MR
wrote: PF-related imagery in KQK.... I would like to add one more
reference from
the same passage: "Beyond the fence, the
black car, the expensive
Icarus, was already waiting inexorably."
Given our recent discussion
of the waxwing, I found it hard not to see this
as related also.
JM: You saw the "ashen fluff" as a
kind of fallen Icarus? The imagery about Icarus and falls is well
developped in ADA and annotated by B.Boyd. I vaguely remember Kinbote
imagining young Shade holding a dead bird in his hand, a very
corporeal fluff indeed.
The car itself,
in KQK, in the short period of the novel, suffers two crashes, the second a PF
typical "head-on" collision.
In a recent
message about Red Admiral and doom in KQK, two announced deaths were mentioned:
the dog's and Martha's. The gardener had the dog killed and Martha got a
chill on the day she'd planned to kill Dreyer, and died from
pneumonia.
And yet, there
was another death lurking by on that day: the driver's, in an accident with the
Icarus. In the Red Admiral scene he ( "chauffeur") was chatting
with the gardener and creating moveable shadows with
cigarette smoke.
Dreyer
survived. The butterfly's presence was a curiously misdirected warning - if it
represented a warning at all.
Also in Pale
Fire, the intended victim was not John Shade but Judge Goldsworth. Or, according
to Kinbote, it was he, King Charles II, the intended victim. Hazel committed
suicide, apparently like Kinbote and Gradus.
In both
situations in which the Vanessa atalanta appears, we see a gardener trundling a
barrow, like a clockwork toy. Those who died might have been victimized by
"Fate" but, in the human scale, they were not the intended victims ( VN's father
was also shot by accident).
I wonder what kind of connection exists between a
gardener and a butterfly.
MR added in another posting: Skipping to the end of the poem, I'm curious if anyone else has
thought twice about that "empty barrow." While this clearly denotes
an empty
wheelbarrow, shouldn't we also consider that an "empty
barrow" in a
different context means "empty grave"?
JM: Trundling
it?
If we search for more connections, there is another one in the
same Chapter Two:
"Franz had the feeling that in another minute his body would melt
completely...Dreyer, slowly rotating before him like a flaming wheel with human
arms for spokes...The merry-go-round in Franz's head never
stopped"
Before that, at the very beginning,
nausea and dizziness is linked with physical discomfort. Later, this
carroussel rotation is associated with sexual bliss (
could not find the page now). Love and death are firmly associated in KQK, as
are the "odi et amo" oscillatory
terrors..
There are also the emerald ear-rings,
an important feature in "KQK ( where the novel's color
scheme favoured greens: turmaline, emerald; and blacks,asphalt, car,
melanite) and they appear in Shade's poem, also as ear-rings and as a cicada's
empty emerald case.
Jansy