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Re: MR on KQK, Icarus
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MR wrote: PF-related imagery in KQK.... I would like to add one more reference from
the same passage: "Beyond the fence, the black car, the expensive
Icarus, was already waiting inexorably." Given our recent discussion
of the waxwing, I found it hard not to see this as related also.
JM: You saw the "ashen fluff" as a kind of fallen Icarus? The imagery about Icarus and falls is well developped in ADA and annotated by B.Boyd. I vaguely remember Kinbote imagining young Shade holding a dead bird in his hand, a very corporeal fluff indeed.
The car itself, in KQK, in the short period of the novel, suffers two crashes, the second a PF typical "head-on" collision.
In a recent message about Red Admiral and doom in KQK, two announced deaths were mentioned: the dog's and Martha's. The gardener had the dog killed and Martha got a chill on the day she'd planned to kill Dreyer, and died from pneumonia.
And yet, there was another death lurking by on that day: the driver's, in an accident with the Icarus. In the Red Admiral scene he ( "chauffeur") was chatting with the gardener and creating moveable shadows with cigarette smoke.
Dreyer survived. The butterfly's presence was a curiously misdirected warning - if it represented a warning at all.
Also in Pale Fire, the intended victim was not John Shade but Judge Goldsworth. Or, according to Kinbote, it was he, King Charles II, the intended victim. Hazel committed suicide, apparently like Kinbote and Gradus.
In both situations in which the Vanessa atalanta appears, we see a gardener trundling a barrow, like a clockwork toy. Those who died might have been victimized by "Fate" but, in the human scale, they were not the intended victims ( VN's father was also shot by accident).
I wonder what kind of connection exists between a gardener and a butterfly.
MR added in another posting: Skipping to the end of the poem, I'm curious if anyone else has thought twice about that "empty barrow." While this clearly denotes
an empty wheelbarrow, shouldn't we also consider that an "empty
barrow" in a different context means "empty grave"?
JM: Trundling it?
If we search for more connections, there is another one in the same Chapter Two:
"Franz had the feeling that in another minute his body would melt completely...Dreyer, slowly rotating before him like a flaming wheel with human arms for spokes...The merry-go-round in Franz's head never stopped"
Before that, at the very beginning, nausea and dizziness is linked with physical discomfort. Later, this carroussel rotation is associated with sexual bliss ( could not find the page now). Love and death are firmly associated in KQK, as are the "odi et amo" oscillatory terrors..
There are also the emerald ear-rings, an important feature in "KQK ( where the novel's color scheme favoured greens: turmaline, emerald; and blacks,asphalt, car, melanite) and they appear in Shade's poem, also as ear-rings and as a cicada's empty emerald case.
Jansy
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the same passage: "Beyond the fence, the black car, the expensive
Icarus, was already waiting inexorably." Given our recent discussion
of the waxwing, I found it hard not to see this as related also.
JM: You saw the "ashen fluff" as a kind of fallen Icarus? The imagery about Icarus and falls is well developped in ADA and annotated by B.Boyd. I vaguely remember Kinbote imagining young Shade holding a dead bird in his hand, a very corporeal fluff indeed.
The car itself, in KQK, in the short period of the novel, suffers two crashes, the second a PF typical "head-on" collision.
In a recent message about Red Admiral and doom in KQK, two announced deaths were mentioned: the dog's and Martha's. The gardener had the dog killed and Martha got a chill on the day she'd planned to kill Dreyer, and died from pneumonia.
And yet, there was another death lurking by on that day: the driver's, in an accident with the Icarus. In the Red Admiral scene he ( "chauffeur") was chatting with the gardener and creating moveable shadows with cigarette smoke.
Dreyer survived. The butterfly's presence was a curiously misdirected warning - if it represented a warning at all.
Also in Pale Fire, the intended victim was not John Shade but Judge Goldsworth. Or, according to Kinbote, it was he, King Charles II, the intended victim. Hazel committed suicide, apparently like Kinbote and Gradus.
In both situations in which the Vanessa atalanta appears, we see a gardener trundling a barrow, like a clockwork toy. Those who died might have been victimized by "Fate" but, in the human scale, they were not the intended victims ( VN's father was also shot by accident).
I wonder what kind of connection exists between a gardener and a butterfly.
MR added in another posting: Skipping to the end of the poem, I'm curious if anyone else has thought twice about that "empty barrow." While this clearly denotes
an empty wheelbarrow, shouldn't we also consider that an "empty
barrow" in a different context means "empty grave"?
JM: Trundling it?
If we search for more connections, there is another one in the same Chapter Two:
"Franz had the feeling that in another minute his body would melt completely...Dreyer, slowly rotating before him like a flaming wheel with human arms for spokes...The merry-go-round in Franz's head never stopped"
Before that, at the very beginning, nausea and dizziness is linked with physical discomfort. Later, this carroussel rotation is associated with sexual bliss ( could not find the page now). Love and death are firmly associated in KQK, as are the "odi et amo" oscillatory terrors..
There are also the emerald ear-rings, an important feature in "KQK ( where the novel's color scheme favoured greens: turmaline, emerald; and blacks,asphalt, car, melanite) and they appear in Shade's poem, also as ear-rings and as a cicada's empty emerald case.
Jansy
Search the archive: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/archives/nabokv-l.html
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