Stan
Kelly-Bootle: “Jansy recently said
there’s a lot of CK in VN. Ca va sans dire! CK/VB/JS/HS et al, are all
the fictive products of VN’s cunning, teasing pen. CK/VB
is, ironically, a more credible creation (even when lying) than the uneven poet
Shade (VN trying too hard). “
JM: Stan, you are emphasizing the use
of metaphors, such as those related to exile and “Ponto” ( “Ex,”
must simply refer to where “home” lies). Right. After all, we tend
to remember, at least most of the time, that Hazel, Shade or CK/VB are
characters created by Nabokov and what I meant by “there’s a lot of
CK in VN” purported to express my idea that many traits in Kinbote’s
character are closer to VN’s than Shade’s are (although Nabokov
explicitly refers to the similarities in taste between him and Shade). It’s
probably the kinbotean trait in him that stimulated his comment about shared tastes
for “evil things” with Shade (he must have hugely enjoyed “playing”
that persona).
In the same line, why is it possible to accept that Nabokov used the pen-name
Sirin and refuse his choice of an American John Shade for his “classic”
productions?
Alexey
Sklyarenko: Gran D. du
Mont" is a puzzle. "Grand Duke" is an owl mentioned in VN's
story The Visit to the
Museum: "There was, on top of the
case, a pair of owls, Eagle Owl and Long-eared, with their French names reading
"Grand Duke" and "Middle Duke" if translated."
Note that the stuffed Parluggian Owl is mentioned in the same chapter of Ada (1.24)….
JM: The owls in VN’s story and the stuffed Parluggian Owl
in Ada are satisfactory associations to Gran D and, for me, they settle
the issue (at least momentarily). Thanks! I recently found, somewhere,
Nabokov’s words about Dukes and Herzog (It was in a review, by Rosenbaum,
about Samuel Bellow and his novel, but this same transposition is found in SO*).
The stuffed animal in Lolita… was it a squirrel? Creepy ( they remind me
of Hitchcock’s movie, Psycho).
………………………….
*-
There’s an interesting paragraph by Rosenbaum in the aforementioned review
(sent by Jim Twiggs to the List): “I'll
get to the butterfly secret, as I've come to think of it...I'm going to limit
my comments here...meanwhile, let me return to the butterfly secret and to what
I believe may be a not widely recognized coherence between VN's love of
literature and his love of lepidopterology. What they have in common, I came to
realize, is that they are both, the literary and the butterfly work, about
language. What VN was doing in his lovingly obsessive study of wing-marking
patterns and genital morphology was an act of reading ; he was reading and
translating the language, the esoteric genetic poetics of butterfly markings.
It's something I began to get an amorphous feeling for from close reading of
the lepidopteral monographs when I came upon an explicit clue at the close of
VN's major work on the butterfly genus Lycaeides, one he'd devoted much of his
life to limning. Summing up his incredibly painstaking, dizzyingly detailed
attempt to describe and categorize the variety of wing patterns of Lycaeides,
to find meaning in the subtle shifts in the pigmentation of the tiny "maculations,"
he adds, "In conclusion, a few words may be said concerning the specific
repetition, rhythm, scope and expression of the genetic characters supplied by
the eight categories discussed." (Nov.23,1997,The
New York Observer). This is a
lovely vision about the connection between Nabokov’s love of literature
and Lepidoptera, considering his love for language.
It carried me back to the medieval naturalist monks who were certain that the
world was a book written by God waiting to be decoded. The latter tried to
reach God’s message in nature. Nabokov, in Rosenbaum’s
interpretation, has his attention drawn to the workings of language more than he
worries about its independent “message,” and this is probably
the best way to read Nabokov’s works. Patterns instead of a special
content or magical revelation ( there’s fun in going after this too,
there’s no way to deny that garbled dream, like Athanasius Kircher’s).