NABOKV-L discussion

Kinbote signs his foreword to Pale Fire with the date “August 19, 1959, Cedarn Utana.” This date contains crucial information to understanding the novel.

     For several years now I have been posting on this site various ideas I have about a Jungian substrate to PALE FIRE. I have now consolidated and formulated three main parts of my  WIP “Archetype, Alchemy, & Allegory: The Jungian Substrate of Nabokov’s PALE FIRE” which I’ve uploaded to Cambridge Engage, a new site for works-in-progress. These also can be viewed on academia.edu.

A couple of points from Brian Boyd's latest Annotations to Ada (Part 2, Chapter 2) which I thought is worth following up.

I would like to say how much I appreciate the new feature, “Classics From the Nabokovian.” It’s hard to be “up” on everything that’s been written on Nabokov, even though we have this great resource here. I really enjoyed   Gennady Barabtarlo's "See under Sebastian," The Nabokovian 1990.24: 24-28.

Could the elusive Alamillo in "Time and Ebb" be the mexican general Luis Alamillo Flores, born in 1904? Not that he seems a match of Hitler, but being a military attache in Washington DC, Paris and the Pacific, he could be well known by Nabokov at the time of writing this tale.

Funny to think of that "98 war" too...

> archetype (Greek archē, "first," and typos, "imprint")

> arch = foot

> footprint = imprint of foot

> imprint = impress = emlem = stamp

> sole = soul homophone

I posted the other day about how I think Northrop Frye’s  Jungian based “Archetypal Literary Criticism” may actually be more the target of VN’s parody in Pale Fire than Jung himself.

I’ve gone back into the Listserve archives and found some interesting notes on Maud Bodkin, who’s preceded Frye with Jungian based literary criticism.

Gennady Barabtarlo wrote in 1998 (!):

This year seems to correspond with the dates and days of the main year of Pale Fire's narrative (1959), other than January and February (1959 was not a Leap Year but 2020 is). 

For instance the letter that Kinbote says he received from Disa "on April 6, 1959" (pg 93, Vintage version), would have arrived on a Monday, like today. (And had a fast turn-around time, being in response to a letter he had air-mailed on the Thursday before (page 257).)

(The quote in the title is from page 84.)

I recently have come across the work of Northrop Frye, who was the prominent literary critic at the time that Pale Fire was written. I suspect that Pale Fire may be a parodic response to Frye’s Archetypal Literary Criticism. This would strongly support my theories of a Jungian substrate in PF. I wonder if anyone out there has studied ALC and if this seems to fit.

Mary

From Virginia Woolf's "Rambling Round Evelyn" (1925) in The Common Reader (my emphasis):

"...that butterfly will sit motionless on the dahlia while the gardener trundles his barrow past it, but let him flick the wings with the shadow of a rake, and off it flies, up it goes, instantly on the alert. So, we may reflect, a butterfly sees but does not hear... But as for going into the house to fetch a knife and with that knife dissecting a Red Admiral's head... no sane person in the twentieth century would entertain such a project for a second."