Investigating the phenomena in the Haunted Barn, Hazel Shade (the poet’s daughter in VN’s novel Pale Fire, 1962) asked the luminous circlet if it was a will-o-the-wisp:
The notes continue for several pages but for obvious reasons I must renounce to give them verbatim in this commentary. There were long pauses and "scratches and scrapings" again, and returns of the luminous circlet. She spoke to it. If asked something that it found deliciously silly ("Are you a will-o-the-wisp?") it would dash to and fro in ecstatic negation, and when it wanted to give a grave answer to a grave question ("Are you dead?") would slowly ascend with an air of gathering altitude for a weighty affirmative drop. For brief periods of time it responded to the alphabet she recited by staying put until the right letter was called whereupon it gave a small jump of approval. But these jumps would get more and more listless, and after a couple of words had been slowly spelled out, the roundlet went limp like a tired child and finally crawled into a chink; out of which it suddenly flew with extravagant brio and started to spin around the walls in its eagerness to resume the game. The jumble of broken words and meaningless syllables which she managed at last to collect came out in her dutiful notes as a short line of simple letter-groups. I transcribe:
pada ata lane pad not ogo old wart alan ther tale feur far rant lant tal told
In her Remarks, the recorder states she had to recite the alphabet, or at least begin to recite it (there is a merciful preponderance of a's) eighty times, but of these seventeen yielded no results. Divisions based on such variable intervals cannot be but rather arbitrary; some of the balderdash may be recombined into other lexical units making no better sense (e. g., "war," "talant," "her," "arrant," etc.). The barn ghost seems to have expressed himself with the empasted difficulty of apoplexy or of a half-awakening from a half-dream slashed by a sword of light on the ceiling, a military disaster with cosmic consequences that cannot be phrased distinctly by the thick unwilling tongue. And in this case we too might wish to cut short a reader's or bedfellow's questions by sinking back into oblivion's bliss - had not a diabolical force urged us to seek a secret design in the abracadabra,
812: Some kind of link-and-bobolink, some kind
813 Of correlated pattern in the game.
I abhor such games; they make my temples throb with abominable pain - but I have braved it and pored endlessly, with a commentator's infinite patience and disgust, over the crippled syllables in Hazel's report to find the least allusion to the poor girl's fate. Not one hint did I find. Neither old Hentzner's specter, nor an ambushed scamp's toy flashlight, nor her own imaginative hysteria, expresses anything here that might be construed, however remotely, as containing a warning; or having some bearing on the circumstances of her soon-coming death. (note to Line 347)
At the beginning of "Circe," Episode 15 of James Joyce's Ulysses (1922), red and green will-o’-the-wisps and danger signals are mentioned:
(The Mabbot street entrance of nighttown, before which stretches an uncobbled tramsiding set with skeleton tracks, red and green will-o’-the-wisps and danger signals. Rows of grimy houses with gaping doors. Rare lamps with faint rainbow fins. Round Rabaiotti’s halted ice gondola stunted men and women squabble. They grab wafers between which are wedged lumps of coral and copper snow. Sucking, they scatter slowly. Children. The swancomb of the gondola, highreared, forges on through the murk, white and blue under a lighthouse. Whistles call and answer.)
The phenomena in the Haunted Barn occurred in October 1956, a few months before Hazel Shade's death (Kinbote does not realize that Shade’s, not Hazel’s, death is predicted in what seems to be Aunt Maud's coded message). The "Circe" chapter of Ulysses is written in the form of a play (it begins with Joyce's stage directions). In the same note of his commentary Kinbote (Shade's mad commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla) offers the reader a scene that he feels cannot be too far removed from the truth:
There are always "three nights" in fairy tales, and in this sad fairy tale there was a third one too. This time she wanted her parents to witness the "talking light" with her. The minutes of that third session in the barn have not been preserved but I offer the reader the following scene which I feel cannot be too far removed from the truth:
THE HAUNTED BARN
Pitch-darkness. Father, Mother and Daughter are heard breathing gently in different corners. Three minutes pass.
FATHER (to Mother) Are you comfortable there?
MOTHER Uh-huh. These potato sacks make a perfect -
DAUGHTER (with steam-engine force) Sh-sh-sh!
Fifteen minutes pass in silence. The eye begins to make out here and there in the darkness bluish slits of night and one star.
MOTHER That was Dad's tummy, I think - not a spook.
DAUGHTER (mouthing it) Very funny!
Another fifteen minutes elapse. Father, deep in workshop thoughts, heaves a neutral sigh.
DAUGHTER Must we sigh all the time?
Fifteen minutes elapse.
MOTHER If I start snoring let Spook pinch me.
DAUGHTER (overemphasizing self-control) Mother! Please! Please, Mother!
Father clears his throat but decides not to say anything.
Twelve more minutes elapse.
MOTHER Does anyone realize that there are still quite a few of those creampuffs in the refrigerator?
That does it.
DAUGHTER (exploding) Why must you spoil everything? Why must you always spoil everything? Why can't you leave people alone? Don't touch me!
FATHER Now look, Hazel, Mother won't say another word, and we'll go on with this - but we've been sitting an hour here and it's getting late.
Two minutes pass. Life is hopeless, afterlife heartless. Hazel is heard quietly weeping in the dark. John Shade lights a lantern. Sybil lights a cigarette. Meeting adjourned. (note to Line 347)
The "red and green will-o'-the-wisps" in the first sentence of Circe seem to be electric traffic lights telling tram cars whether to stop or go, but Joyce's language makes them heralds to a place of witchery. While "the royal red" is the color of Charles the Beloved (who escaped from Zembla clad, like an athlete, in scarlet wool), green is the color of John Shade and his wife Sybil (who live in the frame house on its square of green). Will-o'-the-wisps are ghostly lights that hover over swamps at night, constantly receding, drawing travelers into unseen dangers. In Goethe's Faust, one leads to a Witches' Sabbath. The opening lines of Goethe's Erlkönig (1782), Wer reitet so spät durch Nacht und Wind? / Es ist der Vater mit seinem Kind (Who rides so late through night and wind / It is the father with his child), are a leitmotif in Canto Three of Shade's poem. At the end of the same note of his commentary Kinbote quotes Shade's poem The Nature of Electricity:
The light never came back but it gleams again in a short poem "The Nature of Electricity", which John Shade had sent to the New York magazine The Beau and the Butterfly, some time in 1958, but which appeared only after his death:
The dead, the gentle dead - who knows?
In tungsten filaments abide,
And on my bedside table flows
Another man's departed bride.
And maybe Shakespeare floods a whole
Town with innumerable lights,
And Shelley's incandescent soul
Lures the pale moths of starless nights.
Streetlamps are numbered; and maybe
Number nine-hundred-ninety-nine
(So brightly beaming through a tree
So green) is an old friend of mine.
And when above the livid plain
Forked lightning plays, therein may dwell
The torments of a Tamerlane,
The roar of tyrants torn in hell.
Science tells us, by the way, that the Earth would not merely fall apart, but vanish like a ghost, if Electricity were suddenly removed from the world. (note to Line 347)
Speaking of witchery, one is reminded of "The third in the witch row" (Kinbote's remark during a conversation at the Faculty Club):
"Take my own case," continued my dear friend ignoring Mr. H. "I have been said to resemble at least four people: Samuel Johnson; the lovingly reconstructed ancestor of man in the Exton Museum; and two local characters, one being the slapdash disheveled hag who ladles out the mash in the Levin Hall cafeteria."
"The third in the witch row," I precised quaintly, and everybody laughed. (note to Line 894)
Hazel Shade (the poet's daughter whose "real" name seems to be Nadezhda Botkin) is a namesake of Hazel Felman (1892-1974), the author of Anna Livia Plurabelle (1928), a book that explores the complex themes of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake. This book is an in-depth analysis of the character Anna Livia Plurabelle, who is a representation of the river Liffey in Dublin, Ireland. In Joyce's story The Dead (1914) shades are mentioned:
The air of the room chilled his shoulders. He stretched himself cautiously along under the sheets and lay down beside his wife. One by one, they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age. He thought of how she who lay beside him had locked in her heart for so many years that image of her lover's eyes when he had told her that he did not wish to live.