Actually I was only trying to get all the numbers off my chest
while reading Kinbote to mark the orthography for his "cancellations"
and searching for more apparitions of Pnin ( I don't have a digital copy of PF).
I did find another "cancel" with only one "L",
in notes to lines 433-434 (page 211):
"She would be canceling an illumination or
discussing hospital cots with the head nurse"
Also a new reference to Pnin ( note to line 579,
page 229):
"Upon referring to my little diary...I dined at
their house with the following people: Nattochdag (...); Professor Gordon of the
Music Department ( who completely dominated the conversation); the Head of the
Russian Department ( a farcical pedant of whom the less said the better); and
three or four interchangeable women..."
I wondered if "fustian jokes" ( note
to line 286) had any link with a strange quotation I could not place that
ends with "fusts in us unused" since it sound so Kinbotean, and I cannot
remember his writing it ...
But here is something that I can still ask you
concerning PF and ADA:
Following note 334 ( page 193 EL) where
Kinbote discusses the Hunted Barn - later dismantled "to avoid its
catching fire", we find that " Science tells us, by the way, that the Earth
would not merely fall apart, but vanish like a ghost, if Electricity were
suddenly removed from the world".
Although I agree with John Shade that "one can
harness words like performing fleas and make them drive other fleas" ( page
214), I could not keep from wondering if Kinbote was not announcing
that, besides Gradus ( a creature living by words and trains of thought),
the misterious "Lettrocalamity" which made Terra and Antiterra
emerge, would indicate that the entire edifice of ADA is the
"fiction of a fiction inside a fiction" ( following Appel's description
of "involution" in Lolita).
In this case then there will be no "real" rose
among the artificial ones to surprise one's touch, neither any brass or
wood accretions to a painting to hide a "concrete" walnut...
If for our
author, "relationships" dominate over "facts" and "notation"
then it also makes sense to find it is Kinbote who is arguing in favor
of St.Augustine, the Zemblan High Church and promising "to divulge...an
ultimate truth, an extraordinary secret..." to John
Shade.
Jansy