Jansy Mello: Shade/Hades is an anagram, but was it intended by VN, in the sense that the name Shade would’ve been chosen because of this wordplay instead of its other shades of darkness?
Dear Jansy,
I neglected to respond to your query as to VN's intentions regarding the name Shade as an anagram of Hades. I believe it to have been intentional for several reasons. Shade's dual nature is spelled out plainly when he himself (that is to say VN as Shade) refers to his totem (I forget the word he used) as the versipel, or werewolf. The other reason is that the names of his wife and daughter also point to the underworld. Can this be unintended? I found this very interesting description of the hazel in Frazer's The Golden Bough :
People have fancied that if they cut a branch of hazel on Midsummer Eve it would serve them as a divining rod to discover treasure and water [hidden underground]. They say that if you would procure the mystic wand you must go to the hazel by night on Midsummer Eve, walking backwards .... Having got it you must baptize it in the name of one of the Three Holy Kings according to the purpose for which you intend to use it: if the rod is to discover gold, you name it Caspar; if it is to reveal silver, you call it Balthasar; and if it is to point out hidden springs of water, you dub it Melchior [my italics].
Actually these (at least the walking backwards and the Three Kings) are most likely coincidences; I am not aware of any evidence that VN read The Golden Bough. Of course, there may be slavic equivalents that VN would have known (Pnin knew his slavic folklore). As to the despised by VN T. S. Eliot - I believe that he was very much aware of Frazer. Midsummer's Eve (known as St. John's Eve in Europe and Ivan Kupala in Russia - June 23rd New Style) reference - that's harder to pooh-pooh. I can't find it in the archives, but I thought someone had shown that this day is important in Pale Fire. Note also that "many rites of this holiday are connected with water, fertility and autopurification. The girls, for example, would float their flower garlands on the water of rivers and tell their fortunes from their movement [from the Wikipedia]." There are references to this in both Pnin and Pale Fire I believe. In any event, Hazel does ask her mother for the meaning of chtonic (a word which she finds along with grimpen, a word that may have been coined by Conan Doyle, in The Waste Land which she apparently is reading for a class).
Jansy Mello: This time and again I was reminded of T.S.Eliot’s epigraph to “The Wasteland”, from the Satyricon (Petronius), where one Sybil is mentioned (but I don’t imagine VN was thinking about that ever-shriveling prophet).
As to the Sibyl (note different spelling) she of Delphi was portrayed by Michelangelo as a handsome and relatively young woman. The Cumaen Sibyl (the aged one) was Roman, thus a later copy of the original Greek. Michelangelo put both Sibyls (actually there are a total of five) in the Sistine Chapel:
Note that far from appearing shriveled, the Cumaean Sibyl, though clearly ancient, is endowed by the artist with rather beefy arms! however, Jansy is correct; the Cumaean Sibyl shrank to the point where she could be contained in a jar, to which idea Eliot refers.
Wikipedia: Pausanias [in his Description of Greece, 2nd century AD] claimed that the [Delphic] Sibyl was "born between man and goddess, daughter of sea monsters and an immortal nymph". Others said she was the sister or daughter of Apollo. ... After her death, it was said that she became a wandering voice that still brought to the ears of men tidings of the future wrapped in dark riddles.
The habit of the Sibyl to deliver her messages in "dark riddles" definitely reminds one of Pale Fire. Was Nabokov thinking of the Delphic oracle when he named Mrs Shade Sybil? I have no idea, but certainly he would have been aware of the origins of the name. Arguing against all of this is the fact that of all the characters in Pale Fire one of the least mysterious and otherworldly is Sybil Shade.
Carolyn
P.S. In a footnote in The Golden Bough (ibid., p. 69) I found that "a remarkable property of the hazel is that it is never struck by lightning." Lightning does play a role in Pale Fire, and while Mary McCarthy called her miraculous early review of the novel "A Bolt from the Blue" - the only storm she mentions is an artificial snowstorm in a paperweight. Does anyone have a theory as to why she used this expression for her title?