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[NABOKV-Ll] from the caveman to Keats... remember and dismember...
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After I found a curious item about Euripides, suposedly torn to pieces by the king's dogs and who wrote poetry in a sea-cave on the island of Salamis, with an additional surprise concerning Alexander Pope, I decided to go back to Pale Fire's multiple entries related to "caves."
CK: "my cave in Cedarn";
"a succession of drops falling from the eaves, eavesdrop, cavesdrop." ;
"a passage in Timon of Athens ...Having no library in the desolate log cabin where I live like Timon in his cave, I am compelled for the purpose of quick citation to retranslate this passage...";
"A powerful motorboat had been prepared in a coastal cave near Blawick (Blue Cove) in western Zembla";
"Charlie proceeding toward the remote treasure in the sea cave, and Odon remaining behind as a decoy.";
"I believe I can guess (in my bookless mountain cave) what poem is meant...";
"Our blue inenubilable Zembla, and the red-capped Steinmann, and the motorboat in the sea cave, and -"
and the special: ."..we undo the work of the ages, the history of the gradual elaboration of poetical description and construction, from the treeman to Browning, from the caveman to Keats. What if we awake one day, all of us, and find ourselves utterly unable to read?
Of course, Pope's scholar was John Shade, not Charles Kinbote. He makes one single mention to "caves" and I don't think he'd been aware of the myth surrounding Pope's own cave-writing. Actually, he was metaphorically referring to his own experience of "dismemberment" ...
JS: One ear in Italy, one eye in Spain,/ In caves, my blood, and in the stars, my brain.
What I read in Peter Levi related to Pope, appears in his chapter about Euripides: "There was a story that he was torn to pieces by the king's dogs. That looks like a characteristic piece of Greek mythification, but if one considers the kind of mastiff they probably were, then it does seem a perfectly possible accident. Another picturesque detail that sten scholars reject is that he used to writepoetry in a sea-cave on the Island of Salamis. I recollect an artificial grotto for the grave of a dead dog at Prior Park, overlooking Bath,put up by Pope. We were told as boys that he used to write his poetry there. Such a myth arises easily. And yet the sea-cave is no more unlikely than the ruined tower at Stanton Harcourt where Pope translated Homer, or the peculiar haunts of many other poets."
Peter Levi's History of Greek Literature[1985,p. 207-208]
.......................................................................................................................................................................................................
Levi also quotes, from Euripides's play about Pentheus (dismembered by the followers of Dionysus, among them his mother and sister), how the god, in his fury, announced himself.(p.235) .
I am Dionysus, the son of Zeus,
I came to Thebes, where Semele bore me,
made pregnant by the fire of lightning
.......
I see my thunderblasted mother's grave
here by this dwelling, and the ruined house
that smoulders from the living flame of Zeus.
These lines led me to incidences related to lightnings, this time in "Lolita," after I remembered HH's mother's death, and the fateful burning of Mr. McCoo's house, and to picnics. These, in turn, led me to another legend about dismemberment, namely Diana and Actaeon. (I cannot fail to realize the echoes between "dismember" and "remember" ).
Starting from Lolita's: ligtning, picnics, electric conflagrations, sex and fire.
Humbert Humbert "very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three, and, save for a pocket of warmth in the darkest past, nothing of her subsists within the hollows and dells of memory..."
"a distraught McCoo in wet clothes turned up at the only hotel of green-and-pink Ramsdale with the news that his house had just burned down - possibly, owing to the synchronous conflagration that had been raging all night in my veins."
"As happens with me at periods of electrical disturbance and crepitating lightnings, I had hallucinations. Maybe they were more than hallucinations... "
We may now return to what has already been discussed in the List concerning Brian Boyd's commentary on Diana, the Enchanted Hunters and Actaeon:
"Notice the names of Jean Farlow's dogs...Cavall was not only King Arthur's favorite hound, but the first of his hounds to turn the stag in a hunting episode in The Mabinogion. Melampus is the name of the first hound of Actaeon, in Ovid's telling of the story of Diana and Actaeon in his Metamorphoses... two hounds from different literary traditions that are the first to chase or turn a stag. Actaeon, remember, is the hunter who spies Diana, the virgin goddess of hunting, naked. Diana, enraged, transforms him into a stag, and his hounds pursue him, Melampus leading, and tear him to pieces... This leads us back to the Enchanted Hunters motif, and the idea of the hunter hunted, and of sex and chastity as linked with hunting and pursuit... Closing in on Lolita at The Enchanted Hunters, Humbert finds himself "hunted" by her when she proposes they try out what she discovered at camp. But Quilty, already at the hotel, witnesses Humbert and recognizes his designs on Lolita. This recognition inspires him to write the play The Enchanted Hunters, revolving around a character called Diana, whose role Lolita will take. The play itself turns out to be an enchanted device for Quilty's hunting down Lolita and then for stalking and hounding Humbert, now very much the hunted rather than the hunter, all the way across America. Just after Humbert gives up his hunt for Lolita's "kidnapper," he passes through Briceland... and The Enchanted Hunters Hotel, before writing a poem about Diana and the Enchanted Hunters. When he hears from Lolita about her marriage to a young American, Humbert resumes the hunt but finds himself chasing the wrong prey; and when at last Lolita gives him the scent he needs, he heads straight off to kill the man who had hunted and hounded him...Nabokov was a scientist and had spent most of the decade before writing Lolita in charge of butterflies and moths at Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology. He was fascinated by pattern in nature, like the patterns of butterfly wings, the patterns of matching patterns in natural mimicry...As a novelist he ...realized that the profusion of patterns in nature may obscure or distract us from other significant patterns. Beside Hourglass Lake, the character patterns of Charlotte's jealousy (of Lolita, of Jean) and of Humbert's scornfulness of adult women, and the wry verbal patterns of free indirect speech, here ironically maximizing the mental distance between Humbert and Jean-all seem much more prominent than the incidental Cavall and Melampus./Even if we track down Cavall and Melampus, and link them to the Enchanted Hunters, and through Cavall as King Arthur's dog link to the Arthurian pattern ... I am not satisfied with what we can interpret of either the Enchanted Hunters or the Arthurian (and Merlinesque) pattern. Nabokov's patterns have powerful implications, once we trace them far enough, and in the case of Lolita I don't think I or anyone else has yet reached that point. Book Essay - Spring 2008 - The Art of Literature and the Science of Literature :"The delight we get from detecting patterns in books, and in life, can be measured and understood" By Brian Boyd ("The American Scholar On Line")
The List discussion added A.Bouazza's link bt. Farlow's dogs and Lord Byron's, providing one more link to Nabokov's patterns, now extending from "Lolita" to "Pale Fire" (even to "Ada", and incest, through Lord Byron).
In her book about Pale Fire ("Find What the Sailor has Hidden") Priscilla Meyer offers to entries about Diana in her Index:
Diana goddess: p.16-17 the "feelings of the heroes (Onegin and Humbert) and heroines (Tatianna and Lolita) are juxtaposed to the authorial persona's relation to his muse, who is associated in both novels with the goddess Diana, the moon, and Gottfried Burger's Lenore..."
Diana butterfly: 170-176
p.170 Pale Fire is set in Appalachia at a point, where, Shade tells Kinbote, the Canadian and Austral zones blend (quotes note to line 238) so that one finds both the Diana and the Atlantis butterflies, each mentioned in Shade's poem, Besides a passion for lepidoptera, there are biographical points of contact between Wallace and Nabokov.
176: quoting CK's note to line 347 (Another, less pointless, story awaited me at the top of the hill, where a square plot invaded with willow herb, milkweed and ironweed, and teeming with butterflies, contrasted sharply with the goldenrod all around it.) "Ironweed is fed on by the Diana butterfly mentioned elsewhere by Shade as defining the Austral zone of Appalachia."
There are many avenues for inter-textual research. Right now, I'm reading again P.Meyer's chapter linking Lolita and PF and enjoying afresh Alfred Appel's notes to "Lolita" in which he offers, among many other fascinating items) connections between these two novels.
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CK: "my cave in Cedarn";
"a succession of drops falling from the eaves, eavesdrop, cavesdrop." ;
"a passage in Timon of Athens ...Having no library in the desolate log cabin where I live like Timon in his cave, I am compelled for the purpose of quick citation to retranslate this passage...";
"A powerful motorboat had been prepared in a coastal cave near Blawick (Blue Cove) in western Zembla";
"Charlie proceeding toward the remote treasure in the sea cave, and Odon remaining behind as a decoy.";
"I believe I can guess (in my bookless mountain cave) what poem is meant...";
"Our blue inenubilable Zembla, and the red-capped Steinmann, and the motorboat in the sea cave, and -"
and the special: ."..we undo the work of the ages, the history of the gradual elaboration of poetical description and construction, from the treeman to Browning, from the caveman to Keats. What if we awake one day, all of us, and find ourselves utterly unable to read?
Of course, Pope's scholar was John Shade, not Charles Kinbote. He makes one single mention to "caves" and I don't think he'd been aware of the myth surrounding Pope's own cave-writing. Actually, he was metaphorically referring to his own experience of "dismemberment" ...
JS: One ear in Italy, one eye in Spain,/ In caves, my blood, and in the stars, my brain.
What I read in Peter Levi related to Pope, appears in his chapter about Euripides: "There was a story that he was torn to pieces by the king's dogs. That looks like a characteristic piece of Greek mythification, but if one considers the kind of mastiff they probably were, then it does seem a perfectly possible accident. Another picturesque detail that sten scholars reject is that he used to writepoetry in a sea-cave on the Island of Salamis. I recollect an artificial grotto for the grave of a dead dog at Prior Park, overlooking Bath,put up by Pope. We were told as boys that he used to write his poetry there. Such a myth arises easily. And yet the sea-cave is no more unlikely than the ruined tower at Stanton Harcourt where Pope translated Homer, or the peculiar haunts of many other poets."
Peter Levi's History of Greek Literature[1985,p. 207-208]
.......................................................................................................................................................................................................
Levi also quotes, from Euripides's play about Pentheus (dismembered by the followers of Dionysus, among them his mother and sister), how the god, in his fury, announced himself.(p.235) .
I am Dionysus, the son of Zeus,
I came to Thebes, where Semele bore me,
made pregnant by the fire of lightning
.......
I see my thunderblasted mother's grave
here by this dwelling, and the ruined house
that smoulders from the living flame of Zeus.
These lines led me to incidences related to lightnings, this time in "Lolita," after I remembered HH's mother's death, and the fateful burning of Mr. McCoo's house, and to picnics. These, in turn, led me to another legend about dismemberment, namely Diana and Actaeon. (I cannot fail to realize the echoes between "dismember" and "remember" ).
Starting from Lolita's: ligtning, picnics, electric conflagrations, sex and fire.
Humbert Humbert "very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three, and, save for a pocket of warmth in the darkest past, nothing of her subsists within the hollows and dells of memory..."
"a distraught McCoo in wet clothes turned up at the only hotel of green-and-pink Ramsdale with the news that his house had just burned down - possibly, owing to the synchronous conflagration that had been raging all night in my veins."
"As happens with me at periods of electrical disturbance and crepitating lightnings, I had hallucinations. Maybe they were more than hallucinations... "
We may now return to what has already been discussed in the List concerning Brian Boyd's commentary on Diana, the Enchanted Hunters and Actaeon:
"Notice the names of Jean Farlow's dogs...Cavall was not only King Arthur's favorite hound, but the first of his hounds to turn the stag in a hunting episode in The Mabinogion. Melampus is the name of the first hound of Actaeon, in Ovid's telling of the story of Diana and Actaeon in his Metamorphoses... two hounds from different literary traditions that are the first to chase or turn a stag. Actaeon, remember, is the hunter who spies Diana, the virgin goddess of hunting, naked. Diana, enraged, transforms him into a stag, and his hounds pursue him, Melampus leading, and tear him to pieces... This leads us back to the Enchanted Hunters motif, and the idea of the hunter hunted, and of sex and chastity as linked with hunting and pursuit... Closing in on Lolita at The Enchanted Hunters, Humbert finds himself "hunted" by her when she proposes they try out what she discovered at camp. But Quilty, already at the hotel, witnesses Humbert and recognizes his designs on Lolita. This recognition inspires him to write the play The Enchanted Hunters, revolving around a character called Diana, whose role Lolita will take. The play itself turns out to be an enchanted device for Quilty's hunting down Lolita and then for stalking and hounding Humbert, now very much the hunted rather than the hunter, all the way across America. Just after Humbert gives up his hunt for Lolita's "kidnapper," he passes through Briceland... and The Enchanted Hunters Hotel, before writing a poem about Diana and the Enchanted Hunters. When he hears from Lolita about her marriage to a young American, Humbert resumes the hunt but finds himself chasing the wrong prey; and when at last Lolita gives him the scent he needs, he heads straight off to kill the man who had hunted and hounded him...Nabokov was a scientist and had spent most of the decade before writing Lolita in charge of butterflies and moths at Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology. He was fascinated by pattern in nature, like the patterns of butterfly wings, the patterns of matching patterns in natural mimicry...As a novelist he ...realized that the profusion of patterns in nature may obscure or distract us from other significant patterns. Beside Hourglass Lake, the character patterns of Charlotte's jealousy (of Lolita, of Jean) and of Humbert's scornfulness of adult women, and the wry verbal patterns of free indirect speech, here ironically maximizing the mental distance between Humbert and Jean-all seem much more prominent than the incidental Cavall and Melampus./Even if we track down Cavall and Melampus, and link them to the Enchanted Hunters, and through Cavall as King Arthur's dog link to the Arthurian pattern ... I am not satisfied with what we can interpret of either the Enchanted Hunters or the Arthurian (and Merlinesque) pattern. Nabokov's patterns have powerful implications, once we trace them far enough, and in the case of Lolita I don't think I or anyone else has yet reached that point. Book Essay - Spring 2008 - The Art of Literature and the Science of Literature :"The delight we get from detecting patterns in books, and in life, can be measured and understood" By Brian Boyd ("The American Scholar On Line")
The List discussion added A.Bouazza's link bt. Farlow's dogs and Lord Byron's, providing one more link to Nabokov's patterns, now extending from "Lolita" to "Pale Fire" (even to "Ada", and incest, through Lord Byron).
In her book about Pale Fire ("Find What the Sailor has Hidden") Priscilla Meyer offers to entries about Diana in her Index:
Diana goddess: p.16-17 the "feelings of the heroes (Onegin and Humbert) and heroines (Tatianna and Lolita) are juxtaposed to the authorial persona's relation to his muse, who is associated in both novels with the goddess Diana, the moon, and Gottfried Burger's Lenore..."
Diana butterfly: 170-176
p.170 Pale Fire is set in Appalachia at a point, where, Shade tells Kinbote, the Canadian and Austral zones blend (quotes note to line 238) so that one finds both the Diana and the Atlantis butterflies, each mentioned in Shade's poem, Besides a passion for lepidoptera, there are biographical points of contact between Wallace and Nabokov.
176: quoting CK's note to line 347 (Another, less pointless, story awaited me at the top of the hill, where a square plot invaded with willow herb, milkweed and ironweed, and teeming with butterflies, contrasted sharply with the goldenrod all around it.) "Ironweed is fed on by the Diana butterfly mentioned elsewhere by Shade as defining the Austral zone of Appalachia."
There are many avenues for inter-textual research. Right now, I'm reading again P.Meyer's chapter linking Lolita and PF and enjoying afresh Alfred Appel's notes to "Lolita" in which he offers, among many other fascinating items) connections between these two novels.
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/