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Re: THOUGHTS: the need for climax in Canto 4
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Matt: Shade needs to get us to line 1000, so we need another 15 lines. In these we find...details...trivial in the poem itself... we get the final interruption--a man with a wheelbarrow. Who is he? What is he doing in the penultimate line of the poem? And how does that wheelbarrow lead us back to line 1? I know the relationship to the clockwork toy, but I don't think Shade himself is making that connection here."
JM: In a long past posting ( January 2007, # 197 and Jan 22 listserv.ucsb.edu/lsv-cgi-bin/wa?A3=ind0905...) Matt and I discussed gardener, wheelbarrow and
butterfly ...Da capo!!!! (as in line 1000?) //All the additional words came from the old postings...
RS Gwynn: The assumption here is that Shade...lacks any imagination whatsoever...has to "see" every detail that he records...If he sees Kinbote's Negro gardener from his window, it may well be that he imagines the detail of the wheelbarrow, borrowing from memories of his childhood toy...If Shade here wants to "loop" the poem back to his early childhood...("Rosebud") He is a man (a poet) who has come through an immense personal unhappiness to see a transcendent joy in simply being alive (and having, dammit, to shave every day)... who says that the gardener could not have held a spade or a wheelbarrow or nothing at all at different times? ...Really now.
[...] the omission of the last line by Shade (and the "last" line is probably the first) is part of the poem's clearly symmetrical structure. Leaving off this line this would make line 500 the central line of 999 (only in a poem with an odd number of lines can there be a central line). This line the marks Hazel's death, and Hazel's death is clearly the "center" of the poem.
Anthony Stadlen: This is a non-sequitur. It answers the questions "Why would there have been a line 1000?" and "Why would line 1000 have been the last line?" It does not answer my question: Why, why, why "presumably a repetition of the first line at the end"? ,,,the poem is not obviously circular or cyclical like Finnegans Wake. As I said: We have only Kinbote's word for it.
RSGwynn: I didn't phrase that very well, did I? I think that JS fully intended to end at 999. It's for the reader to complete the couplet, if he or she is so inclined; it would have been easy enough for JS to write the line if he'd wanted to. Kinbote's supposition is as good as anyone's, as the choice of rhyme does send us back to the beginning... Thus, let the poem end without conclusion or say, essentially, "back to square one."
JM: Shade seems to have enough imagination to fill his description with recently or long past events, I agree. Therefore, there is equally no proof that he is going insane when there is an apparent slippage in his metaphors (docking ship, Zembla's cheek-field being harvested...) In Nabokov's own paper-box with rejected cards he annotated in one the information that Marat collected butterflies (and, I remind you, Marat is also linked to assassination, razor-sharp guillotine and, most of all, a "scientific" theory about the ethereal phlogiston).
But I disagree about his "...immense personal unhappiness leading to a transcendent joy..." I cannot feel any real grief in him after mentally-unbalanced, disagreable Hazel committed suicide: he employs the bathos to play with it contrapuctually, to exercise his poetic skills or something in that line. His failings as a caring father, though, as I see it, have no relation with the hypothesis of his morphing into mysoginous Kinbote, nor the doom-butterfly representing her equally loving filial attempts to warn him off his assassination. PF's characters are rather selfish and narrow-minded.
Some people see a butterfly-shape in the arrangement of the cantos, and expect symmetry. The shape is of a pair of wings, there's no hairy and sensitive body in between them. I agree with Gwynn that we have only Kinbote's words( including the poem's division into cantos and its verses and rejected variants) and that the poem ends without conclusion, which is up to the readers to interpret in one way or another.
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JM: In a long past posting ( January 2007, # 197 and Jan 22 listserv.ucsb.edu/lsv-cgi-bin/wa?A3=ind0905...) Matt and I discussed gardener, wheelbarrow and
butterfly ...Da capo!!!! (as in line 1000?) //All the additional words came from the old postings...
RS Gwynn: The assumption here is that Shade...lacks any imagination whatsoever...has to "see" every detail that he records...If he sees Kinbote's Negro gardener from his window, it may well be that he imagines the detail of the wheelbarrow, borrowing from memories of his childhood toy...If Shade here wants to "loop" the poem back to his early childhood...("Rosebud") He is a man (a poet) who has come through an immense personal unhappiness to see a transcendent joy in simply being alive (and having, dammit, to shave every day)... who says that the gardener could not have held a spade or a wheelbarrow or nothing at all at different times? ...Really now.
[...] the omission of the last line by Shade (and the "last" line is probably the first) is part of the poem's clearly symmetrical structure. Leaving off this line this would make line 500 the central line of 999 (only in a poem with an odd number of lines can there be a central line). This line the marks Hazel's death, and Hazel's death is clearly the "center" of the poem.
Anthony Stadlen: This is a non-sequitur. It answers the questions "Why would there have been a line 1000?" and "Why would line 1000 have been the last line?" It does not answer my question: Why, why, why "presumably a repetition of the first line at the end"? ,,,the poem is not obviously circular or cyclical like Finnegans Wake. As I said: We have only Kinbote's word for it.
RSGwynn: I didn't phrase that very well, did I? I think that JS fully intended to end at 999. It's for the reader to complete the couplet, if he or she is so inclined; it would have been easy enough for JS to write the line if he'd wanted to. Kinbote's supposition is as good as anyone's, as the choice of rhyme does send us back to the beginning... Thus, let the poem end without conclusion or say, essentially, "back to square one."
JM: Shade seems to have enough imagination to fill his description with recently or long past events, I agree. Therefore, there is equally no proof that he is going insane when there is an apparent slippage in his metaphors (docking ship, Zembla's cheek-field being harvested...) In Nabokov's own paper-box with rejected cards he annotated in one the information that Marat collected butterflies (and, I remind you, Marat is also linked to assassination, razor-sharp guillotine and, most of all, a "scientific" theory about the ethereal phlogiston).
But I disagree about his "...immense personal unhappiness leading to a transcendent joy..." I cannot feel any real grief in him after mentally-unbalanced, disagreable Hazel committed suicide: he employs the bathos to play with it contrapuctually, to exercise his poetic skills or something in that line. His failings as a caring father, though, as I see it, have no relation with the hypothesis of his morphing into mysoginous Kinbote, nor the doom-butterfly representing her equally loving filial attempts to warn him off his assassination. PF's characters are rather selfish and narrow-minded.
Some people see a butterfly-shape in the arrangement of the cantos, and expect symmetry. The shape is of a pair of wings, there's no hairy and sensitive body in between them. I agree with Gwynn that we have only Kinbote's words( including the poem's division into cantos and its verses and rejected variants) and that the poem ends without conclusion, which is up to the readers to interpret in one way or another.
Search archive with Google:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
Visit "Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
Manage subscription options: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/