Walter Miale: The two books are far
more different than alike. For starters, the
narrator's name is Dr. Wilbur
Daffodil-11 Swain, and he becomes
President of the United States on a
platform of "Lonesome no
more"...If anyone has any remarks on the common or
parallel themes of the
books, or can refer me to an article on this, I'd be
grateful.
Jansy. Dear Walter, I didn't read "Slapstick", but the
similarities bt. it and ADA's plot are pharaonically clear. I had
promised myself I would not mention in the list a string of coincidences
which recently happend with me ( they were so insistently bobolinky!) but
after the character's name Wilbur Daffodil-11 Swain popped up I
decided to give wisdom up and risk it:
After the postman brought
me a copy of Richard Wilbur's collected poems - & still on
the same day - I went to the movies with my grandchildren to watch a new
version of "Charlotte's Web" ( this book may be familiar to Americans,
but I had no inkling about it until then). The piglet that is saved by a
clever spider that weaves words in her net is also named Wilbur.
Later I learned that "Wilbur" was more coincidental than I'd thought. E.B.
White, author of Charlotte's Webb was Nabokov's friend and fellow
contributor to the New Yorker. His wife, Katherine, also a
contributor, was VN's editor at the magazine ( an information I also got
from Jacob Wilkenfeld).
If getting the Wilbur poems from a
fellow Nabokovian would not in itself be surprising, watching a movie
based on a story written by VN's co-workers at the New Yorker,
with a Wilbur piglet and a verbal-spider was
more astonishing than finding the "Gnomon" connection also present in "Pale
Fire".