JM: the cover of "The New Yorker", 18 October
1969, by Saul Steinberg...Nabokov is found right after Gogol, before Hi
Nabor, While-U-Wait, U Turn.
Fran Assa:
Wonderful find! But on the cover, don't miss "Ada" right after
"Dada"! 2/3 of the way down.
JM:
After Fran's instigation I copied down the words in the
vicinity of "Ada":
Trieste,
Joyce, James Joyce, Greta Garbo, Donald Duck, BB,MM,Phileas Fogg, Ugene Unesco,
Tristan Tzara, Tara, Tata, Uta, Ata, Ita, Nene, Papa, Gigi, Tata, Dada,
Ada, Hedda, Betty Parsons.
The doubling of names in "Greta
Garbo, Phileas Fogg..." followed by "Tata...Ata...Papa" carried me
over to Kinbote's views on Hazel's: "pada ata lane
pad not ogo old wart alan ther tale feur far rant lant tal told" and
Shade's "Some kind of link-and-bobolink, some kind /Of
correlated pattern in the game."
Kinbote tries divine sense in Hazel's
broken associations and connects them to the girl, not to Shade, not
to a Geist ( he is more of a psychoanalyst than a mystic?).
He observes, on PF's lines 347 ( "Old
Barn") "I abhor such games; they make my temples
throb with abominable pain — but I have braved it and pored endlessly, with a
commentator’s infinite patience and disgust, over the crippled syllables in
Hazel’s report to find the least allusion to the poor girl’s
fate."
Associations are a dangerous game of patterns,
mainly because patterns are seldom "game," and associations even
less so (Steinberg offered his own & I don't think he was really playing
with specific allusions, but there is order in his chaos!)