In an interview (sorry I can't tell you which one) Nabokov complained that in Ulysses Joyce uses the word prone when he means supine. Nabokov was undoubtedly thinking of the sentence "He [Stephen] lies prone, his face to the sky, his hat rolling to the wall. (15.4748-9)" I think Joyce's use of prone here is intentional -- earlier in the same hallucinatory chapter Bloom gives birth to octuplets -- but this remark at least shows that Nabokov knew and cared about the difference between the two words.
In a message dated 5/14/09 2:38:32 PM, jansy@AETERN.US writes:
Mike Stauss: "A friend recently made the offhand comment that Vladimir Nabokov, though a master of the English language, never observed the difference between "supine" and "prostrate". He didn't have any examples to cite. Any responses from the list to this charge?"
B.Boyd: Nonsense. As if someone who a) had an English vocabulary wider than any other novelist but Joyce's b) had a particular fascination for the accurate rendition of gesture and posture, and their local cultural and individual variants, and c) had a lifelong concern for the precise description of physiological particularities, arising from, among other things, his passion for Lepidoptera, would make this mistake. From the LOLITA SCREENPLAY, p. 41: HUMBERT So you are Lolita. LOLITA Yes, that's me. Turns from sea-star supine to seal prone."
Two magnificent metaphors and a fine defamiliarizing description of a commonplace action in nine syllables. Tom Stoppard called "(picnic, lightning)" the greatest parenthesis in literature. This must rank as one of the greatest stage directions in drama."
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