

⊱ ───────────── ⊰

Taglist - @mansaaay @hope-to-hell @feralrunaway @thetaoofzoe @luclittlepond @madbaddic7ed @brandycranby @emyearns

⊱ ───────────── ⊰

#August Walker x Reader #Male reader #Black reader #henry cavill x reader #Henry Cavill fluff #Repeat #henry cavill x black reader #henry cavill x black!reader

[johnfmyles]

Nabokov: Lively Objects

Nabokov’s lively objects After a time Nabokov’s supercilious tone wearied me and in the later novels, especially Ada the tone is pretty egotistical. The early novels, though, are marked by a quirky stylistic trope of animated objects which Nabokov used intriguingly in order to confront the reader’s experience of literary metaphor. Essentially, Nabokov pursues an original, highly individualistic, phenomenology of objects that makes the reader re-vision the world as a result of this defamiliarization.

In Nabokov’s first novel, Mary, this characteristic is not much in evidence, but in the majority of Nabokov’s novels up to The Gift (in which it reaches its apogee, a novel itself much centred on a number of questions of style and language) and The real Life of Sebastian Knight, and in the short stories of this period, destabilizing objects is a regular concern. Nabokov’s essay ‘Man and Things’ (1928) sets out his thinking on this topic. In it he takes a kind of Berkeleyan viewpoint in which it is not the object itself that exists for the viewer but only what our perception makes of it. ‘A thing, a thing made by someone, does not exist in itself’ (69) he states, but is ‘dependent upon who looks on it’. Things thus ‘bring to mind’ images which are the material of thought, of representation (he regularly criticized James Joyce for his over-estimation of the verbal-linguistic in the constitution of human thought or experience). Nabokov sees us as ‘lending things our feelings’ – which he calls ‘anthropomorphic ardour’ (72). He even goes as far to argue that things die when we ‘neglect’ them, and we often mourn them when we have done so (73).

In Invitation to a Beheading the central character Cincinnatus is shown to be surrounded by a ‘false logic of things’, chimera, objects that are animated by others, by the agents of the state who are working to subjectify him. In his experience we see him feeling a ‘general instability, …a certain flaw in all visible matter’, even if the ‘objects still observed an outward propriety’ (172). In this Orwellian and Kafkaesque world there is a moral concern to address the political status of objects and to confront the issue of who or what is doing the primary seeing and defining along with the phenomenological status of everyday objects.

This concern is also prominent is many of the interviews and essays Nabokov made concerned with questions of his style. In his fragment-essays ‘The creative writer’ and ‘style’ (both circa. 1941) he shows a concern to ‘dislocate the given world’ (189), to make the reader see the ‘whatness of things’ (187), to ‘move objects from their usual series’ (198), and to bring things out of the domain of habitual modes of experience (188)  (in this he shows an affinity for Proust). This concern is particularly marked in Look at the Harlequins with its performative ‘look’ in its title and where the aim is ‘to make iniquity absurd’ (197).

But Nabokov consciously rejected the type of politically-committed literature of writers like Sartre and Camus, the Soviet novelist-ideologues of the Stalinist era such as Sholokhov, or even novelists like Pasternak who were critical of the regime. Mostly, when objects crop up in his novels they do so apolitically, defamiliarizing, to ‘reveal the most elementary things in their unique lustre’ (Think, Write, Speak 132). The aim is to redefine domestic objects in their particularity, to give them a kind of agency, like the mirror ‘that had plenty of work to do’ in Laughter in the Dark (37). In Despair, Nabokov’s Doestoyevskian novel about a Hermann Hermann and his double, Hermann laments the ‘sick mirror’ he has created of himself, the mirror representing an outside, perhaps narcissistic, view of himself that he has fallen for when he stumbles on his double. Hermann believes that having a double might allow him to escape the confines of the self he has created, that by killing his live reflection he can achieve freedom, to re-imagine himself. Hermann has an ‘eye to eye monologue’ with his double, but he is put into a critical light when Nabokov shows that in seeing just the outside of things, people as much and as like objects, Hermann is on a faltering path of redundant defamiliarization:

I cannot recollect now if the ‘monologue’ was a slip or a joke. The thing is typed out on good, eggshell blue notepaper with a frigate for watermark: but it is now sadly creased and soiled at the corners; vague imprints of his fingers, perhaps. Thus it would seem that I were the receiver – not the sender. (45)

Hermann is attempting to create a world of dead things that lack their own animation. It is also, in writing, what Nabokov sees as going on in the ‘cooperatives of words’ in tired metaphors or, historically, the way objects from earlier periods become obsolescent because the generation that animated them has dissipated (338).

The Gift serves as the apogee of Nabokov’s concern with reanimating things. In fact, the ‘Gift’ in the novel is the ability ‘to go beyond the surface of things’ (326). This is contrasted to the positivist scientific idea of objects, be they human, social or natural. In this novel Nabokov directly criticises cold German systematizing philosophical materialists like Feuerbach and Hegel. Fyodor, the protagonist artist sees ‘things like words as [having] their cases’ but commonly-understood dictionary-syntactical confinement of meaning ‘must be displaced’ (236-7) by a poetical imagination built upon ‘chance and emotion’ (198).

At one point around half-way through the novel, there is a sudden shift in the syntax and style (approximately 173 of the Penguin edition) when Nabokov’s metaphors and his characterization of objects becomes somewhat tired, predictable, conventional – a blond woman is described woodenly as ‘buxom’ and ‘whose soul was more like that of a replica of her apartment’ (186). A little further on, Herzen (whom Nabokov associates with Russian revolutionary materialists) is described as a writer producing ‘false glib glitter’ (198). And the café in which Fyodor meets Zina is described in a kind of dead prose as ‘an empty little café where the counter was painted in indigo colour and where dark blue gnomelike (the dull imprecise simile here underlined by merging with its marker – ‘like’) lamps…’. Such prose contrasts with the earlier part of the novel in which a sustained defamiliarization of the object world is evident. In particular, Nabokov sees natural phenomena, such as ‘the bent shadow of a poplar sitting there’ (51); a ‘young chestnut tree [is] unable to walk alone’ (57) and ‘dun birches…stood around blankly with all their attention turned inside themselves’. This latter instance continues to note ‘a little man was tossing a stick into the water at the request of his dog’ (45); and rain ‘loses the ability to make any sound’ (75).

Early on in Despair Hermann Hermann recounts the walk he took that led him to meet his doppelganger, Felix:

I trod upon soft sticky soil: dandelions trembled in the wind and a shoe with a hole in it was basking in the sunshine under a fence. (3)

The reader is struck by this shoe, abandoned, an object which has lost its pair and its ‘use-value’ but is still seen as being alive, animated by the verb ‘basking’. The reader is, simultaneously, aware of the subtle contrast in the metaphoric language by the more conventional attribution of ‘trembling’ to a plant like a dandelion eddying in the breeze. This is juxtaposition in Nabokov’s earlier work of conventional and animated metaphors is a regular one. It is Nabokov’s way of disturbing the reader’s literary sensibilities, to make them experience the ‘Gift’ of undermining cliched writing passing itself off as literature. In The Real Life of Sebastian Knight this occurs regularly, thus we find ‘letters resent being unfolded’ (34), the author is described as ‘budding’ (46). Bookshelves are ‘densely peopled’ which seems conventional, in contrast to the following sentence in which a writing desk ‘looked sullen and distant’ (30). A reflection is seen, commonly, as ‘live’ but is quickly followed with the attribution of a window as being ‘sick’ (51)

That shoe basking and yet useless in the human world seems to be part-way back to returning to nature, which means in Nabokov’s world to have lost its conventional meaning, that it can now only appeal to us to re-view it, reexperience its thingliness before it is lost to us. The idea of ‘thingliness’ reminds me of Derrida’s articles on Van Gogh’s boots and what Heidegger made of them in his ‘Origin of the work of Art’. Derrida, like Nabokov, was concerned with how Van Gogh’s boots were non-functioning, and, as the shoe in Despair is subject to the novelist’s revisioning, revivifying, so in Van Gogh the boots become reviewed, become the (a) ‘subject’ in painting (301). Derrida partly is concerned with literary comparisons to the painterly, suggesting that Van Gogh’s boots have a figurative value comparable to metonymy or synecdoche (302). But his main concern is how things are ‘brought into the nameable’ (306) in painting, literature, in the artistic generation of cultural value.

Things like boots become nameable when they are disturbed from their (back)ground, related in the Aristotelian concept of an originary state hypokeimenon (305). In paintings like Van Gogh’s boots this revisioning process occurs or, in literature like Nabokov’s there is a detaching and estrangement of the objects of the natural world or shoes and other domestic(ated) objects. Nabokov’s Gift, like Van Gogh’s, is to bring objects out of their expected gaze, their ground, and into revision-ing. Derrida categorizes this more generally as disturbing objects’ ‘substantia’: the thing no longer has the figure or value of ‘an underneath’ (308). Nabokov’s early novels  thus sensitize us to the presence of things, to reexperience them by the activating light of his literary imagination.