Subject
Re: CLARIFICATION (Stadlen, Kunin, Hochard)
From
Date
Body
In a message dated 4/30/2010 3:18:40 PM Central Daylight Time,
jansy@AETERN.US writes:
>
> *- Like Stadlen, I was also taken in by the way Hochard inserted Carolyn's
> name in the middle of his posting - and this is why I attributed to
> Carolyn a reference to Maar and a quote from Transparent Things (they were
> Hochard's). I thought he'd been initially quoting her lines!
> **- From Shade's lines: "And now a silent liner docks, and now/
> Sunglassers tour Beirut, and now I plough/ Old Zembla’s fields where my gray
> stubble grows,/ And slaves make hay between my mouth and nose."
> *** - Wiki explains that the pun on "tub," following Alexander Pope's
> observation, considers that the tub "was a common term for a Dissenter's
> pulpit, and a reference to Swift's own position as a clergyman." and that
> Marat was killed in his tub a only a few years before Pope and Swift themselves
> died . My connection (Pope,Swift, Marat) is too forced, alas.
>
Shade specifically (and ironically) mentions Marat (l. 894), and he
alludes, not to Pope's "Zembla" (apparently a reference to Nova Zembla as an ultima
Thule in "An Essay on Man"), but to "old" Zembla, meaning that he is
referring to Kinbote's Zembla. Other than the stricken lines about the escape of
the "northern king," Shade is perhaps making a small (a very small) nod to
Kinbote here, to whom he has been listening for a long time. Does this mean
that he is morphing into Kinbote? I think not. It is hard for a poet to
get some persistent voices out of his mind when he is trying to concentrate on
other things, in this case an autobiographical poem.
That said, Swift's "tub" may well be both a boat and a pulpit, but it is
assuredly not a bathtub!
Lines 931-38 may be ambiguously metaphoric in only the last two lines. The
rest is Shade ranging outward imaginatively from "the country of my cheek"
to the nearby highways and hilly roads, to ocean liners, to tourists
disembarking in a foreign land. Maybe he, like me, sometimes likes to stick his
big toe up the tap ("now a silent liner docks"). He's already told us (l.
893) that he uses his toe to regulate the warmth of the bath.
Lebanon was deeply troubled in the second half of 1958 (shortly before this
poem takes place). U. S. Army and Marine forces landed in Beirut. About
six months later (the time of the poem's composition), the crisis has passed,
and tourism had resumed. Perhaps this is what Shade is alluding to in that
remark on "sunglassers."
I can't see Shade's lines as much more than amusingly whimsical, just as
the passage that comes before it catalogs a personal list of "evil" things. I
don't much like swimming pools myself, and bullfighting has little
attraction. As a matter of fact, I dislike most of the same things that
Shade/Nabokov dislikes. Maybe the reason why I daily shop at Market Basket is that
there's no music!
Search archive with Google:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
Visit "Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
Manage subscription options: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/
jansy@AETERN.US writes:
>
> *- Like Stadlen, I was also taken in by the way Hochard inserted Carolyn's
> name in the middle of his posting - and this is why I attributed to
> Carolyn a reference to Maar and a quote from Transparent Things (they were
> Hochard's). I thought he'd been initially quoting her lines!
> **- From Shade's lines: "And now a silent liner docks, and now/
> Sunglassers tour Beirut, and now I plough/ Old Zembla’s fields where my gray
> stubble grows,/ And slaves make hay between my mouth and nose."
> *** - Wiki explains that the pun on "tub," following Alexander Pope's
> observation, considers that the tub "was a common term for a Dissenter's
> pulpit, and a reference to Swift's own position as a clergyman." and that
> Marat was killed in his tub a only a few years before Pope and Swift themselves
> died . My connection (Pope,Swift, Marat) is too forced, alas.
>
Shade specifically (and ironically) mentions Marat (l. 894), and he
alludes, not to Pope's "Zembla" (apparently a reference to Nova Zembla as an ultima
Thule in "An Essay on Man"), but to "old" Zembla, meaning that he is
referring to Kinbote's Zembla. Other than the stricken lines about the escape of
the "northern king," Shade is perhaps making a small (a very small) nod to
Kinbote here, to whom he has been listening for a long time. Does this mean
that he is morphing into Kinbote? I think not. It is hard for a poet to
get some persistent voices out of his mind when he is trying to concentrate on
other things, in this case an autobiographical poem.
That said, Swift's "tub" may well be both a boat and a pulpit, but it is
assuredly not a bathtub!
Lines 931-38 may be ambiguously metaphoric in only the last two lines. The
rest is Shade ranging outward imaginatively from "the country of my cheek"
to the nearby highways and hilly roads, to ocean liners, to tourists
disembarking in a foreign land. Maybe he, like me, sometimes likes to stick his
big toe up the tap ("now a silent liner docks"). He's already told us (l.
893) that he uses his toe to regulate the warmth of the bath.
Lebanon was deeply troubled in the second half of 1958 (shortly before this
poem takes place). U. S. Army and Marine forces landed in Beirut. About
six months later (the time of the poem's composition), the crisis has passed,
and tourism had resumed. Perhaps this is what Shade is alluding to in that
remark on "sunglassers."
I can't see Shade's lines as much more than amusingly whimsical, just as
the passage that comes before it catalogs a personal list of "evil" things. I
don't much like swimming pools myself, and bullfighting has little
attraction. As a matter of fact, I dislike most of the same things that
Shade/Nabokov dislikes. Maybe the reason why I daily shop at Market Basket is that
there's no music!
Search archive with Google:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
Visit "Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
Manage subscription options: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/