Stan
Kelly-Bootle [to JM:...Why would Joyce have named
his novel "Ulysses" instead of Odysseus? Nabokov, all set against a
"mythological reading" of Joyce's novel, might have chuckled at Stan's query
]:"... it’s plain daft to deny many intended parallels
with Homer’s epic. But there’s NO contradiction here with Nabokov warning us not
to over-interpret Joyce’s novel in terms of Greek mythology...You misread my
rhetorical query. It’s a well-aired point in Joycean scholarship...that Joyce
was enamoured of Oolissays... Joyce later told Frank Bugden that Ulysses
was “the only all-round character in literature.” [ ]... to embellish
the real Marat allusions with his “belief” in phlogiston is, as we say, a bit of
stretch."
JM: Indeed, I misread your "rethorical
query," with the implication that neither Nabokov, nor Joyce, had
read Homer in the original. VN's kind of aerial view of Dublin and its
inhabitants, while lecturing on Joyce's "Ulysses", favors this kind of
geographical/animated "patterning," instead of drawing parallels with
Homer's yarns after a unifying element for Joyce's individual
chapters.
Your main point, and I agree with you,
warns against "over-interpretations" ( in every sense!)
Nabokov's recurrent references to the
French Revolution, with a bit on electricity unexpectedly thrown
in, led me to read about the Marat/Lavoisier enmity, related to the "phlogiston." These marginal
readings are (for me) a refreshing side-effect from my way of
exploring Nabokov.
As I noted before, the
"torf/ftor/trof/fort" scramble is insufficient, for me, to derive
indications about ruin,decay, explosives or combustion and syllabic links to
VN's other works. However, this theme is never absent from Ada, nor are
those images of a phoenix-like ressurrection from the ashes. These are in
contradiction to Nabokov's equally frequent returns to his ideas
about "immortality through art," or HH's dejected recognition that "we have
only words to play with" ( quoted from memory).