R S Gwynn: This Magritte, known as
"Not to Be Reproduced," has always struck me as very Nabokovian. Surely VN
knew Magritte's work. Does anyone have a direct link between the
two?
JM: Yes, I do. VN's novels and
Magritte's paintings. Any other links would be indirect?
J. Aisenberg: ...Hegel's
Holiday. It led me to read Hegel and I was never really sure exactly what the
joke meant. Is it a dialectical gag? Thesis: rain. Antithesis unmbrella.
Synthesis: pesron under protected by rain. Only here the glass seems to be
protecting the water from the rain. A holiday from Hegelian
reasoning?
JM: Nice! You focused on the umbrella
I'd hallucinated in the Golconda painting. There are lots of things that can be
said for a holiday from Hegelian reasoning: that water can never get
any wetter? Not to build a tempest inside a cup of tea (in Portuguese
the saying goes: in a glass of water, perhaps its the same in
French)
To SKB & CK: a correction! I'm no
good with Spanish or Italian. When I posted the substitution for the last
paragraph on this theme, it was to late to have it corrected. The new lines
for C.K's and SK-B's picadillo I
have: picadilly, armadillo, picadero (riding-school, lover's
nest), picador (the guy that spits the bull). The "tiny sin" as "picadillo"
relates to SK-B's Greek "pic."as a portmanteau-word.
It seems that "tiny" or "little" is already indicated
in the end of "pecadillo".
James
Twiggs: "Puzzles," as Gertrude Stein famously remarked, "are not
literature." I may have butchered the quote, but you get the point. And your
response might well be, "They are when they're written by Nabokov." We could go
round and round on this for a few years longer [...] And so it goes, round and
round. It's not just the evidence that's in question but also the very nature of
the evidence--and what the hell counts as evidence any damn how? We are never
going to agree on any of this, are we? Is this our fault? Is it the book's? Is
it even a fault? (Jansy, Matt, and Stan--to name only three of our
regulars--would, I take it, join me in saying no to all three questions .)
Assuming the word "schreib" isn't an insult of some kind, I'm grateful for Piers
Smith's fast and funny response. It points up the idea that, at least in some
general metaphorical sense, Shade and Kinbote are, indeed, one and the same.
JM: Your reasoned posting was
a delight to read. May I disagree? Were there three or four
questions? And, indeed, I'd say "No" to all. I was intrigued not with
"schreib" ( related to writing) but with "zimmer frames" in Piers
Smith's post, if he was referring to Zimmer's notes, or to the
windows in a room. I'd been recently checking Goldsworth's windows (Kinbote
feared the Shadows and prowlers) and I passed too quickly in front of a
mirror inside so it only caught my awareness too late to take it
down. So here's the query: Aunt Maud's room was preserved as a
sanctuary ( why?) and her dictionary was opened on the letter M ( moor, moon,
etc). Well, Kinbote mentions another dictionary (Shade's? His own?) and it was
also opened on "M". Has anyone mentioned this item? I have no time at present to
search for it (there are lots of unshuttered windows to
close...)