Unfortunately I forgot to add a direct reference to
the triptych in the poem Pale Fire in my last posting:
"the point is that the three/Chambers, then bound by you and her and me,/
Now form a tryptich or a three-act play/ In which portrayed events forever stay.
( 379-382)
Brian Boyd ( Nabokov's Pale Faire, The Magic of Artistic Discovery, page
185) observes "triptych or...three-act play resounds oddly with the note on
the Haunted Barn, which is also a three-act drama...Both scenes show rare
examples of Hazel interacting with her parents..."
and adds: " As if in memory of the first triptych or...three-act play,"
and in refutation of the second triptych's discordant course and conclusion
("Life is hopeless, afterlife hearless"), Hazel seems to offer her father a poem
to outdo "Four Quartets", a poem that has its origins in a quartet of daughters
much luckier than her in life, whose "end" is int their "beginning"...whose
photographs in a closet become the basis for Alfin, Blenda, Charles and Disa and
for the tunnel episode that in turn prompts her father to write his "Four
Cantos," as his poem is subtitled." ( more about this, Baskervilles and
Holmes, Eliot on pages 191-195 )
How could I have asked about "The Fourth" in PF while forgetting
the subtitle, the ever present Four Cantos?
( Eliot's "third" is, after all, not a "third man" - it brings
forth a shadowy rival, or even a child in conflict with the parental
couple...)
PS: I don't know if we could stretch things a little (
etymologicallywise) and search for different meanings of the word
"canto" ( Latin: "cantus")?
I don't know if I'm still under the influence of Drescher's pugnacious
cardinals ( are they related to waxwings?), but these "four cantos" brought to
my mind a rosette with the "four cardinal points of the compass". Longitude
or latitude indicators are sometimes felt in Pale Fire ( New Wye and
Palermo). The more distant rosette can be found in:
"Once, three decades ago, in my tender and terrible boyhood, I had
the occasion of seeing a man in the act of making contact with God. I had
wandered into the so-called Rose Court at the back of the Ducal Chapel... The
sound of rapid steps made me raise my morose gaze from the
sectile mosaic of the court — realistic rose petals cut out of rodstein and
large, almost palpable thorns cut out of green marble. Into these roses and
thorns there walked a black shadow: a tall, pale, long-nosed, dark-haired young
minister ...".