Without Lifting A Finger

I'm almost at the end (and the end is somewhat coming back to me: Memory says: Now I remember): Gradus (Mr. Gray) has fired and hit Shade instead of Kinbote = Commentator = Zemblan King (once he's recovered, with the help of a good-looking gardener, Kinbote dials 11111). I think today I'll just highlight a few fantastic phrases (why I keep coming back to Nabokov) I've highlighted via Kindle (great for that and notetaking). Re the writing process (specifically Shade's): . . . so that he could plunge back into his chaos and drag out of it, with all its wet stars, his cosmos? Re history: Shade: "True, sir. In due time history will have denounced everybody. . . ." Re Lines 939 - 940: Man's life, etc.: . . . our poet suggests here that human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece. Re Gradus and a cup of coffee (he's on his way; he's in the Big Apple): He had a brimming cup and half a saucerful of coffee at...

Et in Arcadia ego by Poussin  * On a more practical note Art = Play = Stratagem may keep Alzheimer's at bay. Example #1 (Kinbote): A newspaper account of a Russian tsar's coronation had, instead of korona (crown), the misprint vorona (crow), and when next day this was apologetically "corrected," it got misprinted a second time as korova (cow). The artistic correlation between the crown-crow-cow series is something that would have, I am sure, enraptured my poet. I have seen nothing like it on lexical playfields and the odds against the double coincidence defy computation. Example #2 (Kinbote): My illustrious friend showed a childish predilection for all sorts of word games and especially for so-called word golf. He would interrupt the flow of a prismatic conversation to indulge in this particular pastime, and naturally it would have been boorish of me to refuse playing with him. Some of my records are: hate-love in three, lass-male in four, and live-dead i...

He never tired of denouncing/poking fun of Freudians or other Quacks. Through Kinbote: Alas, I find only two items preserved in my notebook:    By picking the nose in spite of all commands to the contrary, or when a youth is all the time sticking his finger through his buttonhole . . .  the analytic teacher knows that the appetite of the lustful one knows no limit in his phantasies.         (Quoted by Prof. C. from Dr. Oskar Pfister, The Psychoanalytical Method, 1917, N.Y., p. 79)    The little cap of red velvet in the German version of Little Red Riding Hood is a symbol of menstruation.         (Quoted by Prof. C. from Erich Fromm, The Forgotten Language, 1951, N.Y., p. 240)    Do these clowns really believe what they teach?

Twice now I've missed incredible moons. When was it--some time in spring--that I missed, except in poem, the perigee moon (driving down 4th early in the morning I thought I'd be crushed). Last night I was walking the dog and an incredible waning crescent moon--west on 4th,  low on the horizon--was begging to be captured. The dog took forever (yes, Lucie), and by the time I returned with my camera it was gone. I walked all the way to the corner liquor store hoping to get a shot. No luck.  

Nabokov was a Cynic (a good thing IMO)--in the sense that he shunned group affiliations and was never shy about questioning accepted beliefs. Though it's always dangerous to equate author and author's creation, certainly parts of Emma are Flaubert and parts of Shade and Kinbote are Nabokov. Connecting all the dots of course is impossible. Here's Kinbote on a good Zemblan Christian: In fact, a good Zemblan Christian is taught that true faith is not there to supply pictures or maps, but that it should quietly content itself with a warm haze of pleasurable anticipation. Here's Shade on the afterlife: SHADE: Life is a great surprise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one. And here's Kinbote again (only a fraction of the whole foray), gently pushing against the idea of suicide as sin: The ideal drop is from an aircraft, your muscles relaxed, your pilot puzzled, your packed parachute shuffled off, cast off, shrugged off-- shootka (little chute)...

Of course I only imagine an easter egg. What if Nabokov somehow had a sneakpeek at O'Brien's masterpiece? From Pale Fire : After the last guest had gone (on bicycle), and the ashtrays had been emptied, all the windows were dark . . . The imagined easter egg is buried in the deep grass of a parenthetical: on bicycle . * Speaking through Shade and Kinbote, Nabokov reveals loads about his personal tastes and intolerances. For example, here is Shade (poet/prof) discussing with Kinbote the grading of students' papers. "I am generally very benevolent [said Shade]. But there are certain trifles I do not forgive." Kinbote: "For instance?" "Not having read the book. Having read it like an idiot. Looking in it for symbols; example: 'The author uses the striking image green leaves because green is the symbol of happiness and frustration.' 

I think I can answer the first question now: Yes, Pale Fire is very much connected to Nabokov's work in translating "Eugene Onegin." I dug up this lengthy essay (by Molly Lehman) pointing to that conclusion rather quickly: http://mollylehman.wordpress.com/literary-criticism/vladimir-nabokovs-pale-fire-and-the-role-of-the-literary-annotation-in-reading/ A quote from her text: We can begin to see, then, how Nabokov’s exploration of the literary footnote in Eugene Onegin could expand itself into a fictional work like Pale Fire. The novel appeared in print for the first time in 1962, five years after he finished the translation, and indeed, John Lyons has noted that “He [Nabokov] worked on his edition of Eugene Onegin and Pale Fire simultaneously, and no doubt the first was in large part the inspiration of the second.”  For Nabokov, spurred by his work on Eugene Onegin to experiment further with the possibilities of literary annotation, Pale Fire seems to have been a wa...

Just a great image: The pool of opalescent ditch water had grown in length; along its edge walked a sick bat like a cripple with a broken umbrella. * And a nice bit re the "other reality" of Art: Eystein had also resorted to a weird form of trickery: among his decorations of wood or wool, gold or velvet, he would insert one which was really made of the material elsewhere imitated by paint. This device which was apparently meant to enhance the effect of his tactile and tonal values had, however, something ignoble about it and disclosed not only an essential flaw in Eystein's talent, but the basic fact that "reality" is neither the subject nor the object of true art which creates its own special reality having nothing to do with the average "reality" perceived by the communal eye.

Question #1: Did the lengthy commentary of "Eugene Onegin" inspire, plant the seed for,  Pale Fire = Poem + Commentary? Questioin #2: Did Flann O'Brien's De Selby (whose footnotes eventually dominate the page) contribute to the genesis of  Pale Fire ? Answers: I have none. Rereading Pale Fire brought these questions to mind. I have no idea if there's evidence out there to take a stab at the answers. Certainly Nabokov liked to claim: No influences. I'll get back to it if I can dig anything up.

Nabokov is all about style and wordplay. He loved to poke fun at Freud and Freudians; and, though perhaps not as often, Dostoevsky (he accused "Dusty and Dusky" of sloppy writing and poshlost ). From the poem in Pale Fire : Fra Karamazov, mumbling his inept All is allowed , into some classes crept; . . . * And a fun example of Nabokov's wordplay/love-of-words (from the commentary): What the obituarist does not know is that Lukin comes from Luke, as also do Locock and Luxon and Lukashevich. It represents one of the many instances when the amorphous-looking but live and personal hereditary patronymic grows, sometimes in fantastic shapes, around the common pebble of a Christian name. 

Finished Emma (singing the De profundis I buried her yesterday); have a few more pages left on Emants' A Posthumous Confession ; started a Kindle version (hope the commentary has hyperlinks back to the poem) of Nabokov's Pale Fire (read it last maybe 7 or more years ago). Re Pale Fire's Preface (ghost written by Charles Kinbote), I'll only copy out the wonderful sentence evoking the mourning cloak butterfly (where I live there's a few stands of cottonwoods that lure them in: I wait every year for the little mummies to evict the ashen tenants fringed with yellow): As a rule, Shade destroyed drafts the moment he ceased to need them: well do I recall seeing him from my porch, on a brilliant morning, burning a whole stack of them in the pale fire of the incinerator before which he stood with bent head like an official mourner among the wind-borne black butterflies of that backyard auto-da-fe.