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Re: Cocteau and VN Correction
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Stephen Blackwell: Excellent discovery between Jansy and Carolyn! Not much has been written about Nabokov and Cocteau; I found this on Google books: Self-reflexivity in Literature edited by Werner Huber, Martin Middeke, et al. ... Jansy and I have bee discussing off-list the strange inconsistency in Kinbote's age reporting: that he is 16 years Shade's junior (= b. 1914), but that King Charles the Beloved was born 1915. Perhaps this slippage is psychologically related to Kinbote's regarding Shade's "60th-no, 61st" birthday, noted already by Jansy.[ ].I see that the Library of America notes (ahem) tell us that "In his lecture on The Walk by Swann's Way" [...] published in Lectures on Literature, Nabokov wrote "Jean Cocteau has called the work 'a giant miniature, full of mirages, of superimposed gardens, of games conducted between space and time.'" Note 554.24-25; p. 896 in the volume. No mention of Cocteau's birthday or the coincidence there.
Jansy Mello: So Nabokov did, indeed, quote Cocteau's "suspended gardens" (and games conducted between space and time.*..) without relating it to his former observation about "floral metaphors."
Stephen Blackwell's formulation of our off-list discussion about the 16 year difference between Kinbote and Shade and his hypothesis about " this slippage is psychologically related to Kinbote's regarding Shade's 60th-no, 61st" birthday" makes a lot of sense.
My confusion related to the birthyears in 1914 and in 1915 is almost ready to be dispelled. After all, there's no doubt that Charles Kinbote, Charles Xavier and Gradus are one and the same and that they were all three born in July 5, 1915. .
One curiosity related to the Gingko and the word écu (escutcheon), Disa and Sybil:
Kinbote mentions Disa's coat-of-arms in close proximity to his reference to Shade's poem about the "arbre aux quarante écus." (Payn, Dukes of/ Poems, Shade's short).
1. Payn, Dukes of, escutcheon of, 270; see Disa, my Queen.
Poems, Shade's short: The Sacred Tree, 49; The Swing, 61; Mountain View, 92...
2. Disa, Duchess of Payn, of Great Payn and Mone; my lovely, pale, melancholy Queen, haunting my dreams, and haunted by dreams of me, b. 1928; her album and favorite trees, 49;...
The page reference takes us to Shade's line 270, about Sybil
"My dark Vanessa, crimson-barred, my blest/My Admirable butterfly!"
and to Charles Kinbote's commentary to this line, in which he links Sybil and Disa most explicitly:
"As to the Vanessa butterfly, it will reappear in lines 993-995 (to which see note). Shade used to say that its Old English name was The Red Admirable, later degraded to The Red Admiral. It is one of the few butterflies I happen to be familiar with. Zemblans call it harvalda (the heraldic one) possibly because a recognizable figure of it is borne in the escutcheon of the Dukes of Payn.".
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* - "The poem was begun at the dead center of the year, a few minutes after midnight July 1.[ ].the departure from Zembla of the would-be regicide... Gradus...left Onhava on the Copenhagen plane on July 5." marks the importance of the "dead center of the year" in New Wye. We know that New Wye lies in the same longitude as Palermo from CK's foreword: "I was told I had chosen the worst winter in years - and this at the latitude of Palermo." There is a warning (note to line 172): "and cannot tell the difference between longitude and latitude." Kinbote: "Yes. I agree.": We are also informed that "He never tired of illustrating by means of these examples the extraordinary blend of Canadian Zone and Austral Zone that "obtained," as he put it, in that particular spot of Appalachia where at our altitude of about 1,500 feet northern species of birds, insects and plants commingled with southern representative."
How about the time that Gradus left Onhava? What do we know? From note to line 171 we read the hour of Gradus's assignment to kill Charles Xavier and note that it takes place in the same date (not time) in which Shade began his poem ): "We place this fatidic moment at 0:05, July 2, 1959 - which happens to be also the date upon which an innocent poet penned the first lines of his last poem"
A small example of time and space scramblings....
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