JM: Yes, indeed we had.
Thank you for extracting the gist of more associations ( ingle,
ingledom) to refresh my memory.
I was not intent on "Pale Fire" when the chance
appearance of "goblets and cup-bearers" reached me and made me recall their
presence in "Ada".
Sorry for not having been thorough enough and
reached your former posts, Matt. I was
sidetracked by noticing Nabokov's different, not totally
unrelated uses of "cup" in "Ada" ( cupped hands/gowpen, hands
cupped on breast or buttocks, breasts in bras... no "Bras
d'Or" to take us to Golden Cups/"soutiens", though! ).
...Next, while travelling to Pale Fire, the sudden glimpse of Gradus ( as the
dog Argus) recognizing his owner, a King who wanted to return to
his Kingdom...( the hints are there but they don't make sense to me, yet:
Kinbote as Ulysses...? Well, there are Sybils and mermen/maids...)
......................................................
Sandy Klein sent
news about:
"Alain Robbe-Grillet
turned the masses against inventive fiction. Now that he's dead, will
experimental writing make a comeback? " (by Stephen Marche) "English
fiction in the wake of Robbe-Grillet has become a deliberately old-fashioned
activity, like archery or churning your own butter. He represented, through his
status as cultural icon of the avant-garde, an entire generation that turned
literary experimentation into self-involved blandness. In the '50s, writers like
Nabokov could produce "Pale Fire" or "Lolita" and feel themselves part of the
mainstream of literary culture. After the '60s, after Robbe-Grillet, anyone who
experimented in fiction was being consciously marginal, or at least
countercultural. Thomas Pynchon (Nabokov's student) removed himself in the most
dramatic way; Nicholson Baker is another, quieter
example."
JM:Ermelinda Ferreira, in "O leitor no
texto", compared Calvino's 1979 novel and Nabokov's 1962 "Pale Fire"
in relation to the "aesthetics of reception" (K. Burke and H.R.Jauss).
After having recently
re-read "The Vane Sisters" (1959), Italo Calvino's novel "If on a
Winter's Night a Traveler" was brought to my mind, for it also
relies on acrostics and includes the reader.
I would be thankful to learn about any
article approaching Nabokov's "The Vane Sisters" and Italo
Calvino's 1979 book.
(And hoping that TOOL...etc)