Gary Lipon to JM's "The... words "bar/neon-bar" are
'unpoetically' placed close together": I read them as ten lines apart!?
[... ]I have been writing a little essay on a new interpretation of Pale
Fire...In this interpretation Hazel is destined to die young in order to provide
a theme,(motivation?) for Shade's Magnus Opus, Pale Fire.Through composing this
work Shade believes he has, or will become, immortal//".other men die; but I / Am not another; therefore I’ll not
die" ...Even though the mind searches for an ironic interpretation of
this line, I have never been able to find one. It's notable that it is logically
incorrect...
Jansy Mello: Gary Lipon is correct when he notes
that the words "bar/neon-bar" are ten lines apart. (Cf.
387-388: "new car/Hawaiian bar" and 397-398: "the
azure entrance ..."/"Puddles were neon-barred..."). The
common "car-bar" must have impressed me enough to
get the pattern carried over to the bar's entrance with its
neon-barred puddles.
Actually, I'd been fighting off the temptation to link cages and HH's
jail bars in Lolita to the Carmen-barmen ditty derived from a
song hit describing a crime, that was ingeniously
and playfully elaborated in the novel.* ( but the metal-gun kills
Carmen and not her lover)
In the Nab-L interpretations for the irony in Shade's lines
( "other men die, but I/Am not another...") has
been brought up in the past in connection to Marcel Duchamp's epitaph:
"D'ailleurs, c'est toujours les autres qui meurent" ("Besides, it's
always other people who die.") and other suggestions.
......................................................................................................................................................................................
* - HH writes about "a foolish song that was then
popular — O my Carmen, my little Carmen, something, something, those something
nights, and the stars, and the cars, and the bars, and the
barmen" which ends up woven into HH's verses:
"Who is your hero, Dolores Haze?
Still
one of those blue-caped star-men?
Oh the balmy days and the palmy
bays,
And the cars, and the bars, my
Carmen!"