John Rea wrote at the end of today's posting: Ki semenat ispinaza,
non andet isculzu. Is it Zemblan for the famous saying: "He
who plants spinach shall not tread on plums"? Or feast on dead rabbits, as Kinbote noted when he
annotated: " I have seen The Red
Admirable feasting on oozy plums and, once, on a dead rabbit. It is a most
frolicsome fly. An almost tame specimen of it was the last natural object John
Shade pointed out to me as he walked to his
doom".
.........................................
On July 2003, there was a posting at the List, on Pale Fire, by Glenn
Kenny, discussing poem and Frost:
The first thing to remember is that, regardless of the illusion that
the poem is a stand-alone work, it most manifestly is not.
Kinbote's insistence that the poem has no existence without the
commentary is, in the context of the novel, a kind of cruelty he
inflicts on Shade's shade; but in the reality outside the novel, it's
absolutely true! Add to that the fact that
the poem is a pastiche-"one
oozy footprint" behind Frost, but expressing a sensibility very
much in tune with V.N.'s own ("I loathe such things as jazz,"
etc.)-and you have something that some might argue is not
quite quantifiable on its own. But let's forget all that for the nonce.
I think it is an often very moving work, with an interesting cinematic
quality (i.e.,
the "intercutting" between the Shade's not-quite-channel
surfing and Hazel's journey to death) that isn't evident in the poets
that Shade is based on....
GK discusses the interconnection for poem and commentary,
bringing up certain traits shared by Shade and V. Nabokov.
I was re-reading "Strong Opinions" today and noticed that, indeed, VN
seems to appreciate Shade: " some of my more responsible characters are
given some of my own ideas. There is John Shade in Pale Fire, the poet. He does
borrow some of my own opinions...he says someething I think I can
endorse...( page 18,Vintage).
In contrast with this, there are several statements in SO in which VN seems
to believe in a theory about afterlife and of a shedding the
burden of the flesh, which I had, incorrectly now I see, found closer to
Kinbote's professed faith. There's no end of oozy plums for Red
Admirals to feast on and to surprise the reader. VN was not afraid of
over-ripe plums scattered along PF!
..........................................
Andrew
Brown recollected a "winter scene" he heard described in childhood, charged with
swift deadly currents and daring children society forgot ( a very beautiful
text). But when he compared this with "Woolf’s surrealistic boating
disaster in which a dinghy full of apple sellers and tortoises managed to pull a
Titanic in the middle of some Brit puddle." he must have been carried away
by different oozy undercurrents of meaning. That's not what I read in "Orlando",
nor what I tried to compare with MR's overwritten messages found
in the transparency of a watery palimpsest.