CK: on the Liverpool back streets, the kids
shout “Barley!” as a signal to end their altercations.
For VN’s admiration of Dickens, look no further than VN’s well-known
Lectures on Literature (written 1940-48, assembled/edited by Fredson
Bowers and published by Harvest-Harcourt, 1980) which includes a long
chapter on Bleak House.
It opens
“We are now ready to tackle Dickens. We are now ready to embrace
Dickens. We are now ready to bask in Dickens.”
and closes, 60 glowing pages later with
“A great writer’s world is indeed a magic democracy, where even some
very minor character, even the most incidental character like the
person who tosses the twopence [pronounced ‘tuppence’ - skb], has the
right to live and breed.”
This collection is certainly useful to Pale Fire analysts, since
there’s a 30-page chapter in LoL devoted to RLS’s The Strange Case of
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. VN’s negative views on detective stories are
prominent here, but he makes an exception of J&H: it’s lame as a
detective story, and even tasteless as a parable or allegory. “It has,
however, its own special enchantment if we regard it as a phenomenon of
style.” Word-sleuths, -mystics and -fetishists will love VN’s
suggested link between “Hyde” and the Greek hydatid (a
water-pouch for tapeworms) indicating that Hyde is the 1% parasite
dwelling within a 99% “good” Jekyll. But note VN’s firm belief that RLS
“knew nothing of this when he chose the name [Hyde].” I leave you to
ponder the irony here in view of VN’s rejection of imputed allusions in
Pale Fire of which he claimed to be unaware! Further, I wonder how VN’s
complex diagrams of the three personalities involved in J&H
tie in with the Shade-Kinbote “split-personality” theory.
“The Fitzgerald business is also worthy of thought. Certainly all these
themes, occult/psychosis and art/puzzle and intra-language translation,
all play enormous roles in Nabokov's work and thought.”
Indeed, yes.
Skb