Jerry Friedman [to JM]
Kinbote's present tense ...If I can see any importance in it, it's that he
could be revitalizing the moribund trope of the poet immortalizing his
subject. Not only did the cicada sing after molting, it's still alive and
singing in Shade's poem in some sense. Maybe.
JM: Maybe. Kinbote
had emphasized the closeness bt. waxwing and the cicada (shadow, fluff
and a live moving reflection).
For Shade the song was
alive: metaphorically, through the poet's art? in another,
spiritual, dimension?... It is difficult, and probably useless,
to discover what Shade had meant except that, for
him, Lafontaine's fable is "wrong."
JF
(adding to CK's two variants, set down in a note to line
596: "Should the dead murderer try to embrace/ His outraged victim whom he now
must face?" and, later, line 895: "In nature’s strife when fortitude
prevails/The victim falters and the victor fails." Yes, reader, Pope.")
"... Also Kinbote's "anti-Darwinian aphorism: The one who kills is
always his victim's inferior."? Because they all challenge
commonsense?"
JM: Perhaps these
lines escape from the darwinian "survival of the
fittest," by stressing that which isn't "biological", such as
moral fortitude (virtue). And yet, this idea doesn't seem to fit into a Nabokovian picture
(unless he'd been thinking about his father as one
such valiant victim).
btw: a victim
who "falters" ( Falter: moths or butterflies in German?) reminds me of VN's
"Ultima Thule" and Falter ("was
Falter a quack? Was he a true seer? Was he a medium whom the narrator's
dead wife might have been using to come through with the blurry outline of a
phrase which her husband did or did not recognize?")
...................................................................................................................................................
Hazel's "phantom swing", in an earlier
poem by Shade, seems to be still hanging from a tree: "The empty little swing that swings/Under the tree: these are the
things/That break my heart." I cannot recall where Shade
observes the difference in size from the young shagbark in his
childhood and the fully grown tree: didn't he note ( or was it
someone in the List?) that a swing, tied to its branches, would also grow
more distant from the ground? Anyway, Shade's emphasis on the swing always
struck me as trite, almost cruel in its disregard of the reality of
the pathetic young woman who, at some point in her life, used to swing
from it.