M.Marcus: "Jansy, I'd hoped the associations were clear. Nabokov mentioned
a bird (hawfinch) and Van said that he could make a distinction: "knows a stone
from a cone". Hamlet says he can draw a distinction between two birds -- "know a
hawk from a handsaw" -- so Shakespeare was more compact. Hawfinch &
hawk...As for your selected quotations, they need a full examination...[snip]
I'll just mention that Percy's first appearance (p. 187) has him with "a
flute of champagne in his hand". Having been prevailed upon to read chapter 7 of
Bend Sinister, I must quote its first two sentences: " A fluted glass with a
blue-veined violet and a jug of hot punch stand on Ember's bed table. The buff
wall directly above his head (he has a bad cold) bears a sequence of three
engravings". It's odd how a 1947 book anticipates PF and Ada. Fluted & flute
are too much of a coincidence to be one.[ ] Well, Nabokov was a
horrible purveyor of allusions. In any case, the first paragraph of BS's chapter
7 refers exclusively to Vere. "
Jansy
Mello: Hello, MM. The associations bt stone/cone -
hawk/handsaw/hawfinch are perfectly clear. What I meant is that I lack
sufficient familiarity with Shakespeare to be able to follow some
of your other links and allusions.
It's so interesting to
see that Percy first appears holding "a flute of champagne," and the
"fluted glass" in BS, with a Shakespearean whiff. To connect all the
"flutes", I bring up once again one of the quotes related to Percy de
Prey "One supposes it might have been a kind of suite for flute,
a series of ‘movements’ such as, say: I’m alive — who’s that? — civilian —
sympathy — thirsty — daughter with pitcher — that’s my damned gun — don’t... et
cetera or rather no cetera... while Broken-Arm Bill prayed his Roman deity in a
frenzy of fear for the Tartar to finish his job and go. But, of course, an
invaluable detail in that strip of thought would have been — perhaps, next to
the pitcher peri — a glint, a shadow, a stab of
Ardis.)
A.Sklyarenko presented a lovely
sculpture of a bronze girl with a broken pitcher sculpted by Pavel
Sokolov (Lafontaine's Perette) and an apposite poem
by Pushkin.
Myself, I was reminded of Keats (the urn
was a Grecian one), because of the lines: "...girl doomed to offer an everlasting draught of marble water
to a dying marine from her bullet-chipped jar " In Keats,
instead of a flute, there's an unheard pipe: "... - yet, do not grieve;
/She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss, /For ever wilt thou love, and
she be fair! "
There's
a complicated reference in the "pitcher peri," that may lead one to
Shakespeare's "Midsummer Night's Dream," through Gilbert and Sullivan's
"Iolanthe or The Peer and the Peri" ( a comic opera).
Google informs me also about "Paradise and the
Peri, in German Das Paradies und die Peri,"..."by
Robert Schumann, based on a German translation of a tale from Lalla Rookh, by
Thomas Moore [ The peri, a creature from Persian and Islamic mythology, is the focus of the
story, having been expelled from Paradise and trying to regain entrance by
giving the gift that is most dear to heaven.Eventually the peri is admitted
after bringing a tear from the cheek of a repentant old sinner who has seen a
child praying": "A stab of Ardis" (Arcadia,
Paradise)?
Why
would Broken-Arm Bill pray to a Roman deity?