1. JM to DBJ: This entry came to my attention
once ... Something set my mind at rest and I promply forgot the
"interesting association belatedly realized" ...
PS: Now I remember what
it was. I almost forgot it because it was trivial: both
Kinbote and Shade lost their parents while still
young.
2. Suellen to JM: a poet in California has taken all of the lines of
Moby Dick and arranged them into verse format. Quite astounding really.Herman
Melville, Moby-Dick; or The Whale, Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
([1851], 1988), p. 44, 64, 79, 242.
JM to S: Similar to VN's
choice, I remember how Dirksen's continued: The ship casts off her cables
...all careening, all careening...and glides to the
sea. I'll try to find you more about this composition.
HM's: "I saw the opening maws of hell" reminded me of Pale Fire's
reference to Lafontaine in Shade's poem: "dead is the mandible, alive the
song", but re-examining it now, I cannot see why this connection sprung to
my mind at the time.
There are too many associative threads running in our minds after one
reads VN for the second or third or twentieth time ( for example: has the name
Lafontaine, and his fabled ant, any connection to the hereafter vision of a
"fountain"?).
It is my impression that most of the threads do not resolve themselves
into a pattern, but are part of VN's "reiterative" style: we keep hearing
past words and antecipating future ones, like in music or in certain kinds of
embroidery, while themes pop up and disappear like
bubbles
Examples:
Bend Sinister and reiterated
pregnant images:
November trees,
poplars...richly furrowed bark and an intricate sweep of numberless
burnished bare twigs... Their immobility is in contrast with the
spasmodic ruffling of the inset reflection — for the visible emotion of a tree
is the mass of its leaves... They just flicker a little, of a neutral
tint, but burnished by the sun to the same ikontinct as the
intricate trillions of twigs. Swooning blue of the sky crossed by pale
motionless superimposed cloud wisps...The cloud
wisps are flushed with flesh pink, and the trillions of twigs
are becoming extremely distinct... It is all inky
black with a pale blue inky sky — 'runs blue, writes black' as that ink
bottle said, but it did not, nor does the sky, but the trees do with their
trillions of twigs.
(end
ch1)
This
was the last stronghold of the dualism he abhorred. The square root of I is
I. Footnotes, forget-me-nots. The stranger quietly watching...Even at the
very moment when I was rocked by the convulsion men value
most...
This night there was only a diffused glow where a Neptune of granite loomed upon his square rock which
rock continued as a parapet which parapet was lost in the mist.
..Krug stopped, trying to control himself, with the palm of his ungloved
hand resting on the parapet ... and he walked on — jerkily, because of the
sobs shaking his ungloved soul... Krug shall later
loose his glove...*
(ch 2)
The perfection of nonhuman creatures — birds, young dogs, moths
asleep, colts — and these little mammals. A combination of three tiny brown
spots, birthmarks on the faintly flushed cheek near the nose recalled some
combination he had seen, touched, taken in recently — what was it? The
parapet.
(ch
3)
* a glove and loss:
1. "Olga was at the
wheel, Krug, a non-driver, sat beside her, his
gloved hands folded in his lap"
2.
"Krug, a
hunchback for the nonce, inserted his latchkey and
slowly reverting to normal stature stepped into the hollow, humming,
rumbling, rolling, roaring silence of his flat...He took off
the one glove he had on, disposed of
his overcoat and hung up his wide-brimmed black felt hat."
3.
"We
might be shown, he said...Polonius
in his youth acting Caesar ...the
skull in Hamlet's gloved hands developing the features of a live jester (with
the censor's permission)..."
4. "On
the eve of the day fixed by Quist he found himself on the bridge: he was out
reconnoitring, since ...Krug had only one
glove, and he had forgotten his glasses."
5.
"Watching
the snowflakes upon the dark and beautiful water, Krug argued that either the
flakes were real, and the water was not real water, or else the latter was real,
whereas the flakes were made of some special insoluble stuff. In order to settle
the question, he let his mateless glove fall from
the bridge; but nothing abnormal happened: the glove simply
pierced the corrugated surface of the water with its extended index, dived and
was gone."
6. " he swung down the
passage followed by Mariette and, a hunchback again,
unlocked the impatient door.Young woman with
pistol in gloved hand..."
7. "
Numerous
hands, several of which were heavily gloved, tugged at torpid
recurved Krug (still in the larval
stage) and pulled. him out."
8. 'Watch
Those Curves': a curving line on a blackboard was
shown and a pointer in a rubber-gloved hand pointed
out the climactic points and other points of interest in the
yarovization of the ego." ( pointers we find in Pale Fire, on TV
weather reports; in Transparent Things... In BS they are sometimes
representatives of loss, bare soul or bare bodkin and strangely linked to
larval, recurved, hunchback position )