some thoughts on Hodge

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Sent: Saturday, April 12, 2003 12:46 PM

Subject: some thoughts on Hodge

Firstly, thanks to Tom Rymour for the photos of the Hodge memorial which I much enjoyed seeing.

The question posed by John Morris regarding the epigraph to Pale Fire has been addressed in The Nabokovian (Spring '91, no. 26, pp 44-49) by Gerard de Vries, in a paper entitled "Pale Fire and the Life of Johnson: The Case of Hodge and Mystery Lodge." De Vries has discovered a passage in the Life which certainly seems to pertain to Pale Fire, in which SJ is quoted as saying:

"Modern writers are the moons of literature; they shine with reflected light, with light borrowed from the anicents."

He also finds a passage about flies and horses which he finds pertinent:

"A fly, Sir, may sting a stately horse, and make him wince, but one is but an insect, and the other is a horse still."

It is a paper Mr Morris and others interested in the question will find worthwhile.

Although I don't know if there is a specific answer to this question, the epigraph is certainly suggestive of some of the themes in Pale Fire and some have been pointed out before: the relationship of Boswell and Johnson (the names Samuel and John Shade may be derived from Johnson's name and the Bo of Boswell might suggest Botkin); the theme of Scotland as an exotic Northern place is also suggested.

A shooting, a madman and a cat are also to be found in Pale Fire. Johnson's belief that Hodge shall not be shot may suggest that Shade too is not shot. A cat of course appears in New Wye and then seems to turn into Fleur de Fyler (in the commentary to line 80) rather like Alice's black kitten turns into the Red Queen (ili naoborot).

Another cat tangent that might be worth pursuing is suggested by that fact that in Russian cats are said to murlikat' (purr), which in turn suggests E T A Hoffmann's Lebensansichten des Kater Murr, regarding which this passage is most interesting:

Hoffmann resists authorship in multiple ways: by having Kater Murr [who is a cat] write his autobiography, muddling it with a fragmentary biography of Johannes Kreisler, and by confusing his own identity repeatedly with that of Meister Abraham and Kreisler.

(quoted from a review of a book with the intriguing title of Alchemy of Authorship; Subversive writing in Hoffmann, Scott and Pushkin by David Glenn Kropf, Stanford UP, 1994)

Perhaps someone who has read Hoffman would comment?

Carolyn