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Re: THOUGHTS: Poor old man Swift
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Jerry Friedman [to JM] Kinbote's present tense ...If I can see any importance in it, it's that he could be revitalizing the moribund trope of the poet immortalizing his subject. Not only did the cicada sing after molting, it's still alive and singing in Shade's poem in some sense. Maybe.
JM: Maybe. Kinbote had emphasized the closeness bt. waxwing and the cicada (shadow, fluff and a live moving reflection).
For Shade the song was alive: metaphorically, through the poet's art? in another, spiritual, dimension?... It is difficult, and probably useless, to discover what Shade had meant except that, for him, Lafontaine's fable is "wrong."
JF (adding to CK's two variants, set down in a note to line 596: "Should the dead murderer try to embrace/ His outraged victim whom he now must face?" and, later, line 895: "In nature’s strife when fortitude prevails/The victim falters and the victor fails." Yes, reader, Pope.") "... Also Kinbote's "anti-Darwinian aphorism: The one who kills is always his victim's inferior."? Because they all challenge commonsense?"
JM: Perhaps these lines escape from the darwinian "survival of the fittest," by stressing that which isn't "biological", such as moral fortitude (virtue). And yet, this idea doesn't seem to fit into a Nabokovian picture (unless he'd been thinking about his father as one such valiant victim).
btw: a victim who "falters" ( Falter: moths or butterflies in German?) reminds me of VN's "Ultima Thule" and Falter ("was Falter a quack? Was he a true seer? Was he a medium whom the narrator's dead wife might have been using to come through with the blurry outline of a phrase which her husband did or did not recognize?")
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Hazel's "phantom swing", in an earlier poem by Shade, seems to be still hanging from a tree: "The empty little swing that swings/Under the tree: these are the things/That break my heart." I cannot recall where Shade observes the difference in size from the young shagbark in his childhood and the fully grown tree: didn't he note ( or was it someone in the List?) that a swing, tied to its branches, would also grow more distant from the ground? Anyway, Shade's emphasis on the swing always struck me as trite, almost cruel in its disregard of the reality of the pathetic young woman who, at some point in her life, used to swing from it.
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JM: Maybe. Kinbote had emphasized the closeness bt. waxwing and the cicada (shadow, fluff and a live moving reflection).
For Shade the song was alive: metaphorically, through the poet's art? in another, spiritual, dimension?... It is difficult, and probably useless, to discover what Shade had meant except that, for him, Lafontaine's fable is "wrong."
JF (adding to CK's two variants, set down in a note to line 596: "Should the dead murderer try to embrace/ His outraged victim whom he now must face?" and, later, line 895: "In nature’s strife when fortitude prevails/The victim falters and the victor fails." Yes, reader, Pope.") "... Also Kinbote's "anti-Darwinian aphorism: The one who kills is always his victim's inferior."? Because they all challenge commonsense?"
JM: Perhaps these lines escape from the darwinian "survival of the fittest," by stressing that which isn't "biological", such as moral fortitude (virtue). And yet, this idea doesn't seem to fit into a Nabokovian picture (unless he'd been thinking about his father as one such valiant victim).
btw: a victim who "falters" ( Falter: moths or butterflies in German?) reminds me of VN's "Ultima Thule" and Falter ("was Falter a quack? Was he a true seer? Was he a medium whom the narrator's dead wife might have been using to come through with the blurry outline of a phrase which her husband did or did not recognize?")
...................................................................................................................................................
Hazel's "phantom swing", in an earlier poem by Shade, seems to be still hanging from a tree: "The empty little swing that swings/Under the tree: these are the things/That break my heart." I cannot recall where Shade observes the difference in size from the young shagbark in his childhood and the fully grown tree: didn't he note ( or was it someone in the List?) that a swing, tied to its branches, would also grow more distant from the ground? Anyway, Shade's emphasis on the swing always struck me as trite, almost cruel in its disregard of the reality of the pathetic young woman who, at some point in her life, used to swing from it.
Search archive with Google:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
Visit "Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
Manage subscription options: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/