Message One: Life as a
Commentary, a Message... JM to Jerry Friedman.
I promised
to find JF the link bt. lines: 939-940: " Man's life as
commentary to abstruse/ Unfinished poem. Note for further use."
and
lines 235-236: "Life is a message scribbled in the
dark" because I remembered a reference in CK's Foreword, but I
couldn't find it. Still, Kinbote's own commentary is
exceptionally pertinent: "If I correctly understand the sense of this
succint observation, our poet suggests here that human life is but a series
of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece".
Strangely enough, K doesn't read these verses in a self-referential mood,
as when he stated: "without my notes Shade's text simply has no human
reality at all"( Everyman's,page 28). Here he seems to have in mind
a question, similar to Nabokov's, about what metaphysical "Eye"
shall witness nature's perfect mimesis or accompany the evolutions of
mankind.
Jansy
Message Two: To Espy: Kinbote and Shade
Kinbote writes " I espied at last the
top of my poet's head", using the same spelling used by Shade (unlike
the meaning of espionage/ to spy) for "Espied in a
bark".( Cf. LA, page 610). I find this rather curious, specially
because this peculiar verb ( "to espy") seems to lie closer to
Kinbote than to Shade. Jansy
Message Three: Sublimation or Sublimination, JM to Don.
B.Johnson
Comparing Shade's "sublimated grouse" and
Kinbote's description of the poet as "My sublime
neighbor's face had something about it that might have appealed to the
eye...His misshapen body...intelligible if regarded as waste products
eliminated from his intrinsic self by the same forces of perfection which
purified and chiseled his verse" ( LoA,page 453,
Everyman's,26), I began to suspect that it confirms
Don's hypothesis on the transformation of what is humble into a
thing sublime, like Boyd's description of the metamorphosis of a
clumsy resentful woman into a gracious generous Vanessa
atalanta ghost.
And
yet, if we read from the begining of the paragraph (E.page 25,LA 452/3) we
find: " His whole being constituted a mask.John Shade's
physical appearance was so little in keeping with the harmonies living in the
man... dismiss it as a coarse disguise or passing fashion".
No
"sublimated" transformation is intended: these are Shadean words
only. For Kinbote, the poet's essence might be "sublime", but his
appearance is a mask, a coarse disguise.
There is no "sprung verse" leaping from one stage to
another, no real metamorphosis: the body is something ugly to be
shed to reveal the beauty of the soul. This seems to be quite in
keeping with Kinbote's religious affiliations!
Perhaps, instead of "sublimation", we
should examine "sublimination" ( according to Kinbote) if
we want to explore the "sublimated grouses".
(a) Kinbote adds a third item to Shade's methods of
composition: "if we count
the all-important method of relying on the flash and flute of the
subliminal world and its "mute command" (line
871)."
According to many,
ghostly
commands issue from this hidden world, instead of unconscious
fantasies. Anyway, both "fantasy & fantôme" or "spirits
&ghosts" obey a "subliminal command";
(b)
Kinbote believes that his "commentary to this poem, now in the
hands of my readers, represents an attempt to sort out those echoes and wavelets
of fire, and pale phosphorescent hints, and all the many subliminal
debts to me.";
Paranoic
& delusional Kinbote succintly takes into account the various
determining influences and "borrowings" included in Shade's
poem...
(c)
Kinbote
"literally" surrendersto a poltergeist effect: "one winter morning Shade...saw that the
little table from his study ... was standing in a state of shock outdoors,
on the snow (subliminally this may have participated in the
making of lines 5-12)."
(d) But, more important still, we discover
that sublimination has a sublimatory
effect!
Cf: "...worries
in no way connected with her assumed her image in the subliminal
world as a battle or a reform becomes a bird of wonder in a tale for
children. These heartrending dreams transformed the drab prose of his
feelings for her into strong and strange poetry" (notes to lines
433-434).
Kinbote
not only considers himself a poet ( like someone, JF?, had already found
out). He becomes capable of remorse and altruistic
sentiments.
Jansy
Message Four : Iridule
(CK's note to line
109): 'An iridescent cloudlet, Zemblan muderperlwelk . The term
"iridule" is, I believe, Shade's own invention.'
My first idea was
on how could Shade have invented a word that already existed in Zemblan
vocabulary. CK and JS might be one and the same?
In
my opinion, though, Kinbote had coined a new word to correspond
to Shade's. He seems to know a lot about "Conchology", a kingly specialty in
Zembla, interested in shells and pearls (cf. note on line 12).
It
is easy to translate the Zemblan word: "a mother of pearl cloud",
which Kinbote connects to other verses ( commentary to lines
633-634) about "strange nacreous gleams". Nacreous is a reference to
a conch or shell's iridescence. But the connection CK made is
strange, when we check it againt the original poem.
In
it Shade claims:
"I tore apart the fantasies of Poe, and dealt with childhood
memories of strange/Nacreous gleams beyond the adult's range",
whereas on line 109 we read "The iridule - when beautiful and
strange,/...mountain range/ an opal cloudlet in an oval form/ Reflects the
rainbow..."
Rainbow ( "arco-iris") reiterates the eye/iris, iridule
theme in one, whereas both sentences share the
words "strange" and "range", set close to "nacreous gleams".
But this is not enough!
[ In the same note
CK also asserts that, above the word "iridule", Shade had added:
"peacock-herl",i.e, an artificial fly to seduce fish:
an "alder".
There is no comment for lines 633-634, but they come close
to another "alder" ( Goethe's "Erlkoenig", a seducer of
boys if we should believe Kinbote).]
Jansy
Message
Five: Finnigan's, Finnegan's or
Finnegans?
In an old
posting to VN-L, on Thursday, August 12, 2004, under the
subject: Finnegan's or Finnegans in Pale Fire?,
R. Zahnausen
mentions that in a German translation of Pale Fire he found a
mention of the novel - "Finnegans Wake" is printed with an apostrophe =
Finnegan's...In his afterword Andrew Field mentioned that the
poor literary skills of Dr. Kinbote are dedectable by the false writing of
Finnegans Wake. With an apostrophe! R. Zahnhausen discovered
that "both of the 2
english/american editions (Pelican Classics and the Nabokov-Edition in "The
Library of America") Finnegans Wake is written in the correct spelling. (no
apostrophe)! " and adds that as "Jeff Edmunds told me the other day: "To complicate
matters further, in my own copy of Pale Fire (Putnam, First Perigree printing,
1980), the title appears as "Finnigan's Wake," with a second "i" instead of an
"e" and with the superfluous apostrophe." ...
What's the truth?
Brian Boyd
answered him on Friday, August 13, 2004 on "Subject: RE: Finnegan's or Finnegans
in Pale Fire? (fwd)": "As I recall, Nabokov made the correction in his own copy
of the novel. Hence the LoA change."
Jansy: Indeed,
my LoA copy ( 3rd
printing) carries, on page 488, the corrected title: "Finnegans
Wake". But I still found the same wrong spelling elsewhere.
In my 1992 Everyman's Library, on page
76, I found the same spelling of Jeff Edmund's Putnam,1980: "Finnigan's
Wake"!
This same (mis)spelling is also found
in the Brazilian 1985 translation by Jorio Dauster and Sérgio Duarte. Its second
edition, printed in 2004, corrected this spelling.)
Would the correction inserted by
VN have been made after Andrew Field wrote about Kinbote's mistake in his
"afterword"?
Jansy
Message
Six: to Charles
H.W. on Sprung Rhythm and GM Hopkins:
I found this explanation about
"Sprung Rythm" in the internet ( no help for a "Russian sprung
rhythm").