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Fw: [NABOKV-L] THOUGHTS on Shade's Litany of Hates
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Gary Lipon [to Jim Twiggs] You are right that almost all of the items in the shit-list can be attributed to VN, although Jazz is supported by Kinbote's the first quawk of Jazz and apparently shared by VN. You might like to go back and read the entire canto with this question in mind:For each metaphor how decipherable is it?
And now a silent liner docks, and now
Sunglassers tour Beirut, and now I plough
Old Zembla’s fields where my gray stubble grows,
And slaves make hay between my mouth and nose.
The disjointed thoughts, which begin right from the start of the canto, the looseness of metaphor throughout, the obsession with the act of shaving, and the litany of hates, some of which seem odd, all point to the notion that Shade is truly loosing his grip on reality; and perhaps his sense of identity!
JM: An advert about Verdi's opera "Nabucco" (lamentation about exile, lost love, lost liberty) bears an illustrative "Assyrian beard". Nebukhanezar's name in Italian is suggestive of Nabokov's surname - but this must be a dead end.
We often forget (when we imagine Mason or Irons playing Humbert Humbert, for example) that Humbert describes his either unshaven or grown beard ("to me as I am now, today, with my heart and my beard, and my putrefaction..."), plus the bearded woman, Beardsley, the difficult passage about a Kasbeam barber ("Lolita"), indicate a still not fully explored reference to shaving. We find "gilette," razors associated to bristling aesthetic thrills, poets (Shelley, Housman). Kinbote's "beaver" was shaven off in Zembla and there is a white "whitmaneske" beard in Bend Sinister (beards come in all shades of hair-color), aso.
PS: The author of the note about a bald-headed Pnin and a not as bald Nabokov, was R.S.Gwynn ( "V. Botkin" yields n b o k v (with i & t left over). I'm sure someone has pointed this out before. Sounds like a conscious red herring to me. The description of the man in the library jibes with every other description of Pnin (whose presence is earlier noted in the novel). Photographs of VN from the late 50s/early 60s show him with thinning, receding hair but not as bald. Plus, would VN have ever appeared in public (or even in a cameo) wearing a Hawaiian shirt? I doubt it.)
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And now a silent liner docks, and now
Sunglassers tour Beirut, and now I plough
Old Zembla’s fields where my gray stubble grows,
And slaves make hay between my mouth and nose.
The disjointed thoughts, which begin right from the start of the canto, the looseness of metaphor throughout, the obsession with the act of shaving, and the litany of hates, some of which seem odd, all point to the notion that Shade is truly loosing his grip on reality; and perhaps his sense of identity!
JM: An advert about Verdi's opera "Nabucco" (lamentation about exile, lost love, lost liberty) bears an illustrative "Assyrian beard". Nebukhanezar's name in Italian is suggestive of Nabokov's surname - but this must be a dead end.
We often forget (when we imagine Mason or Irons playing Humbert Humbert, for example) that Humbert describes his either unshaven or grown beard ("to me as I am now, today, with my heart and my beard, and my putrefaction..."), plus the bearded woman, Beardsley, the difficult passage about a Kasbeam barber ("Lolita"), indicate a still not fully explored reference to shaving. We find "gilette," razors associated to bristling aesthetic thrills, poets (Shelley, Housman). Kinbote's "beaver" was shaven off in Zembla and there is a white "whitmaneske" beard in Bend Sinister (beards come in all shades of hair-color), aso.
PS: The author of the note about a bald-headed Pnin and a not as bald Nabokov, was R.S.Gwynn ( "V. Botkin" yields n b o k v (with i & t left over). I'm sure someone has pointed this out before. Sounds like a conscious red herring to me. The description of the man in the library jibes with every other description of Pnin (whose presence is earlier noted in the novel). Photographs of VN from the late 50s/early 60s show him with thinning, receding hair but not as bald. Plus, would VN have ever appeared in public (or even in a cameo) wearing a Hawaiian shirt? I doubt 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/