Kinbote stresses Shade's allusion, as they were
written btween lines 653-664:
(1) "What is that funny creaking - do
you hear?" "It is the shutter on the stairs, my dear.", PF 653-654;
(2) "...made that thud/ It is
old winter tumbling in the mud", PF 659-660;
(3) "Who rides so late in the
night and the wind?...It is the father with his child", PF,
662-664.
Kinbote's omission might make us forget Shade's former references that connect the theme, not
only to Goethe's Erlking, but to T.S.Eliot and John Webster, in a more
tortuous way than I had surmised at first. The first intimation of the Erlking's presence, as I see it, comes
on lines 443-447: "Was that the phone?...There was no sense/
In window-rubbing: only some white fence...". These reappear after thirty more verses ( 479-480) "We heard the wind. We heard it rush and throw/ Twigs at the
windowpane. Phone ringing? No."
The similar line in T.S.Eliot's "The Waste Land" is
not present in Kinbote's selection. And Eliot,
indeed, only indicates John Webster: " What is
that noise?/ The wind under the door./ 'What is that noise now? What is the wind
doing?'/ Nothing again nothing."
Eliot's quote in the context of wind and nightly
noises [ Cf. Webster: "Is the wind in that door still?" ] probably derives from "The Devil's Law Case" (3.2.162).
Brian Boyd, inspite of its closeness to Goethe's and Shade's Erlking lines, does
not mention this work by Webster. Rather, he emphasizes Eliot's second reference to John Webster: " O keep the Dog far hence, that's friend to men" ( Cf. the Dirge in
Webster's White Devil, as annotated by Eliot and found in Collected
Poems, 1909-1962, T.S.Eliot, Faber Paperbacks, page 61-86) .
Boyd's text does not mention Eliot in
direct connection with Goethe's Erlking, either, but the link appears
through Kinbote! Since BB does write: " what
Shade does not realize, but we can see, it that it was indeed in a sense the
sinister "Elf King"" of Goethe's poem who was out there in that night of
wind, another fantastic king, another pedophile" ( here BB agrees
with Kinbote's interpretation about Goethe's Erlkoenig) ..."one of the many things Kinbote cannot understand is a parent's
anxious love for a child that runs through Goethe's poem and Shade's agonizing
echo" (page 85,TMOAD).
There are various other entries in BB's book, I
shall select only a few: " Evoking another warm, windy March
night exactly a year after Hazel's death, Shade mimics Eliot ( Part II of
"The Waste Land"), in deliberate tribute to the Eliot lines from "Four Quartets"
...The unease in the Eliot lines gives rise in Shade's memory to the deeper
unease of Goethe's "Elf King"... For us, though, the Goethe lines bring just as
surely to mind the image of Charles II fleeing in dread and darknes over the
moountains of Zembrla, muttering these lines to himself. And we will soon
understand the depth of the ironic reversal of Shade's sureness that he will
hear nothing from Hazel" ( pg 150); " 'shivers of alfear
(uncontrollable fear caused by elves,' echoes of Goethe's "Erlkönig"
have been gathering..."(page163)
( Both Eliot and James Joyce write about dogs digging corpses and VN was well aware of
this. In his Lecture on Literature ( Bowers, page 297) Nabokov observed:
"Notice, by the way, the term poor dogsbody. The symbol of a forlorn
dog will be attached to Stephen through the book", and a little further: "
Stephen will not go to Paddy Dignam's funeral. He answers his riddle, " - The
fox burying his grandmother under a hollybush" (...) In the sext chapter
Stephen, walking on the beach, sees a dog, and the dog idea and fox idea merge
as the dog foxily scrapes up the sand, and listen, for he has buried something,
his grandmother" ( LEL, Bowers, page 299). )
I always welcome corrections since, unlike
Schultze's character Lucy Van der Pelt, I never use a pen...I need a
pencil with an attached eraser when writing more informally at the
List.