Stephen Blackwell: "An important correction to my “Lolita’s Ape: Caged at Last,” published in the most recent Nabokovian (No. 67; Fall 2011)" related to the discovery of "the Life magazine photographs taken by chimpanzees of their own cage bars...first noticed by Michael Juliar (author of Vladimir Nabokov: A Descriptive Bibliography, Garland, 1986) and posted to NABOKV-L on Oct. 26, 1998."

 

JM: Steve Blackwell's note in the last Nabokovian is informative and instigatinga, a delight to read.

I was particularly pleased by the coincidence of themes because at the time I hadn't read his article when I posted N-L messages about "prison bars", the "body as a prison" (Pale Fire) and, following De la Durantaye's work, a caged ape, and an artistic fasting, in Kafka's short-stories. 

I just found a different reference to prison bars in Nabokov, now used as an example of "involution." In The Annotated Lolita.Alfred Appel Jr notes  in the Introduction (xxiii): "Speak,Memory only reinforces what is suggested by Nabokov's visibly active participation in the life of his fiction, as in Invitation to a Beheading when Cincinnatus strains to look out of his barred window and sees on the prison wall the telling, half-erased inscription, "You cannot see anything. I tried it too"(p.29) written in the neat, recognizable hand of the "prison director" - that is, the author - whose intrusion involute the book and deny it any reality except that of 'book'."