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Fw: [NABOKV-L] Edsel Ford find and at least another second fox...
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Don B. Johnson wrote about "a fox" in Pale Fire:
"Note the Kinbote lines at the end of his Commentary on line 71: "The black trunk ...stands on another brown or brownish even larger one, and there is I think a stuffed fox or coyote next to them in their dark corner."
This is the only fox (see Ford's poem) in PF. K sees it in Shades' ancestral home stashed away "on the top of the big black trunk, opposite the old mangle"
For what it's worth, I don't think that Nabokov would have allowed Edsel Ford's poem to intervene too much in the structure of Pale Fire's evolutions.
There are other foxes in Pale Fire, too. I remember finding a longer sentence which reminded me of "the quick brown fox jumped over" ( or some such lines with all the letters of the alphabet). Someone recently used an expression that I was unfamiliar with, "foxed", used by editors or book-sellers. This foxy first mention is made already in the Foreword written by Kinbote ( by the way, the Foreword was written after Kinbote had completed his commentaries and, if one reads "post-scriptically" many lingering questions will be easily settled):
Everyman's page 17, last line: " - that I am the most impractical fellow in the world. Between such a person and an old fox in the book publishing business, relations are at first..."
VN's spiralling non nebulous circularity always astonishes me. Usually we can only understand a sentence after a final stop-sign signals its accomplishment.Only then its meaning may become clear to us.
In my experience with Nabokov we find successive stop-signs but they only invite us to return over and over to ever longer stretches of text. This also applies to entire chapters and demarcated Cantos. We must read a canto, a chapter, a paragraph until its black dot signals the end and then...start all over again circling wider and wider.
From the foreword we gather that:
Shade didn't type his Fair Copy;
He copied the first draft of a day's production at midnight;
The last four cards presented "a corrected draft" instead of a Fair Copy;
When Shade altered the latter, he preserved the date of his actual creation.
When Kinbote wrote his foreword he already knew he was going to commit suicide ( or die);
He realized that it would be posthumously published ( cf page 15: " Nay, I shall even assert ( as our shadows still walk without us) that there remained to be written only one line..." ;
Kinbote also asserts that he is conscious that his own commentaries ( "the underside of the weave" of Shade's poem) will "entrance the beholder and only begetter, whose own past intercoils there with the fate of the innocent author". Shade is an innocent author...
Jansy
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"Note the Kinbote lines at the end of his Commentary on line 71: "The black trunk ...stands on another brown or brownish even larger one, and there is I think a stuffed fox or coyote next to them in their dark corner."
This is the only fox (see Ford's poem) in PF. K sees it in Shades' ancestral home stashed away "on the top of the big black trunk, opposite the old mangle"
For what it's worth, I don't think that Nabokov would have allowed Edsel Ford's poem to intervene too much in the structure of Pale Fire's evolutions.
There are other foxes in Pale Fire, too. I remember finding a longer sentence which reminded me of "the quick brown fox jumped over" ( or some such lines with all the letters of the alphabet). Someone recently used an expression that I was unfamiliar with, "foxed", used by editors or book-sellers. This foxy first mention is made already in the Foreword written by Kinbote ( by the way, the Foreword was written after Kinbote had completed his commentaries and, if one reads "post-scriptically" many lingering questions will be easily settled):
Everyman's page 17, last line: " - that I am the most impractical fellow in the world. Between such a person and an old fox in the book publishing business, relations are at first..."
VN's spiralling non nebulous circularity always astonishes me. Usually we can only understand a sentence after a final stop-sign signals its accomplishment.Only then its meaning may become clear to us.
In my experience with Nabokov we find successive stop-signs but they only invite us to return over and over to ever longer stretches of text. This also applies to entire chapters and demarcated Cantos. We must read a canto, a chapter, a paragraph until its black dot signals the end and then...start all over again circling wider and wider.
From the foreword we gather that:
Shade didn't type his Fair Copy;
He copied the first draft of a day's production at midnight;
The last four cards presented "a corrected draft" instead of a Fair Copy;
When Shade altered the latter, he preserved the date of his actual creation.
When Kinbote wrote his foreword he already knew he was going to commit suicide ( or die);
He realized that it would be posthumously published ( cf page 15: " Nay, I shall even assert ( as our shadows still walk without us) that there remained to be written only one line..." ;
Kinbote also asserts that he is conscious that his own commentaries ( "the underside of the weave" of Shade's poem) will "entrance the beholder and only begetter, whose own past intercoils there with the fate of the innocent author". Shade is an innocent author...
Jansy
Search the archive: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/archives/nabokv-l.html
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