NABOKV-L discussion

> archetype (Greek archē, "first," and typos, "imprint")

> arch = foot

> footprint = imprint of foot

> imprint = impress = emlem = stamp

> sole = soul homophone

I posted the other day about how I think Northrop Frye’s  Jungian based “Archetypal Literary Criticism” may actually be more the target of VN’s parody in Pale Fire than Jung himself.

I’ve gone back into the Listserve archives and found some interesting notes on Maud Bodkin, who’s preceded Frye with Jungian based literary criticism.

Gennady Barabtarlo wrote in 1998 (!):

This year seems to correspond with the dates and days of the main year of Pale Fire's narrative (1959), other than January and February (1959 was not a Leap Year but 2020 is). 

For instance the letter that Kinbote says he received from Disa "on April 6, 1959" (pg 93, Vintage version), would have arrived on a Monday, like today. (And had a fast turn-around time, being in response to a letter he had air-mailed on the Thursday before (page 257).)

(The quote in the title is from page 84.)

I recently have come across the work of Northrop Frye, who was the prominent literary critic at the time that Pale Fire was written. I suspect that Pale Fire may be a parodic response to Frye’s Archetypal Literary Criticism. This would strongly support my theories of a Jungian substrate in PF. I wonder if anyone out there has studied ALC and if this seems to fit.

Mary

From Virginia Woolf's "Rambling Round Evelyn" (1925) in The Common Reader (my emphasis):

"...that butterfly will sit motionless on the dahlia while the gardener trundles his barrow past it, but let him flick the wings with the shadow of a rake, and off it flies, up it goes, instantly on the alert. So, we may reflect, a butterfly sees but does not hear... But as for going into the house to fetch a knife and with that knife dissecting a Red Admiral's head... no sane person in the twentieth century would entertain such a project for a second."

Here’s an interesting literary allusion I just accidentally discovered in Pale Fire.  I was reading F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Diamond Big as the Ritz,” a short story about a young man who is a guest at a preposterously fabulous remote diamond and gilt chateau. He awakes in the morning and after being undressed by a servant,

Friends,

I'm wondering if anyone has guidance on how, going forward, we should be citing material from this list and the archives. In the past, our citations listed NABOKV-L as the container/publication. Now that all that material has been moved to thenabokovian.org, I'm not sure how to cite specific posts. If we had an official, standardized policy that we all could use, that would be helpful.

Matt Roth

I would like to announce that I have uploaded to academia.edu a major part of my work-in-progress on the Jungian substrate of PALE FIRE:

  ‘THE TRI-PART MAN: Archetype, Alchemy, and Art in Nabokov’s PALE FIRE’

It is uploaded as a draft and can be commented on, which I would find very helpful.

Has it ever been noted that Prince Charles (Kinbote) and his first love, Oleg may be half brothers? (Both sons of Col. Gusev)

It seems to me that Prince Charles’ mother, Blenda, and Colonel Gusev are intimated in an affaire and were likely in cahoots with the airplane crash demise of King Alfin (sort of a Hamlet scenario). Kinbote is likely the son of Gusev.

See attached diagram

Having not read much Nabokov criticism yet, I am still mostly indebted to annotators online, and one astute contributor on genius, points out that that lemniscate "is a standard meteorological symbol for haze", connecting to the poet's desire for his daughter Hazel's soul to be eternal.

Haze generally is a phenomenon of obfuscation, a grey filter inhibiting vision and clarity, composed of dry particles such as smoke, dust, (stardust?) and sand (the latter a unit of time, a thousand years ago).