Carolyn Kunin [off list]: Some of Jansy's musings brought up, to me, the question of burning at the stake. Of course Spain, mentioned by VN, was famous for it, but it also played a role inEnglish history. As it comes up in Hilary Mantel's "Wolf Hall" ...it is treated as a diabolical form of torture cum execution. The wiki ...mentions, besides some gruesome very recent examples, that Esmeralda was rescued from burning by Quasimodo. If ever I had known that, I had forgotten it. Esmeralda, immer, immer? [ ] Not sure about non-leporine rodents, but in those days pregnancy tests had something to do with rabbits

Jansy Mello: Since many of the "leporine doctors" in ADA had a hand in gynaecological questions this is information may be pertinent for those who want to investigate issues related to sexual and non-sexual methods of reproduction in ADA. Burning at the stake must have had a private resonance for Nabokov, if we remember not only Pale Fire's "backyard auto da fé," (or the controversies over the TOoL manuscripts), but Lolita. The name of VN's heroine at first was to jave been "Juanita (Dark)."

When piles of Jewish writer's books were burnt by the Nazi's, Sigmund Freud (rather innocently - if that's the right word) observed: "What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books."[Letter to Ernest Jones (1933), as quoted in The Columbia Dictionary of Quotations (1993) by Robert Andrews, p. 779]

"In literature and film, an unreliable narrator (a term coined by Wayne C. Booth in his 1961 book The Rhetoric of Fiction) is a literary device in which the credibility of the narrator is seriously compromised. This unreliability can be due to psychological instability, a powerful bias, a lack of knowledge, or even a deliberate attempt to deceive the reader or audience. Unreliable narrators are usually first-person narrators, but third-person narrators can also be unreliable [ ] The literary device of the unreliable narrator should not be confused with other devices such as euphemism, hyperbole, irony, metaphor, pathetic fallacy, personification, sarcasm, or satire; it may, however, coexist with such devices, as in Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho[ ]One of the earliest known examples of unreliable narration is Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales. In the Merchant's Tale for example, the narrator, being unhappy in his marriage, allows his misogynistic bias to slant much of his tale, and in the Wife of Bath's, the Wife often misquotes and misremembers quotations and stories.[ ]In some cases, as with Vladimir Nabokov's 1962 Pale Fire, the reader is unable to discern among several possible narrators, each with his or her own intrinsically unreliable agenda and bias. This serves to effectively include the reader in the experience of the novel, rather than simply providing a narrative, encouraging independent theories and ultimately furthering a point."