...........................................................................................................................
* From the
Archives:
JM: 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...
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.
23 January 2007
Don Johnson: "The
quote...unearthed by the indefatigable Jansy is an informative gem in relation
to PF. Here, as in PF, the Red Admiral appears to a harbinger of death
(first--the dog Tom; second, Marta [rather than her husband, the intended
victim]). This "mortality marker" is made even clearer in DN's
translation...revisions clearly establish the immanency of death as signaled by
the Red Admiral--just as it does in PF... VN apparently inserted the 1962 PF
echoes into the 1968 KQKn English version.
JM: D.B.Johnson had praised my link bt Pale Fire and a Red
Admiral in KQKn. And yet, it had been already mentioned by Alfred Appel
(1970/71) when he asked: " That particular butterfly appears frequently in your
own work, too. In Pale Fire[... ], the insect appears in King, Queen, Knave just
after you've withdrawn the authorial omniscience..." Still, the point I wanted
to make was not centered exclusively on the appearance of the butterfly but to
the description of a gardener trundling a barrow and his automatic, mechanical
way of moving in the same paragraph, close to the butterfly, February 11,
2007
A bonus insertion:
S.Klein:http://article.nationalreview.com/ May Days
PastDiary of a month gone.By John Derbyshire...
"My comments in last month’s
diary about Vladimir Putin’s odd nasal obsession included a passing mention of
the 19th-century Russian writer Nikolai Gogol [...] it is hard to find any other
author who has described with such gusto smells, sneezes and snores. This or
that hero comes into the story trundling, as it were, his nose in a
wheelbarrow." 03 de Jun de 2008