Matt Roth: "I recently re-read two excellent
articles from The Nabokovian and wanted to fill in a few lucanae found therein.
The first article, by Charles W. Harrison, from 1997, contains a good deal of
interesting history centering on the Nattochdag lineage in Sweden. CWH
suspects that Nabokov may have gleaned the Nattochdag name from the
Adelskalendar, a directory of Swedish nobility, and/or from Isak Denison’s Seven
Gothic Tales [ ]VN, at this date, was still working on Shade’s poem.
He had already written about Hazel’s drowning in the lake, but he had not yet
given her a name, in writing at least. One wonders if Rolf’s “hazelbushes” were
influential? On the other hand, VN first wrote about Dr. Nattochdag, in
the scene from the Foreword (p. 24-25), on March 12, 1961, about a month after
receiving the letter from Rolf..".//The second article, from 2000, is by Ward
Swinton and concerns Kinbote’s mention of the poet Flatman[ ] What I find
most interesting is the notion that Browning was using Flatman’s quip
metaphorically to represent, in a sense, his own disappearance—the disappearance
of a king likened to the disappearance of a poet. This certainly seems to
fit with various aspects of the Kinbote-Shade relationship in PF"
Jansy Mello: Impressive research, MR, as usual!
Personally, I prefer to think that the name "Hazel" gets its
inspiration from various sources, one re-inforcing the other [including Haze,
Dolores, the famous lines from Lord A.Tennyson, the mystical associations
to the hazel tree, the description of the color of his eyes in a passport
(hazel brown),aso], because it seems closer to what Sebastian Knight (and
Nabokov) describes as the multinear workings of their associations.*
btw: The name isn't Denison, but Dinesen (i.e, Karen Blixen, whose
novels inspired at least two excelent movies: Out of Africa and Babette's
Feast).
On the fun part, I recently heard those lines about vanishing kings
in another CSI episode (which I cannot place, sorry!) : "cons don't die, they
simply disappear"
.......................................
*
- "...he knew that his slightest thought or sensation had always at least
one more dimension than those of his neighbours..." [ ] "Most people
live through the day with this or that part of their mind in a happy state of
somnolence... in my case all the shutters and lids and doors of the mind would
be open at once at all times of the-day. Most brains have their Sundays, mine
was even refused a half-holiday. This state of constant wakefulness was
extremely painful not only in itself, but in its direct results. Every ordinary
act which, as a matter of course, I had to perform, took on such a complicated
appearance, provoked such a multitude of associative ideas in my mind, and these
associations were so tricky and obscure, so utterly useless for practical
application, that I would either shirk the business at hand or else make a mess
of it out of sheer nervousness" [ ] "At times he felt like a child given a
farrago of wires and ordered to produce the wonder of light. And he did produce
it...at other times he would be worrying the wires for hours in what seemed the
most rational way — and achieve nothing." (RLSK) These quotes are
almost apt, but there's a paragraph which escaped me and it
demonstrates this state of affairs with greater clarity.
While I
was searching through RLSK I found a paragraph that foretells Shade's insight
about the patterns in life. I think VN is alluding to Baudelaire's poem
"Correspondances" when he writes about the conversing trees and the gestures of
their language.
"The answer to all questions of life and death, 'the
absolute solution' was written all over the world he had known: it was like a
traveller realizing that the wild country he surveys is not an accidental
assembly of natural phenomena, but the page in a book where these mountains and
forests, and fields, and rivers are disposed in such a way as to form a coherent
sentence; the vowel of a lake fusing with the consonant of a sibilant
slope; the windings of a road writing its message in a round hand, as clear as
that of one's father; trees conversing in dumb-show, making sense to one who has
learnt the gestures of their language.... Thus the traveller spells the
landscape and its sense is disclosed, and likewise, the intricate pattern of
human life turns out to be monogrammatic, now quite clear to the inner eye
disentangling the interwoven letters, And the word, the meaning which appears is
astounding in its simplicity: the greatest surprise being perhaps that in the
course of one's earthly existence, with one's brain encompassed by an iron ring,
by the close-fitting dream of one's own personality — one had not made by chance
that simple mental jerk, which would have set free imprisoned thought and
granted it the great understanding...Thus, a cherry stone and its tiny shadow
which lay on the painted wood of a tired bench, or a bit of tom paper, or any
other such trifle out of millions and millions of trifles grew to a wonderful
size. Remodelled and re-combined, the world yielded its sense to the soul as
naturally as both breathed."
Correspondances :
Charles Baudelaire (excerpts)
"La Nature est un temple où de vivants piliers
Laissent parfois
sortir de confuses paroles ;
L’homme y passe à travers des forêts de
symboles
Qui l’observent avec des regards familiers.
Comme de longs échos qui de loin se confondent
Dans une
ténébreuse et profonde unité,
Vaste comme la nuit et comme la clarté,
Les
parfums, les couleurs et les sons se
répondent..."