-------- Original Message --------
Dear Peter Dale,
The merry-go-round - noisy carrousel
- is also linked to death. It may change into the grumble of heavy
trucks or tourist cars camping in Cedarn but we mustn't forget Shade's
lines 609-614:
"Nor can one help the exile, the old man/ Dying in a motel, with the
loud fan/ Revolving in the torrid prairie night/ And, from the outside,
bit os colored light/ Reaching his bed like dark hands from the past/
Offering gems, and death is coming fast"...
You wrote: "the one shoe motif in
Cindarella, which you associate with Shade's brown shoe, in folklore
appears (the argument is made by Carlo Ginsburg in his Storia
notturna 1989, esp.Pt3.2 pp.208ff) to refer to death."
I won't be able to get the text you indicated (Ginsburg's) but, if not
exactly the shoe, Cinderella herself seems to refer to death when one
follows various different authors. Take Freud, for example.
In his text "The theme of the three caskets" (1913), Standard Edition,
vol.XII, Freud elaborates on certains aspects of King Lear and The
Merchant of Venice to show how the youngest of three daughters, in
folktales and myths, is associated with silence, hiding and death.
Cinderella is the youngest of three, Apuleius' Psyché, Shakespeare's
Cordelia. He also reffers to the three goddesses in the judgement of
Paris episode in "La Belle Hélène" and ends up with the three Parcae (
the third one is Atropos).
Nabokov often mentioned three misterious ladies in "ADA" and even Leda
was associated with "three swans" or "three eggs".
Myself, I didn't make the link bt.
shoe and death, as you found it described in Ginsburg. I thought about
slippers and shoes as some kind of "invariant", something that often
makes subtle appearances in various Nabokovian novels ( Pnin, Pale
Fire, Ada, Lolita and particularly in one short-story the title of
which I cannot recall ). For me, up to now, the shoe was related to
survival of a special kind.
Your question ( would it be the third
one?), relegated to the post-scriptum, is very complex. Without even
trying to scratch the surface of the issue you raised, but following my
motion to pick up Freud, I'd suggest that any authorial control stops
short when unconscious memories or desires make their presence felt, as
( so I profess) they usually do - at all times.
Jansy