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Re: Query: interesting association
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1. JM to DBJ: This entry came to my attention once ... Something set my mind at rest and I promply forgot the "interesting association belatedly realized" ...
PS: Now I remember what it was. I almost forgot it because it was trivial: both Kinbote and Shade lost their parents while still young.
2. Suellen to JM: a poet in California has taken all of the lines of Moby Dick and arranged them into verse format. Quite astounding really.Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or The Whale, Evanston: Northwestern University Press. ([1851], 1988), p. 44, 64, 79, 242.
JM to S: Similar to VN's choice, I remember how Dirksen's continued: The ship casts off her cables ...all careening, all careening...and glides to the sea. I'll try to find you more about this composition.
HM's: "I saw the opening maws of hell" reminded me of Pale Fire's reference to Lafontaine in Shade's poem: "dead is the mandible, alive the song", but re-examining it now, I cannot see why this connection sprung to my mind at the time.
There are too many associative threads running in our minds after one reads VN for the second or third or twentieth time ( for example: has the name Lafontaine, and his fabled ant, any connection to the hereafter vision of a "fountain"?).
It is my impression that most of the threads do not resolve themselves into a pattern, but are part of VN's "reiterative" style: we keep hearing past words and antecipating future ones, like in music or in certain kinds of embroidery, while themes pop up and disappear like bubbles
Examples:
Bend Sinister and reiterated pregnant images:
November trees, poplars...richly furrowed bark and an intricate sweep of numberless burnished bare twigs... Their immobility is in contrast with the spasmodic ruffling of the inset reflection — for the visible emotion of a tree is the mass of its leaves... They just flicker a little, of a neutral tint, but burnished by the sun to the same ikontinct as the intricate trillions of twigs. Swooning blue of the sky crossed by pale motionless superimposed cloud wisps...The cloud wisps are flushed with flesh pink, and the trillions of twigs are becoming extremely distinct... It is all inky black with a pale blue inky sky — 'runs blue, writes black' as that ink bottle said, but it did not, nor does the sky, but the trees do with their trillions of twigs.
(end ch1)
This was the last stronghold of the dualism he abhorred. The square root of I is I. Footnotes, forget-me-nots. The stranger quietly watching...Even at the very moment when I was rocked by the convulsion men value most... This night there was only a diffused glow where a Neptune of granite loomed upon his square rock which rock continued as a parapet which parapet was lost in the mist. ..Krug stopped, trying to control himself, with the palm of his ungloved hand resting on the parapet ... and he walked on — jerkily, because of the sobs shaking his ungloved soul... Krug shall later loose his glove...*
(ch 2)
The perfection of nonhuman creatures — birds, young dogs, moths asleep, colts — and these little mammals. A combination of three tiny brown spots, birthmarks on the faintly flushed cheek near the nose recalled some combination he had seen, touched, taken in recently — what was it? The parapet.
(ch 3)
* a glove and loss:
1. "Olga was at the wheel, Krug, a non-driver, sat beside her, his gloved hands folded in his lap"
2. "Krug, a hunchback for the nonce, inserted his latchkey and slowly reverting to normal stature stepped into the hollow, humming, rumbling, rolling, roaring silence of his flat...He took off the one glove he had on, disposed of his overcoat and hung up his wide-brimmed black felt hat."
3. "We might be shown, he said...Polonius in his youth acting Caesar ...the skull in Hamlet's gloved hands developing the features of a live jester (with the censor's permission)..."
4. "On the eve of the day fixed by Quist he found himself on the bridge: he was out reconnoitring, since ...Krug had only one glove, and he had forgotten his glasses."
5. "Watching the snowflakes upon the dark and beautiful water, Krug argued that either the flakes were real, and the water was not real water, or else the latter was real, whereas the flakes were made of some special insoluble stuff. In order to settle the question, he let his mateless glove fall from the bridge; but nothing abnormal happened: the glove simply pierced the corrugated surface of the water with its extended index, dived and was gone."
6. " he swung down the passage followed by Mariette and, a hunchback again, unlocked the impatient door.Young woman with pistol in gloved hand..."
7. " Numerous hands, several of which were heavily gloved, tugged at torpid recurved Krug (still in the larval stage) and pulled. him out."
8. 'Watch Those Curves': a curving line on a blackboard was shown and a pointer in a rubber-gloved hand pointed out the climactic points and other points of interest in the yarovization of the ego." ( pointers we find in Pale Fire, on TV weather reports; in Transparent Things... In BS they are sometimes representatives of loss, bare soul or bare bodkin and strangely linked to larval, recurved, hunchback position )
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PS: Now I remember what it was. I almost forgot it because it was trivial: both Kinbote and Shade lost their parents while still young.
2. Suellen to JM: a poet in California has taken all of the lines of Moby Dick and arranged them into verse format. Quite astounding really.Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or The Whale, Evanston: Northwestern University Press. ([1851], 1988), p. 44, 64, 79, 242.
JM to S: Similar to VN's choice, I remember how Dirksen's continued: The ship casts off her cables ...all careening, all careening...and glides to the sea. I'll try to find you more about this composition.
HM's: "I saw the opening maws of hell" reminded me of Pale Fire's reference to Lafontaine in Shade's poem: "dead is the mandible, alive the song", but re-examining it now, I cannot see why this connection sprung to my mind at the time.
There are too many associative threads running in our minds after one reads VN for the second or third or twentieth time ( for example: has the name Lafontaine, and his fabled ant, any connection to the hereafter vision of a "fountain"?).
It is my impression that most of the threads do not resolve themselves into a pattern, but are part of VN's "reiterative" style: we keep hearing past words and antecipating future ones, like in music or in certain kinds of embroidery, while themes pop up and disappear like bubbles
Examples:
Bend Sinister and reiterated pregnant images:
November trees, poplars...richly furrowed bark and an intricate sweep of numberless burnished bare twigs... Their immobility is in contrast with the spasmodic ruffling of the inset reflection — for the visible emotion of a tree is the mass of its leaves... They just flicker a little, of a neutral tint, but burnished by the sun to the same ikontinct as the intricate trillions of twigs. Swooning blue of the sky crossed by pale motionless superimposed cloud wisps...The cloud wisps are flushed with flesh pink, and the trillions of twigs are becoming extremely distinct... It is all inky black with a pale blue inky sky — 'runs blue, writes black' as that ink bottle said, but it did not, nor does the sky, but the trees do with their trillions of twigs.
(end ch1)
This was the last stronghold of the dualism he abhorred. The square root of I is I. Footnotes, forget-me-nots. The stranger quietly watching...Even at the very moment when I was rocked by the convulsion men value most... This night there was only a diffused glow where a Neptune of granite loomed upon his square rock which rock continued as a parapet which parapet was lost in the mist. ..Krug stopped, trying to control himself, with the palm of his ungloved hand resting on the parapet ... and he walked on — jerkily, because of the sobs shaking his ungloved soul... Krug shall later loose his glove...*
(ch 2)
The perfection of nonhuman creatures — birds, young dogs, moths asleep, colts — and these little mammals. A combination of three tiny brown spots, birthmarks on the faintly flushed cheek near the nose recalled some combination he had seen, touched, taken in recently — what was it? The parapet.
(ch 3)
* a glove and loss:
1. "Olga was at the wheel, Krug, a non-driver, sat beside her, his gloved hands folded in his lap"
2. "Krug, a hunchback for the nonce, inserted his latchkey and slowly reverting to normal stature stepped into the hollow, humming, rumbling, rolling, roaring silence of his flat...He took off the one glove he had on, disposed of his overcoat and hung up his wide-brimmed black felt hat."
3. "We might be shown, he said...Polonius in his youth acting Caesar ...the skull in Hamlet's gloved hands developing the features of a live jester (with the censor's permission)..."
4. "On the eve of the day fixed by Quist he found himself on the bridge: he was out reconnoitring, since ...Krug had only one glove, and he had forgotten his glasses."
5. "Watching the snowflakes upon the dark and beautiful water, Krug argued that either the flakes were real, and the water was not real water, or else the latter was real, whereas the flakes were made of some special insoluble stuff. In order to settle the question, he let his mateless glove fall from the bridge; but nothing abnormal happened: the glove simply pierced the corrugated surface of the water with its extended index, dived and was gone."
6. " he swung down the passage followed by Mariette and, a hunchback again, unlocked the impatient door.Young woman with pistol in gloved hand..."
7. " Numerous hands, several of which were heavily gloved, tugged at torpid recurved Krug (still in the larval stage) and pulled. him out."
8. 'Watch Those Curves': a curving line on a blackboard was shown and a pointer in a rubber-gloved hand pointed out the climactic points and other points of interest in the yarovization of the ego." ( pointers we find in Pale Fire, on TV weather reports; in Transparent Things... In BS they are sometimes representatives of loss, bare soul or bare bodkin and strangely linked to larval, recurved, hunchback position )
Search the archive: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/archives/nabokv-l.html
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