Matt Roth [responding to: Gary Lipon [ to Jansy's "Why a
pastiche of Hazel's tragedy, along with other sad tales? Why Hazel, in
particular..."] I'm honestly quite surprised, if I understand you
correctly, that you don't see allusions to Hazel's story in this sequence? JM:
No! At least, not from this sequence...] I'm firmly with Gary on
this one. As I think I said before, it is unimaginable to think that Shade could
concoct a young dead woman--who died on a "wild march night"--standing by the
edge of a pond, without having Hazel in mind. Recall that Hazel died by
drowning, probably in March, on a "night of blow," and later on in Canto Three,
while clearly thinking of Hazel's death, Shade writes, "It is the wild / March
wind. It is the father with his child." My Mathilda association is pretty
speculative, while this connection, right there in the text, seems ironclad to
me.
JM: I almost gave up my retort, humbled
by my blindness about anything as obvious, like both Lipon and Roth find it
to be, in Shade's lines related to Hazel.
A "wild March wind" seems to be the only real link to the
night when Hazel was swamped. And not even this one convinces me. Nor the
parent's worrying about a twenty-three year old daughter (23 if I remember
former calculations) out after midnight on her first (?) blind-date, lest
their protectiveness is revelatory of Hazel's mental disturbances.
Lipon's analogies* remain a puzzle. Pond= swamp?
A pond's reflective surface "full of a dreamy sky"...indicate
a wild March windy night? I simply don't get it.
Hazel as Shade's dream-wife? Oh, please...
What has been written about Hazel as "Mother Time" and the
watchman by the lake described as "Father Time"?
In Zembla we find Nabokov's Pale Fire
and the Romantic Movement (with special reference to the Brocken, Scott
and Goethe) by Gerard de Vries
when he quotes: "It is only Lochanhead...must think it...…queer/ To stop without a
farmhouse near/ Between the woods and frozen lake/ The darkest evening of the
year." and he adds that these are "lines borrowed from the
second stanza of Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowing Evening,” a poem
alluded to in Pale Fire."
This reference complicates matters even further: Why
use Frost's lines on "the darkest evening of the year," in
relation to Hazel's stop at Lochanhead? Why skip Shade's disbelief in IPH's
revelations and try to evaluate his own non-Oedipic fantasies for what's
worth?
* -He meets his wives; both loved, both loving, both
Jealous of
one another. [1:Shade, Sybil & Hazel]Fondling a
changeless child, the flax-haired wifeGrieves on the brink of a remembered
pondFull of a dreamy sky.
[2:Sybil & Hazel, pond=swamp]Know of the
head-on crash which on a wildMarch night killed both the mother and the child?[5:Pete
Dean, Sybil and Hazel].....................................Know of the head-on crash which on a
wildMarch night killed both the mother and the child?[5:Pete
Dean, Sybil and Hazel]