Subject
CHW to SS, MR, JM's recent posts
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SS wrote
> Odevalla, a fine town north of Onhava in E. Zembla, once the mayorship of
> the worthy Zule ("chessrook") Bretwit, granduncle of Oswin Bretwit (q.v.,
> q.v., as the crows say).
in what language "Zule" is the "chessrook"? Not in russian. (Ferz in indeed
the "chessqueen".)
Does Zule mean anything at all in Russian? The comment “q.v., q.v., as the
crows say” links the chessrook with crows. There seems to be a veiled
allusion to Shakespeare’s "Light thickens; and the crow makes wing to the rooky
wood..." [Macbeth, Act III, Scene ii]. There also seems to be an undercurrent
of the phrase "as the crow flies" --- as well as the manner in which it
croaks, or caws. How is "q" pronounced in Zemblan, one wonders.
MR wrote:
MR: This poet's ear definitely favors the iamb as the central foot in that
line. [Note to l. 231] Otherwise, one has to read "poor" as unstressed in the
first and
third foot but stressed in the fourth foot--a highly unnatural combination
that is very difficult to read. If, however, the middle foot is "poor
Shade," the line is perfectly balanced, including a nice chime
between "Poor old" and "poor Baud-". Moreover, it continues the completely
iambic cadence of the stanza, with lovely caesurae at the end to resolve
the chord.
If the missing name is Shade, the first stress comes on “Poor”; if the
missing name is Kinbote, the first stress comes on “old”. This is not
necessarily so very difficult to read (or, at least, I don’t find it so),
particularly as in the two preceding lines of the “rejected variant” the first stress
comes on the second syllables: “pets” and “minds”. Kinbote’s note goes on to
mention “senile imbecility”, so the sense-emphasis could well be on “old”.
The sense of the preceding line: “And minds that died before arriving there”
emphasizes age and senile imbecility, so a stress on “old” might follow
reasonably naturally.
JM wrote:
Does anyone remember who said: "images are eminently fascist"?
Google suggests to me that this idea can perhaps be found in Walter Benjamin
’s 1935 essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction".
On the subject of Buñuel and VN, I confess that I cannot see Nabokov as a
"surrealist", neither any of his written works seems to fit.
Reflecting on this I’ve been thinking that all art in the C20th, post Dada
and post WWI, is somewhat surrealist and absurd. When historical events make
no sense, in the spirit of C19th confidence in the direction mankind was
going, the thoughts of writers and other artists appear to fall back on the
subconscious, and connections are made between events and images that dispute
linear logic or "progress". VN seems to me to have been quite strongly influenced
by cinematic imagery in much that he wrote. The passage I mentioned earlier,
Gordon’s appearance in sudden successive changes of bathing attire, would
seem to translate especially well to film. Another surrealistic example that
comes to mind is his short story A Visit to a Museum --- if I’ve remembered the
title correctly.
Does Duchamp’s 1917 fountain also resemble a mountain?
Charles
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