S K-B to Matt: is it really surprising
that in many (most?) cultures the duty of caring for orphans should fall on the
nearest available kin of the deceased parent(s)? [...] The choice of childhood-
and parental-background for key characters is usually plot-relevant, of course,
but the basic choices are quite limited!
JM: I
wikipediaed "changelings": "The changeling,
for example, is the baby left behind by malevolent fairies to replace the
original they've snatched for themselves. (In premodern Europe, midwives were
suspected of witchcraft in part because they were thought capable of presiding
over such secret switches.) The theme of mistaken identity -- of birthrights
dispossessed and ultimately reclaimed, of one child living out a life destined
for another -- underlies the narrative not only of Bible stories like Moses in
the bulrushes and of fairy tales like ''The Princess and the Pea,'' but of great
and kitschy literary characters, from Little Lord Fauntleroy to Daniel Deronda.
And, of course, Mark Twain's ''The Prince and the Pauper'' and ''Puddn'head
Wilson,'' in the latter of which the mother of a baby born into slavery
exchanges him with the master's son."
I also checked in VN for "lightning" ( found no other
mention of lightning-orphaned kids besides HH, but I'm still
looking!).
Here is what I gleaned:
The Defence
"Luzhin [...] did not have to
deal with visible, audible, palpable pieces whose quaint shape and wooden
materiality always disturbed him and always seemed to him but the crude, mortal
shell of exquisite, invisible chess forces[...] he felt quite clearly that this
or that imaginary square was occupied by a definite, concentrated force, so that
he envisioned the movement of a piece as a discharge, a shock, a stroke of
lightning — and the whole chess field quivered with tension, and over this
tension he was sovereign, here gathering in and there releasing electric
power[...] he conducted in a celestial dimension, where his tools were
incorporeal
quantities.
Lolita:
1. "My very
photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was
three"
2. "Quilty, Clare, American dramatist [...] Started on a commercial
career but turned to playwriting. Author of The Little Nymph, The Lady Who
Loved Lightning (in collaboration with Vivian Darkbloom), Dark Age, The
strange Mushroom, Fatherly Love..."
3. HH: "As happens with me at periods of
electrical disturbance and crepitating lightnings, I had hallucinations.
Maybe they were more than hallucinations"
4. HH and Lo: " 'I am not a lady
and do not like lightning," said Lo, whose dread of electric storms gave me
some pathetic solace.(btw: I hadn't realized before Lo was
already familiar with Quilty's play on this
issue...]
PF
Kinbote on John Shade's: "The Nature
of Electricity,"
The dead, the gentle dead —
who knows? — In tungsten filaments abide,/And on my bedside table glows/ Another
man’s departed bride[...]
Streetlamps are numbered, and maybe/ Number
nine-hundred-ninety-nine/[...] is an old friend of mine./And when above the
livid plain/Forked lightning plays, therein may dwell/ The
torments of a Tamerlane,/ The roar of tyrants torn in
hell.
At least two thunderstorm adventures
were described by fleeing King/Kinbote. These might be compared to a dream
told in
Pnin:
"...in the course of one of those dreams that
still haunt Russian fugitives, even when a third of a century has elapsed since
their escape from the Bolsheviks, Pnin saw himself fantastically cloaked,
fleeing through great pools of ink under a cloud-barred moon from a chimerical
palace[...]The Sheppard brothers were both awake [...] the elder lay thinking of
silence...of a poplar that years ago lightning had struck, killing John Head,
a dim, distant relation.[...] It was a pity nobody saw the display in the
empty street, where the auroral breeze wrinkled a large luminous puddle, making
of the telephone wires reflected in it illegible lines of black
zigzags."
ADA:"When lightning struck two days later
(an old image that is meant to intimate a flash-back to an old bam), Van
became aware that it brought together, in livid confrontation, two secret
witnesses..."
( usually flashes of lightning bring up the photographer Kim.
I don't know if Lettrocalamity is storm-related, but in PF we have
learned 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.")
LATH
"Already twice in my
young life a fit of total cramp--the physical
counterpart of lightning insanity--had all but overpowered
me"
" Thunderstorms to me are agony. Their evil pressure
destroys me; their lightning forks through my brain and
breast."
Query: would forked lightning also suggest
something related to "Time" ( besides madness, hallucinations, play of invisible
forces,death,flash-back,photography,theatrical scenery and drama)? VN, in "Ada"
often wrote about two temporal dimensions when "time
forked".