Subject
Nabokovian foot prints
From
Date
Body
Charles Kinbote comments, on lines 939-40 from Shade's poem Pale Fire [ "Man's life as commentary to abstruse/Unfinished poem. Note for further use.]:
"If I correctly understand the sense of this succinct observation, our poet suggests here that human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece."
Years before, Vladimir Nabokov opined that "these footnotes in the volume of life are the highest forms of consciousness" (Lectures on Literature, 374).*
My hunch is that Nabokov is making an observation about those patterns in human life which people, by themselves, cannot easily discern. They must be non-utilitarian embellishments empowered to please an artistic Eye¨
Material footnotes are often appreciated by Charles Kinbote: "In a black pocketbook that I fortunately have with me I find, jotted down, here and there, among various extracts that had happened to please me (a footnote from Boswell's Life of Dr. Johnson, the inscriptions on the trees in Wordsmith's famous avenue, a quotation from St. Augustine, and so on), a few samples of John Shade's conversation..." I can only imagine that the novel's epigraph about Samuel Johnson's cat was copied by Kinbote from his black pocketbook. I cannot make up my mind if I'll pay more attention to Hodges' not being shot, or to the reference to a cat. There are enough mysterious cats in other Nabokov's novels (with the permanent shadow of "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" Cheshire cat). In "The Real Life of Sebastian Knight" there's a cat with celadon eyes who takes a dislike to milk (do Europeans feed milk to their cats? It's most unhealthy). Kinbote must feed Judge Goldsworth's intriguing cat, who one moves about the house with a bow. I cannot remember now if Pnin had to share rooms with any cat, but Nabokov certainly did.
Other kinds of footnotes are unavoidable but disgraceful: "Translators of Shade's poem are bound to have trouble with the transformation, at one stroke, of 'mountain' into 'fountain': it cannot be rendered in French or German, or Russian, or Zemblan; so the translator will have to put it into one of those footnotes that are the rogue's galleries of words."
(Jansy)
..............................................................................................................................................................................................................
* - The full quote returns to the vertical theme about a "brief crack of light" (SO) and to "our awareness of being is not a dot in eternity, but a slit, a fissure, a chasm..." (Ada) Cf: https://listserv.ucsb.edu/lsv-cgi.../wa?... "
"I remember a cartoon depicting a chimney sweep falling down from the roof...and noticing on the way that a sign-board had one word spelled wrong...In a sense, we all are crashing to our death from the top story of our birth to the flat stones of the churchyard and wondering with an immortal Alice in onderland at the patterns of the passing wall. This capacity to wonder at trifles - no matter the imminent peril - these asides of the spirit, these footnotes in the volume of life are the highest forms of consciousness, and it is in this childishly speculative state of mind, so different from commonsense and its logic, that we know the world to be good...considering that the main delight is the sway accorded to a seemingly incongruous detail over a seemingly dominant generalization..."
(in this lecture Nabokov connecta indeterminism to the gods when they are playing havoc with men's lives!) Cf. The Art of Literature and Common Sense, Lect. on Lit. -Bowers.
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/
"If I correctly understand the sense of this succinct observation, our poet suggests here that human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece."
Years before, Vladimir Nabokov opined that "these footnotes in the volume of life are the highest forms of consciousness" (Lectures on Literature, 374).*
My hunch is that Nabokov is making an observation about those patterns in human life which people, by themselves, cannot easily discern. They must be non-utilitarian embellishments empowered to please an artistic Eye¨
Material footnotes are often appreciated by Charles Kinbote: "In a black pocketbook that I fortunately have with me I find, jotted down, here and there, among various extracts that had happened to please me (a footnote from Boswell's Life of Dr. Johnson, the inscriptions on the trees in Wordsmith's famous avenue, a quotation from St. Augustine, and so on), a few samples of John Shade's conversation..." I can only imagine that the novel's epigraph about Samuel Johnson's cat was copied by Kinbote from his black pocketbook. I cannot make up my mind if I'll pay more attention to Hodges' not being shot, or to the reference to a cat. There are enough mysterious cats in other Nabokov's novels (with the permanent shadow of "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" Cheshire cat). In "The Real Life of Sebastian Knight" there's a cat with celadon eyes who takes a dislike to milk (do Europeans feed milk to their cats? It's most unhealthy). Kinbote must feed Judge Goldsworth's intriguing cat, who one moves about the house with a bow. I cannot remember now if Pnin had to share rooms with any cat, but Nabokov certainly did.
Other kinds of footnotes are unavoidable but disgraceful: "Translators of Shade's poem are bound to have trouble with the transformation, at one stroke, of 'mountain' into 'fountain': it cannot be rendered in French or German, or Russian, or Zemblan; so the translator will have to put it into one of those footnotes that are the rogue's galleries of words."
(Jansy)
..............................................................................................................................................................................................................
* - The full quote returns to the vertical theme about a "brief crack of light" (SO) and to "our awareness of being is not a dot in eternity, but a slit, a fissure, a chasm..." (Ada) Cf: https://listserv.ucsb.edu/lsv-cgi.../wa?... "
"I remember a cartoon depicting a chimney sweep falling down from the roof...and noticing on the way that a sign-board had one word spelled wrong...In a sense, we all are crashing to our death from the top story of our birth to the flat stones of the churchyard and wondering with an immortal Alice in onderland at the patterns of the passing wall. This capacity to wonder at trifles - no matter the imminent peril - these asides of the spirit, these footnotes in the volume of life are the highest forms of consciousness, and it is in this childishly speculative state of mind, so different from commonsense and its logic, that we know the world to be good...considering that the main delight is the sway accorded to a seemingly incongruous detail over a seemingly dominant generalization..."
(in this lecture Nabokov connecta indeterminism to the gods when they are playing havoc with men's lives!) Cf. The Art of Literature and Common Sense, Lect. on Lit. -Bowers.
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/