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Fw: [NABOKV-L] Pale Fire's Conmal & other items
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Re: [NABOKV-L] Pale Fire's Conmal + TT TitleItem One:
DBJ wrote: Quite aside from the lines of inquiry suggested by Carolyn and Jansy re Conmal, has anyone noticed the simple fact that...
JM : How about this paragraph in Bend Sinister ( Penguin, page 77), if compared with Conmal's Shakspeare and Kinbote's commentaries?
"One day Ember and he had happened to discuss the possibility of their having invented in toto the works of William Shakespeare, spending millions and millions on the hoax, smothering with hush money countless publishers... since in order to be responsible for all the references to the poet during three centuries of civilization, these references had to be assumed to be spurius interpolations injected by the inventors into actual works which they had re-edited [...]
A cooked chess problem can be cured by the addition of a passive pawn."[...] "the creation of the sense of compact reality backed by a plausible past, of logical continuity...arranged in such a way as to suggest the action of memory..."
Item Two:
SKB wrote: "Busily buried in VN's EO commentaries, I am ready to believe in VN's omniscient (and omnivorous) precision - that there's a reason for every word & allusion in PF! (Is this verging an a 'personality cult' in my studies that VN would rush to discourage? Discuss)"
JM: I hope SKB has not become a victim of a "personality cult", but is simply making a realistic acessment of VN's omnivorous precision (although SKB did write "omniscient"!).
Stretching VN's "reason for every word & allusion in PF" to encompass one of the possible reasons for "nacreous-peacock-iridule-Zemblan muderperl" in PF, as the one presented in "Speak Memory", I wonder why did VN choose "oystershell", instead of merely writing "shell" for a bi-valve mollusk that represents a box with a lid? Could it have been motivated merely from the link of the cigarette-case and his father to establish a distance from a "mother-of-pearl" lining that'd still be nacreous enough to produce a pearl?
( I found two mistakes in my posting about a cigarette-case and "Le Pendu", when I went on to speak about a "hangman's nap...". "Le Pendu" is the hangued one...
Also when describing the oystershell shaped cigarette-case. Oysters are oval but with a very rough irregular shape, unlike the lovely design as the one used for Shell Oil and the proustian "madeleine").
Kinbote does seems to know a lot about "Conchology", "a kingly specialty in Zembla "(cf. note on line 12) .Shade also mentions them indirectly while referring to "nacreous gleams" (line 634, ant notes. Cf. also CK's note to line 109). If we move from the naturalistic aspect onto the other connections ( spirals, as in thumbprints or in a galaxy) we may enter the mysterious field of geometry and math ( Cf. Wiki: "The invention of the conchoid ( mussel-shell shape ) is ascribed to Nicomedes by Pappus and other classical authors; it was a favourite with the mathematicians of the seventeenth century as a specimen for the new method of analytical geometry and calculus. It could be used (as was the purpose of the invention) to solve the two problems of doubling the cube and of trisecting an angle; and hence for every cubic or quartic problem. For this reason Newton suggested that it should be treated as a standard curve.")
Item III.
"Bend Sinister" also offers a link with Kinbote's karusel and "revolving discs", "groove", "memory" and death's "nevermore" (crow, kruv), page 15: ".. the continuation of her voice came into being as if a needle had found its groove. Its groove in the disc of his mind. Of his mind that had started to revolve as he halted in the doorway... Spend the night here...In a hospital bed' ( gospitalisha kruvka - again that marshland accent and he felt like a heavy crow - kruv - flapping against the sunset)...you ought not to not to not to not to" - ( the world went on revolving although it had expended its sense...)
[What strikes me here is VN's extremely incongruous suggestion when he mentions the hospital nurse's marshland accen: "fighting", "fakhtung, fahtung...flukhtung...meteoric remnants of the firing"... We come across the "Le Petomane", exercising cabaret-karusel tricks, while Krug is still mourning his wife!
Quite often, also in other novels, these moments of loss are treated with a special kind of cruelty. For example, when VN first intimates the reader about Lucette's suicide. Or in Pale Fire, Kinbote's comment about Shade's death ("so much for Shade's last birthday"!) ]
Search the archive: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/archives/nabokv-l.html
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DBJ wrote: Quite aside from the lines of inquiry suggested by Carolyn and Jansy re Conmal, has anyone noticed the simple fact that...
JM : How about this paragraph in Bend Sinister ( Penguin, page 77), if compared with Conmal's Shakspeare and Kinbote's commentaries?
"One day Ember and he had happened to discuss the possibility of their having invented in toto the works of William Shakespeare, spending millions and millions on the hoax, smothering with hush money countless publishers... since in order to be responsible for all the references to the poet during three centuries of civilization, these references had to be assumed to be spurius interpolations injected by the inventors into actual works which they had re-edited [...]
A cooked chess problem can be cured by the addition of a passive pawn."[...] "the creation of the sense of compact reality backed by a plausible past, of logical continuity...arranged in such a way as to suggest the action of memory..."
Item Two:
SKB wrote: "Busily buried in VN's EO commentaries, I am ready to believe in VN's omniscient (and omnivorous) precision - that there's a reason for every word & allusion in PF! (Is this verging an a 'personality cult' in my studies that VN would rush to discourage? Discuss)"
JM: I hope SKB has not become a victim of a "personality cult", but is simply making a realistic acessment of VN's omnivorous precision (although SKB did write "omniscient"!).
Stretching VN's "reason for every word & allusion in PF" to encompass one of the possible reasons for "nacreous-peacock-iridule-Zemblan muderperl" in PF, as the one presented in "Speak Memory", I wonder why did VN choose "oystershell", instead of merely writing "shell" for a bi-valve mollusk that represents a box with a lid? Could it have been motivated merely from the link of the cigarette-case and his father to establish a distance from a "mother-of-pearl" lining that'd still be nacreous enough to produce a pearl?
( I found two mistakes in my posting about a cigarette-case and "Le Pendu", when I went on to speak about a "hangman's nap...". "Le Pendu" is the hangued one...
Also when describing the oystershell shaped cigarette-case. Oysters are oval but with a very rough irregular shape, unlike the lovely design as the one used for Shell Oil and the proustian "madeleine").
Kinbote does seems to know a lot about "Conchology", "a kingly specialty in Zembla "(cf. note on line 12) .Shade also mentions them indirectly while referring to "nacreous gleams" (line 634, ant notes. Cf. also CK's note to line 109). If we move from the naturalistic aspect onto the other connections ( spirals, as in thumbprints or in a galaxy) we may enter the mysterious field of geometry and math ( Cf. Wiki: "The invention of the conchoid ( mussel-shell shape ) is ascribed to Nicomedes by Pappus and other classical authors; it was a favourite with the mathematicians of the seventeenth century as a specimen for the new method of analytical geometry and calculus. It could be used (as was the purpose of the invention) to solve the two problems of doubling the cube and of trisecting an angle; and hence for every cubic or quartic problem. For this reason Newton suggested that it should be treated as a standard curve.")
Item III.
"Bend Sinister" also offers a link with Kinbote's karusel and "revolving discs", "groove", "memory" and death's "nevermore" (crow, kruv), page 15: ".. the continuation of her voice came into being as if a needle had found its groove. Its groove in the disc of his mind. Of his mind that had started to revolve as he halted in the doorway... Spend the night here...In a hospital bed' ( gospitalisha kruvka - again that marshland accent and he felt like a heavy crow - kruv - flapping against the sunset)...you ought not to not to not to not to" - ( the world went on revolving although it had expended its sense...)
[What strikes me here is VN's extremely incongruous suggestion when he mentions the hospital nurse's marshland accen: "fighting", "fakhtung, fahtung...flukhtung...meteoric remnants of the firing"... We come across the "Le Petomane", exercising cabaret-karusel tricks, while Krug is still mourning his wife!
Quite often, also in other novels, these moments of loss are treated with a special kind of cruelty. For example, when VN first intimates the reader about Lucette's suicide. Or in Pale Fire, Kinbote's comment about Shade's death ("so much for Shade's last birthday"!) ]
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