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From Ron Rosenbaum:
Alas I think it is Jerry Friedman who has misread Michael Chabon's
misreading. Chabon doesn't say <Kinbote> tucked Zemba into
the poem <or> the "housing". He didn't say Kinbote tucks any
thing into anything. He says VN is the tucker, so to speak.
For clarity, for those who haven't been following closely, since I
beieve the point is important, here is exactly what Chabon says in
his New York Review of Books blog, first brought to the List's
attention by Jansy:
"Vladimir Nabokov, his life cleaved by exile, created a miniature
version of the homeland he would never see again and tucked it,
with a jeweler’s precision, into the housing of John Shade’s
miniature epic of family sorrow...."
If you now try to say it's not tucked into Shade's
<poem>--but into its "housing" (Kinbote's delusional
exegesis) then you are saying Nabokov "tucked" Zembla into
Kinbote's exegesis--or Kinbote "tucked" Zembla into Kinbote which
makes no sense. "Tucked" would be precisely the wrong word for
Kinbote's full, florid, blatantly mad projection of Zembla into
Shade's poem in his commentary. Certainly not an example of the
delicate "jeweler's precision" Chabon is trying to evoke in
service of his praise of "miniaturiztion". .
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