Prof. Boyd and I exchanged some off-VN-forum ponders on the possible influence of naughty, seaside postcards (a very Brit genre dating back to Donald McGill circa 1904*) on a passage in Ulysses. I’ve come across a direct link to Nabokov which justifies on-forum mention.
Towards the end of §¬§à§â§à§Ý§î, §Õ§Ñ§Þ§Ñ, §Ó§Ñ§Ý§Ö§ä (English King, Queen, Knave, translated by Dmitri Nabokov), King Dreyer is at the Seaview Hotel in the Baltic Resort of Gravitch with Queen Martha and her Knavish lover Franz. Dreyer is window shopping and describes several comic postcards with unmistakably McGillesque risqué themes.
VN wrote KQK while sojourning with Véra in the Baltic (1928), and the reported postcards are matched by many wonderfully teasing autobiographical incidents and allusions in the novel (see, inter alia, Brian Boyd’s VN bios).
My only immediate access to KQK is the audio-book, so I can’t cite chapter/verse. The book is hiding in some nearby black hole. I plan further explorations, but it seems clear from the compositional dates of Ulysses and KQK that both Joyce and Nabokov were more-than-familiar with, and exploited, the McGill tradition of nudg-nudge, saucy humour.
Stan Kelly-Bootle.
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_McGill;
http://www.iwight.com/placestogo/default.asp?ls=rec&recid=1839&opt=