Date: Sun, 31 Aug 2003 15:18:13 -0400
From: "Jasper Fidget" <jasper@hatguild.org>
Subject: RE: NPPF Comm2: Often

> From: owner-pynchon-l@waste.org [mailto:owner-pynchon-l@waste.org] On
> Behalf Of Don Corathers
>
> Line 62: often (p 95)
>

>
> Rodnaya Zembla (p 97) = Red Zembla?
>

"Native land" -- "rodnaya zemlya" appears to be a common Russian phrase,
"rodnaya" ==  "native" and "zemlya" == "land" -- it's also the name of a
Russian newspaper.

Jasper

------------------------------

Date: Sun, 31 Aug 2003 15:20:40 -0400
From: "Jasper Fidget" <jasper@hatguild.org>
Subject: RE: NPPF Comm2: Often

> From: owner-pynchon-l@waste.org [mailto:owner-pynchon-l@waste.org] On
> Behalf Of Don Corathers
>
> Line 62: often (p 95)
>

> he is, "as if only now living consciously through those perilous nights in
> my country, where at any moment a company of jittery revolutionists might
> enter and hustle me off to a moonlit wall." Only in the last sentence of
> this long paragraph does he remember to refer to himself as "the
> chloroformed scholar," without explaining why Zemblan revolutionaries
> would
> have any interest in Charles Kinbote.
>

The phrase "only now living consciously" stands out while looking for clues
that Zembla is created in Kinbote's mind in these passages.  He continues:

"The sound of a rapid car or a groaning truck would come as a strange
mixture of friendly life's relief and death's fearful shadow; would that
shadow pull up at my door?  Were those phantom thugs coming for me?"

There's another link here between the Early New Wye and post-Shade's-death
narrative piles.  The two versions of Shade's shooting have either Jack Grey
arriving at the Goldsworth chateau via truck, or Gerald Emerald dropping off
Jakob Gradus by car (see p 284).  Shade says to Kinbote before being shot,
"'I'll have to write again to Bob Wells [the town mayor] about those damned
Tuesday night trucks'" which implies he's heard one and that they are loud
(p. 293).  Emerald is described as having "whizzed off to some tryst in the
valley," implying he's a fast driver (p. 284).

The word "shadow" also stands out, the shadows that might frighten Kinbote
while lying awake in bed, and the personified Shadows in pursuit of the
escaped Charles Xavier, so a link between New Wye and Zembla.

A note regarding resemblances and shadows and all the Alfred the Great
references: among the works Alfred translated into Anglo-Saxon was Boethius'
_Consolation of Philosophy_, in which version of that text Boethius talks
about resemblances and "the shadows of the true happiness."  He writes,
"this present life is very like a shadow, and in that shadow no man can
attain the true felicities.  [...]  If any very great man were driven from
his country, or goeth on his lord's errand, and so cometh to a foreign
people, where no man knows him, nor he any man, nor even knows the language,
thinkest thou that his greatness can make him honourable in that land?  But
I know that it cannot" (Chapter XXVII).

Jasper

------------------------------