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THOUGHTS: Housman in PF
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Matt Roth, in another fascinating find on a dust-jacket: While on vacation in New Hampshire, I happened to find, in a used book store, a first edition of Housman's The Name and Nature of Poetry. As others before me have noted, this book provides the source of Kinbote's paraphrase in his note to line 920: "Housman . . . says somewhere (in a foreword?) exactly the opposite: The bristling of thrilled little hairs obstructed his barbering."
Roth notes that " When Kinbote guesses that the Housman passage is from a foreword, he is of course wrong[...] The edition I found still retains its original dust jacket (unlike the library copies I have seen) and it happens that the very passage paraphrased by Kinbote is quoted on the inside front flap of the jacket. Not exactly a foreword, but this may be what Kinbote/Nabokov had in mind, I think."
JM: Matt, in the book you quoted Housman criticized eighteenth-century's pedantry and artificiality: "Man had ceased to live from the depths of his nature"..."He occupied himself by choice with thoughts which do not range beyond the sphere of his understanding". John Shade, perhaps prompted by Sybil ( Kinbote informs that it was Sybil who weaned Shade from religion), tried to be as cynical and fatalistic as Housman (lines 99 and 100 : My God died young. Theolatry I found/ Degrading, and its premises, unsound").
Although Shade tried to adopt a cynical attitude, as we see in his barbering bath-soap musing, he ended up embroiled in issues way beyond a common mortal's "sphere of understanding".
Below, an almost "religious" exchange bt. Kinbote and Shade, with echoes of Housman's fatalism running thru Kinbote's sermon - and where I also detect a subtle indication about Darwinist Granpa Huxley: "...knowing something of the rules of a game infinitely more difficult and complicated than chess. [...] The chess board is the world, the pieces the phenomena of the universe, the rules of the game are what we call the laws of nature..".
kinbote: Now I have caught you, John: once we deny a Higher Intelligence that plans and administrates our individual hereafters we are bound to accept the unspeakably dreadful notion of Chance reaching into eternity. Consider the situation. Throughout eternity our poor ghosts are exposed to nameless vicissitudes. There is no appeal, no advice, no support, no protection, nothing. Poor Kinbote's ghost, poor Shade's shade, may have blundered, may have taken the wrong turn somewhere - oh, from sheer absent-mindedness, or simply through ignorance of a trivial rule in the preposterous game of nature - if there be any rules.
shade: There are rules in chess problems: interdiction of dual solutions, for instance.
( btw, I learned that Housman had planned to sign "A Shropshire Lad" under the pen-name Terence Hearsay... )
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Roth notes that " When Kinbote guesses that the Housman passage is from a foreword, he is of course wrong[...] The edition I found still retains its original dust jacket (unlike the library copies I have seen) and it happens that the very passage paraphrased by Kinbote is quoted on the inside front flap of the jacket. Not exactly a foreword, but this may be what Kinbote/Nabokov had in mind, I think."
JM: Matt, in the book you quoted Housman criticized eighteenth-century's pedantry and artificiality: "Man had ceased to live from the depths of his nature"..."He occupied himself by choice with thoughts which do not range beyond the sphere of his understanding". John Shade, perhaps prompted by Sybil ( Kinbote informs that it was Sybil who weaned Shade from religion), tried to be as cynical and fatalistic as Housman (lines 99 and 100 : My God died young. Theolatry I found/ Degrading, and its premises, unsound").
Although Shade tried to adopt a cynical attitude, as we see in his barbering bath-soap musing, he ended up embroiled in issues way beyond a common mortal's "sphere of understanding".
Below, an almost "religious" exchange bt. Kinbote and Shade, with echoes of Housman's fatalism running thru Kinbote's sermon - and where I also detect a subtle indication about Darwinist Granpa Huxley: "...knowing something of the rules of a game infinitely more difficult and complicated than chess. [...] The chess board is the world, the pieces the phenomena of the universe, the rules of the game are what we call the laws of nature..".
kinbote: Now I have caught you, John: once we deny a Higher Intelligence that plans and administrates our individual hereafters we are bound to accept the unspeakably dreadful notion of Chance reaching into eternity. Consider the situation. Throughout eternity our poor ghosts are exposed to nameless vicissitudes. There is no appeal, no advice, no support, no protection, nothing. Poor Kinbote's ghost, poor Shade's shade, may have blundered, may have taken the wrong turn somewhere - oh, from sheer absent-mindedness, or simply through ignorance of a trivial rule in the preposterous game of nature - if there be any rules.
shade: There are rules in chess problems: interdiction of dual solutions, for instance.
( btw, I learned that Housman had planned to sign "A Shropshire Lad" under the pen-name Terence Hearsay... )
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/