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Re: THOUGHTS: Shade's Mockingbird (corrections from JF)]]
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I re-read J.Friedman's message and understood his meaning after he explained (humorously ?)that there was "an oddly placed adverbial phrase (how Nabokovian of me)".
I want to thank Studdard for his comforting comments because, before JF's clarification arrived, I felt that I'd been too clumsy for words...
Although I enjoyed very much JF's "connection between the red admiral and Tereus [...] the beginning of a chorus from Swinburne's /Atalanta in Calydon/" I continue to hold to my opinion that the indications about the transmigration of souls, communication with the dead, & father-daughter incest were placed in Pale Fire (1962) either as a trap to discredit viennese quacks, an indication leading onto something else ( "And that secret, ta-ta, ta-ta-ta, ta-ta,/But more than that I may not tell you." ) or a wish-fulfillment fantasy in relation to his father's survival after death (Cf. P.Meyer's Find What the Sailor Has Hidden: Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire for precise quotes I have not at hand right now).
Here we find Shade's poignant emphatic lines about IPH:" It missed the gist of the whole thing[...]; For we die every day; oblivion thrives/ Not on dry thighbones but on blood-ripe lives[...] I'm ready to become a floweret/ Or a fat fly, but never, to forget./ And I'll turn down eternity unless/ The melancholy and the tenderness/ Of mortal life; the passion and the pain;[...]/ Are found in Heaven by the newlydead/ Stored in its strongholds through the years."
In addition, we can compare what VN wrote in "The Art of Literature and Commonsense" (1951): "human life is but a first instalment of a serial soul and that one's individual secret is not lost in the process of earthly dissolution, becomes something more than an optimistic conjecture, and even more than a matter of religious faith, when we remember that only commonsense rules immortality out" and in Pnin, (1957): "Unless a film of flesh envelops us, we die. Man exists only insofar as he is separated from his surroundings. The cranium is a spacetraveller's helmet. Stay inside or you perish. Death is divestment, death is communion. It may be wonderful to mix with the landscape, but to do so is the end of the tender ego". ( obviously all these sentences were cut off from their context...)
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I want to thank Studdard for his comforting comments because, before JF's clarification arrived, I felt that I'd been too clumsy for words...
Although I enjoyed very much JF's "connection between the red admiral and Tereus [...] the beginning of a chorus from Swinburne's /Atalanta in Calydon/" I continue to hold to my opinion that the indications about the transmigration of souls, communication with the dead, & father-daughter incest were placed in Pale Fire (1962) either as a trap to discredit viennese quacks, an indication leading onto something else ( "And that secret, ta-ta, ta-ta-ta, ta-ta,/But more than that I may not tell you." ) or a wish-fulfillment fantasy in relation to his father's survival after death (Cf. P.Meyer's Find What the Sailor Has Hidden: Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire for precise quotes I have not at hand right now).
Here we find Shade's poignant emphatic lines about IPH:" It missed the gist of the whole thing[...]; For we die every day; oblivion thrives/ Not on dry thighbones but on blood-ripe lives[...] I'm ready to become a floweret/ Or a fat fly, but never, to forget./ And I'll turn down eternity unless/ The melancholy and the tenderness/ Of mortal life; the passion and the pain;[...]/ Are found in Heaven by the newlydead/ Stored in its strongholds through the years."
In addition, we can compare what VN wrote in "The Art of Literature and Commonsense" (1951): "human life is but a first instalment of a serial soul and that one's individual secret is not lost in the process of earthly dissolution, becomes something more than an optimistic conjecture, and even more than a matter of religious faith, when we remember that only commonsense rules immortality out" and in Pnin, (1957): "Unless a film of flesh envelops us, we die. Man exists only insofar as he is separated from his surroundings. The cranium is a spacetraveller's helmet. Stay inside or you perish. Death is divestment, death is communion. It may be wonderful to mix with the landscape, but to do so is the end of the tender ego". ( obviously all these sentences were cut off from their context...)
Search archive with Google:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
Visit "Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
Manage subscription options: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/