2 from Mike M:
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Certain identities fluctuate wildly in Ada, so Percy de Prey doesn't at
all times represent Vere, though here he does, predominantly. The
"daughter with pitcher" reminds me of the passage in Genesis 24, when
Rebekah, with a pitcher on her shoulder, offers water to the parched
Isaac, who is her second cousin and whom she marries (relatives
marrying; Cordula is also Van's second cousin). Tartar as Turk?
"Pitcher peri" must be the angel with the pitcher, whoever she is, no?
Vere and Sidney were enemies, and Ardis is the Sidney arrowhead -- a
"stab of Ardis"?
MM
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JM wrote .. It's so interesting to see that Percy first appears holding
"a flute of champagne," and the "fluted glass" in BS, with a
Shakespearean whiff. To connect all the "flutes", I bring up once again
one of the quotes related to Percy de Prey "One supposes it might have
been a kind of suite for flute, a series of ‘movements’ such as,
say: I’m alive — who’s that? — civilian — sympathy —
thirsty — daughter with pitcher — that’s my damned gun —
don’t... et cetera or rather no cetera... while Broken-Arm Bill
prayed his Roman deity in a frenzy of fear for the Tartar to finish his
job and go. But, of course, an invaluable detail in that strip of
thought would have been — perhaps, next to the pitcher peri — a
glint, a shadow, a stab of Ardis.)
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In her January 2004 essay published in the MLR ('Nabokov's Ada and
Sidney's Arcadia, The Regeneration of a Phoenix'), Penny McCarthy
claimed that there were three reasons "why Nabokov might have seen
himself as Sidney's double": exiled prince; imaginative obsession with
sibling incest; and literary innovation. I can't see it. If he imagined
himself as anyone's double, it would have been Hamlet.
Hamlet worshipped his dead father, who was assassinated. Hamlet was
exiled to England. He pretended eccentricity in his language. For
Hamlet, "the time is out of joint - O cursed spite, that ever I was
born to set it right". In his introduction to Bend Sinister, Nabokov
wrote that the choice of title implied "a distortion in the mirror of
being", and in Ada of " a distortive glass of our distorted
glebe"(Hamlet uses the phrase "distorted globe"). Hamlet perceives his
role as one of remediation; somewhere Nabokov said that he would one
day be seen not as a capricious phrase-monger but as a rigid moralist
(from memory, can't remember the source) curing ethical ills.
I suppose this is old hat?