On 19/1/07 15:25, "Nabokv-L"
<nabokv-l@UTK.EDU> wrote:
Victor: Fascinating! BUT you may not have discouraged those
over-zealous in leaping at phonetic and orthographic accidents!** I
note that ‘plesh’ is a ‘bald patch’ and ‘plecho’ is a ‘shoulder.’ I’m
working hard to find some hidden significance to KDK’s life-like
automata!
The various ‘plex-’ compounds in English are semantically stretched by
having different classical roots: Greek ‘plexis’ (percussion via
‘plessein’ [to strike]; and Latin ‘plexus’ (network via pp of
‘plectere’ [to braid]) Thus PLEXOR as percussive, gives us a rubber
hammer for testing KNEE-JERK reflexes — with remarkable resonances with
KDK’s ‘robot-mannequins’ -- not to mention our occasional knee-jerk
reactions to VN’s teaseful corpus!
As a fairly obvious portmanteau, ‘plexible’ has passed into the
tongue-in-cheek Urban Dictionary as:
adj. describing the psychosomatic state of a person who
is both willing to and physically capable of participating in edgy
and/or contorted sexual acts. a compound of '(com)pliant' and
'flexible'.
** E.g., one can over-read the shapes of letters, mistaking arbitrary
phonetic alphabets for ideograms and hieroglyphics. Yes: we know ‘A’
probably started life as the approximate picture of an ox’s head — but
such associations have long since faded! To Jansy, the letter ‘V’ gains
significance by suggesting ‘convergence’ -- to others it spells out
Churchillian triumphalism — to some the finger-V sign means fous-moi
le camp. For
us logicians the sans-serif ‘v’ can be read as ‘OR’ in the sense that
‘X v Y’ is true iff (if and only if!) either X or Y or both are true.
I’m not against the FUN of exploring the infinite ‘allusional regress’
-- it’s embedded in the divine Nabokovian experience just like his
oft-cited parallel-mirrored images -- provided we keep a Nabovian
sensayuma. Not all allusions are created equal or lead to helpful
‘readings.’ We have VN’s own warning that Pale Fire (i) contains
deliberately misleading ‘clues’ (ii) has triggered the ‘discovery’ of
unintended (illusional) allusions. Mary McCarthy, having hunted down
her fair share of ‘associations’ (some obvious, some revealing, some
hyperactive *** and ‘disowned’ by VN) writes dogmatically of Pale Fire:
“This is no giggling, high-pitched, literary camp.” (Brief
endless detour while we follow all the links from military to academic campus
on to homosexuality and ... fou’-le-camp! TLS recently
cited the poet/critic Muldoon as the ultimate culprit in chasing
spurious allusions)
Yet these are the very devices and elements that I find so compelling —
that Pale Fire can, indeed, exploit so many meta-fictional, farcical
fancies and genres, and yet end up overall as a sublime comment on
theodicy, mortality and the human condition — are we in utrumque
paratus (ready to face triumph or death with equal sang-froid —
Vergil Aeneid ii.61)?
*** At one point she hints that “the king’s escape from the castle is
doubtless castling.” Well, we chess-savvies note at once that it’s
illegal for the King to escape a check or checkmate by castling (there
are other rules that inhibit castling), but let that pass. Chess problems
very
rarely involve castling (O-O or O-O-O in symbols) since it’s seldom
clear if earlier moves leading up to the given problem may have
rendered castling impossible. Another slight chess solecism from MM: “a
King and two Knights cannot checkmate a lone King [Solus Rex]” This
ain’t so. She should have said
“a King and two Knights cannot generally FORCE checkmate on a lone
King.”
Stan Kelly-Bootle