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Re: THOUGHTS: the need for climax in Canto 4
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Matt[ to Gary] "I think you may be overselling the degree to which the lack of art reveals madness... Shade needs to get us to line 1000, so we need another 15 lines. In these we find...details...trivial in the poem itself... we get the final interruption--a man with a wheelbarrow. Who is he? What is he doing in the penultimate line of the poem? And how does that wheelbarrow lead us back to line 1? I know the relationship to the clockwork toy, but I don't think Shade himself is making that connection here."
JM: In a long past posting ( January 2007, # 197 amd Jan 22 listserv.ucsb.edu/lsv-cgi-bin/wa?A3=ind0905...) Matt and I discussed gardener, wheelbarrow and butterfly similar to the ones I'd spotted in "King Queen Knave." * Da capo!!!! (as in line 1000?)
Checking the archives:Don B. Johnson..."suggested that echoes of Pale Fire 1962 entered the English 1968 version of Russian KQKn. I had thought the closeness of a Red Vanessa and death would confirm PF's lines - not the other way round.
Don's idea is factually more relevant. May I propose something new? That a Red Vanessa and doom, plus other repeated items, are a part of an even earlier experience which Nabokov inserted in various novels? There are various elements that are placed together with clock-work toy, doom-butterfly and gardener and wheel-barrow. For example: sounds (trundling and clink-tinkle and click clunk) and "heraldic design" ( the Red Vanessa is a "heraldic butterfly") Wheels and wheeling, too?
Oct. 2006,#415: "The neighbor's gardener might not have been "trundling a barrow" since he was holding a spade with which he hit Gradus"...a "real fictional" gardener and a "real fictional" black clockwork toy belonging to Shade into a "fictional fictional" black gardener trundling a barrow, who is also associated with Gradus as a "clockwork man".
.................................................................................................
*KQKn : Tom, the Alsatian dog, jumps from light into shadow to appear as a "spectre of a dog" (758). Dreyer's gardener "moved off with his wheelbarrow, turning with geometrical precision at the intersections of gravel paths, and Tom, rising lazily, proceeded to walk after him like a clockword toy, turning when the gardener turned [...]Two men in top hats, diplomats or undertakers, went by...Out of nowhere came a Red Admiral butterfly, settled on the edge of the table, opened its wings..." (769)
Much later, when the first signs of Martha's deathly pneumonia start to appear, Blavdak Vinomori enters the picture, VN himself, "walnut-brown, "a suntanned fellow", while leaning "against the wall was some kind of net: a bag of pale-bluish gauze on a ring fixed to a rod of light metal" (901). We also find a "split": "a strange rearrangement of emotions was taking place in him (Franz). Dreyer had divided in two. There was the dangerous irksome Dreyer, who walked, spoke, tormented him, guffawed; and there was the second, purely schematic, Dreyer, who had become detached from the first - a stylized playing card, a heraldic design - and it was this that had to be destroyed." (863).
PALE FIRE: "From far below mounted the clink and tinkle of distant masonry work, and a sudden train passed between gardens, and a heraldic butterfly volant en arrière, sable, a bend gules, traversed the stone parapet, and John Shade took a fresh card." Kinbote, note to line 408....A man, unheedful of the butterfly -/Some neighbor's gardener, I guess - goes by...Shade, lines 990/999
btw: Matt, besides the trundle exchange, Google-magic revealed a link (these are almost inevitable, considering the amount of retrievable online information) with John Webster's "The Duchess of Malfi"!!! Namely, "Cariola. Duchess's waiting-woman...Her name is a play on the Italian carriolo meaning "trundle-bed", where personal servants would have slept."
in a discussion at the "pynchon-l-digest" ( August 12, 2003) V2 #3482, two other bonuses:
897: "wick" -- "A piece of material that conveys liquid by capillary action." (American Heritage Dictionary)
Canto Four: Versipellis/ "There is always a psychopompos around the corner, isn't there? John Shade (p. 226)/ "We have seen that the original werewolf, howling in the wintry blast, is a kind of psychopomp, or leader of departed souls; he is the wild ancestor of the death-dog, whose voice under the window of a sick-chamber is even now sound of ill-omen." from "Werewolves and Swan-maidens" by John Fiske http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/1871aug/fiskej.htm
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JM: In a long past posting ( January 2007, # 197 amd Jan 22 listserv.ucsb.edu/lsv-cgi-bin/wa?A3=ind0905...) Matt and I discussed gardener, wheelbarrow and butterfly similar to the ones I'd spotted in "King Queen Knave." * Da capo!!!! (as in line 1000?)
Checking the archives:Don B. Johnson..."suggested that echoes of Pale Fire 1962 entered the English 1968 version of Russian KQKn. I had thought the closeness of a Red Vanessa and death would confirm PF's lines - not the other way round.
Don's idea is factually more relevant. May I propose something new? That a Red Vanessa and doom, plus other repeated items, are a part of an even earlier experience which Nabokov inserted in various novels? There are various elements that are placed together with clock-work toy, doom-butterfly and gardener and wheel-barrow. For example: sounds (trundling and clink-tinkle and click clunk) and "heraldic design" ( the Red Vanessa is a "heraldic butterfly") Wheels and wheeling, too?
Oct. 2006,#415: "The neighbor's gardener might not have been "trundling a barrow" since he was holding a spade with which he hit Gradus"...a "real fictional" gardener and a "real fictional" black clockwork toy belonging to Shade into a "fictional fictional" black gardener trundling a barrow, who is also associated with Gradus as a "clockwork man".
.................................................................................................
*KQKn : Tom, the Alsatian dog, jumps from light into shadow to appear as a "spectre of a dog" (758). Dreyer's gardener "moved off with his wheelbarrow, turning with geometrical precision at the intersections of gravel paths, and Tom, rising lazily, proceeded to walk after him like a clockword toy, turning when the gardener turned [...]Two men in top hats, diplomats or undertakers, went by...Out of nowhere came a Red Admiral butterfly, settled on the edge of the table, opened its wings..." (769)
Much later, when the first signs of Martha's deathly pneumonia start to appear, Blavdak Vinomori enters the picture, VN himself, "walnut-brown, "a suntanned fellow", while leaning "against the wall was some kind of net: a bag of pale-bluish gauze on a ring fixed to a rod of light metal" (901). We also find a "split": "a strange rearrangement of emotions was taking place in him (Franz). Dreyer had divided in two. There was the dangerous irksome Dreyer, who walked, spoke, tormented him, guffawed; and there was the second, purely schematic, Dreyer, who had become detached from the first - a stylized playing card, a heraldic design - and it was this that had to be destroyed." (863).
PALE FIRE: "From far below mounted the clink and tinkle of distant masonry work, and a sudden train passed between gardens, and a heraldic butterfly volant en arrière, sable, a bend gules, traversed the stone parapet, and John Shade took a fresh card." Kinbote, note to line 408....A man, unheedful of the butterfly -/Some neighbor's gardener, I guess - goes by...Shade, lines 990/999
btw: Matt, besides the trundle exchange, Google-magic revealed a link (these are almost inevitable, considering the amount of retrievable online information) with John Webster's "The Duchess of Malfi"!!! Namely, "Cariola. Duchess's waiting-woman...Her name is a play on the Italian carriolo meaning "trundle-bed", where personal servants would have slept."
in a discussion at the "pynchon-l-digest" ( August 12, 2003) V2 #3482, two other bonuses:
897: "wick" -- "A piece of material that conveys liquid by capillary action." (American Heritage Dictionary)
Canto Four: Versipellis/ "There is always a psychopompos around the corner, isn't there? John Shade (p. 226)/ "We have seen that the original werewolf, howling in the wintry blast, is a kind of psychopomp, or leader of departed souls; he is the wild ancestor of the death-dog, whose voice under the window of a sick-chamber is even now sound of ill-omen." from "Werewolves and Swan-maidens" by John Fiske http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/1871aug/fiskej.htm
:
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/