Subject
[THOUGHTS] Danish stiletto, Jekyll, happy healthy heterosexuals,
old moon in the new moon's arms
old moon in the new moon's arms
From
Date
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Jerry Friedman responds on several fronts:
I should have tried harder to track down the connection between
"Danish stiletto" and Dr. Jekyll. The only place I've found it
is in Gerard de Vries (1991), "Fanning the Poet's Fire: Some
Remarks on Nabokov's Pale Fire", Russian Literature Triquarterly
24: 239–267.
Carolyn, I agree that that the "kinbote" in /Dr. Jekyll and Mr.
Hyde/ shouldn't be forgotten, but the link to the name Jekyll
is much more specific than that to weregild, which must appear in
some form in many books.
Please see below.
--- jansymello <jansy@AETERN.US> wrote:
> Samuel Schuman: Also of great interest in this concluding paragraph of
> Pale Fire, of course, is the blurring of the line between Kinbote and
> his maker ("I may turn up yet, on another campus, as an old, happy,
> healthy, heterosexual Russian, a writer in exile, sans fame, sans
> future, sans audience, sans anything but his art"), coupled with the
> speaker's theist reference to another maker ("God will help me...").
> Who is the "me?" Who, for that matter, is the "God?"
>
> Jansy In a typical equivocation we read about an "old, happy,
healthy,
> heterosexual* Russian, a writer in exile" and Vladimir Nabokov
hiumself
> seems to enter to overtake Kinbote. But Nabokov was he then "sans
fame,
> sans future, sans audience"? Certainly not. Another Prof. Pnin
dashing
> away in a little blue car?
I agree completely, and think you could have continued--he was
even less "sans anything but his art". A man with a wife and son!
Not to mention lepidoptery, which had provided him with so much
professional and personal satisfaction. The blurring is very
strange indeed, starting with someone much like VN and ending
with someone quite different.
> ....................................
> * the insistent "h-sounds" and the three "sans" that seem so
> familiar... where do they come from?
> ...................................
The "sans"es suggest the "All the world's a stage" speech from
/As You Like It/.
http://books.google.com/books?id=5awT8bHsVuoC&pg=PA125&lpg=PA125&dq=%22sans+teeth%22+%22sans+ears%22&source=web&ots=MS7gHqRnTr&sig=z-nk4EtgFbXW9Cvu0UVlrLVsFVw&hl=en
or <http://tinyurl.com/5wyrwv>.
> For those who are interested, a little more on Ashen Glow, Earthshine
> and Leonardo, with a passage through icicles, botkins...
...
> Da Vinci's Explanation of the lumen cinereum in the moon:
...
The only phrase I know in English for this light is "the old moon in
the new moon's arms". I don't know whether the following has any
importance in PF, but the first literary association that comes to
my mind is the ballad "Sir Patrick Spens"
<http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/eng/child/ch058.htm>
and Coleridge's reference to it in "Dejection: An Ode"
<http://etext.virginia.edu/stc/Coleridge/poems/Dejection_An_Ode.html>.
I must admit I haven't tried to figure out de Vries's
astronomical theory. I like it insofar as it emphasizes
how the text points to Nabokov outside the text, but we have
a moratorium on that.
Jerry Friedman
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I should have tried harder to track down the connection between
"Danish stiletto" and Dr. Jekyll. The only place I've found it
is in Gerard de Vries (1991), "Fanning the Poet's Fire: Some
Remarks on Nabokov's Pale Fire", Russian Literature Triquarterly
24: 239–267.
Carolyn, I agree that that the "kinbote" in /Dr. Jekyll and Mr.
Hyde/ shouldn't be forgotten, but the link to the name Jekyll
is much more specific than that to weregild, which must appear in
some form in many books.
Please see below.
--- jansymello <jansy@AETERN.US> wrote:
> Samuel Schuman: Also of great interest in this concluding paragraph of
> Pale Fire, of course, is the blurring of the line between Kinbote and
> his maker ("I may turn up yet, on another campus, as an old, happy,
> healthy, heterosexual Russian, a writer in exile, sans fame, sans
> future, sans audience, sans anything but his art"), coupled with the
> speaker's theist reference to another maker ("God will help me...").
> Who is the "me?" Who, for that matter, is the "God?"
>
> Jansy In a typical equivocation we read about an "old, happy,
healthy,
> heterosexual* Russian, a writer in exile" and Vladimir Nabokov
hiumself
> seems to enter to overtake Kinbote. But Nabokov was he then "sans
fame,
> sans future, sans audience"? Certainly not. Another Prof. Pnin
dashing
> away in a little blue car?
I agree completely, and think you could have continued--he was
even less "sans anything but his art". A man with a wife and son!
Not to mention lepidoptery, which had provided him with so much
professional and personal satisfaction. The blurring is very
strange indeed, starting with someone much like VN and ending
with someone quite different.
> ....................................
> * the insistent "h-sounds" and the three "sans" that seem so
> familiar... where do they come from?
> ...................................
The "sans"es suggest the "All the world's a stage" speech from
/As You Like It/.
http://books.google.com/books?id=5awT8bHsVuoC&pg=PA125&lpg=PA125&dq=%22sans+teeth%22+%22sans+ears%22&source=web&ots=MS7gHqRnTr&sig=z-nk4EtgFbXW9Cvu0UVlrLVsFVw&hl=en
or <http://tinyurl.com/5wyrwv>.
> For those who are interested, a little more on Ashen Glow, Earthshine
> and Leonardo, with a passage through icicles, botkins...
...
> Da Vinci's Explanation of the lumen cinereum in the moon:
...
The only phrase I know in English for this light is "the old moon in
the new moon's arms". I don't know whether the following has any
importance in PF, but the first literary association that comes to
my mind is the ballad "Sir Patrick Spens"
<http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/eng/child/ch058.htm>
and Coleridge's reference to it in "Dejection: An Ode"
<http://etext.virginia.edu/stc/Coleridge/poems/Dejection_An_Ode.html>.
I must admit I haven't tried to figure out de Vries's
astronomical theory. I like it insofar as it emphasizes
how the text points to Nabokov outside the text, but we have
a moratorium on that.
Jerry Friedman
Search the archive: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/archives/nabokv-l.html
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