Subject
Re: PALE FIRE MAP?
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Hi, Tom and List ( and welcome back Beth!)
Tom was quite precise while rendering my disabilities as "LATH-like",
but I
confess that I only walked along this novel verbally and, in this case,
vision and optics came uppermost.
A persistent image in "Pnin" and its recurrent theme of dentures and
dental
work (not forgetting Clare Quilty's dentist brother) blended with my
troubles with New Wye. Shade's and Kinbote's houses, in a (too) quick
survey, suggested to me an experience similar to Jonas in the belly of
the
whale or a monastery where a fountain spurted inside its surrounding
closed
courts. Or a "mental geography" of sorts, with Shade being "engulfed"
by
Kinbote.
In "Pnin" we find ( Vintage edition, page 38): " It surprised him to
realize
how fond he had been of his teeth. His tongue, a fat sleek seal, used to
flop and slide so happily among familiar rocks, checking the contours of
a
battered but still secure kindom, plunging from cave to cove, climbing
this
jag, nuzzling that notch, finding a shred of sweet seaweed in the same
old
cleft; but now not a landmark remained..."
If one approaches this paragraph and another, earlier one (page 21) we
discover: "the sensation had the sharpness of retrospective detail that
is
said to be the dramatic privilege of drowning individuals (...) the
subsconsciously evoked shock of one's baptism which causes an explosion
of
intervening recollections between the first immersion and the last..."
one
cannot but wonder if VN is not satyrically summarizing a freudianized
British Nobel-winner's book, namely, William Golding and "Pincher
Martin"
where the chief character explores his mouth while in the intervening
seconds bt. his second drowning finds himself exploring a hallucinated
island with its caves, rocky crevices and slits (no direct references to
matters irrumatory,though, but these are still possible to include
here!).
There are the opening lines in Lolita with tongue and palate, also
somewhere
I remember VN describing words as "rolled around his mouth".
Tom's suggestion of Zembla's "typically precise in his Zemblan
geography"
opened up a new line of thought for me where New Wye, presented as "a
real
place", is not geographically precise and this contrasts with invented
Zembla's precisions?
Please, do send me the photocopy of the Zembla Map, Tom. I look forward
to
your campus cartography ( I hope you include the shagbark-tree, plus
pines,
five poplars (inter alli) plus blossoms, emerald cases and
waxwing-berries
for all seasons!)
Jansy
Search the archive: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/archives/nabokv-l.html
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu,chtodel@cox.net
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
Tom was quite precise while rendering my disabilities as "LATH-like",
but I
confess that I only walked along this novel verbally and, in this case,
vision and optics came uppermost.
A persistent image in "Pnin" and its recurrent theme of dentures and
dental
work (not forgetting Clare Quilty's dentist brother) blended with my
troubles with New Wye. Shade's and Kinbote's houses, in a (too) quick
survey, suggested to me an experience similar to Jonas in the belly of
the
whale or a monastery where a fountain spurted inside its surrounding
closed
courts. Or a "mental geography" of sorts, with Shade being "engulfed"
by
Kinbote.
In "Pnin" we find ( Vintage edition, page 38): " It surprised him to
realize
how fond he had been of his teeth. His tongue, a fat sleek seal, used to
flop and slide so happily among familiar rocks, checking the contours of
a
battered but still secure kindom, plunging from cave to cove, climbing
this
jag, nuzzling that notch, finding a shred of sweet seaweed in the same
old
cleft; but now not a landmark remained..."
If one approaches this paragraph and another, earlier one (page 21) we
discover: "the sensation had the sharpness of retrospective detail that
is
said to be the dramatic privilege of drowning individuals (...) the
subsconsciously evoked shock of one's baptism which causes an explosion
of
intervening recollections between the first immersion and the last..."
one
cannot but wonder if VN is not satyrically summarizing a freudianized
British Nobel-winner's book, namely, William Golding and "Pincher
Martin"
where the chief character explores his mouth while in the intervening
seconds bt. his second drowning finds himself exploring a hallucinated
island with its caves, rocky crevices and slits (no direct references to
matters irrumatory,though, but these are still possible to include
here!).
There are the opening lines in Lolita with tongue and palate, also
somewhere
I remember VN describing words as "rolled around his mouth".
Tom's suggestion of Zembla's "typically precise in his Zemblan
geography"
opened up a new line of thought for me where New Wye, presented as "a
real
place", is not geographically precise and this contrasts with invented
Zembla's precisions?
Please, do send me the photocopy of the Zembla Map, Tom. I look forward
to
your campus cartography ( I hope you include the shagbark-tree, plus
pines,
five poplars (inter alli) plus blossoms, emerald cases and
waxwing-berries
for all seasons!)
Jansy
Search the archive: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/archives/nabokv-l.html
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu,chtodel@cox.net
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm