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Re: Yet another reconsideration of Pale Fire
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About cats and dogs: Nabokov's friendship with "a line of pets," among which there's "Tomsky," happened during his stay in America. Before that period, at the time Vladimir had yet to meet Irina Guadanini (by trade a poodle groomer), dogs were the main presence in his various short-stories.* However in RLSK there's a blue cat with celadon eyes (the reader will soon learn that it's a female cat)** sitting on the lap of a British scholar, one of the very few friends of Sebastian Knight. It is tempting to see in V's "informant" a figure vaguely suggestive of Samuel Johnson, but all the pointers lead to the literary metamorphosis by Irina Guadanini's spells.
In RLSK, while interviewing him V. learns that Sebastian "saw no one except my informant...a handsome friendship...They were both interested in English literature, and Sebastian's friend was already then planning that first work of his, The Laws of Literary Imagination, which, two or three years later, won for him the Montgomery Prize.[...] 'I must confess,' said he as he stroked a soft blue cat with celadon eyes which had appeared from nowhere and now made itself comfortable in his lap, 'I must confess that Sebastian rather pained me [...] In those days, he wrote far better than he spoke, but still there was something vaguely un-English about his poems...He put down the cat and rummaged awhile among some papers in a drawer,' [...] I don't know what's the matter with this cat, she does not seem to know milk all of a sudden'. " Sebastian's half-brother V. believes that "women with a very few exceptions were nothing but cats" and the sound of the word "cat" is depreciatingly related to "sex" (ks,ks catcall...Cathay ) when V. dismisses the importance of Sebastian's companion Clare in his love-life: "the very sound of the word 'sex' with its hissing vulgarity and the 'ks, ks' catcall at the end, seems so inane to me that I cannot help doubting whether there is any real idea behind the word...letting the the 'sexual idea', if such a thing exists, pervade and 'explain' all...is a grave error of reasoning." Now V. proceeds to quote paragraphs from some of his brother's novels: 'The breaking of a wave cannot explain the whole sea, from its moon to its serpent; but a pool in the cup of a rock and the diamond-rippled road to Cathay are both water,' (The Back of the Moon.) There is subdued allusion to Freud ("letting the 'sexual idea...explain" all") and its very discretion is curious.
.............................................................................
* -In a 1965 interview, with Robert Hughes, Nabokov recognizes that "a good deal of Kinbote's commentary was written here in the Montreux Palace garden...I'm especially fond of its weeping cedar, the arboreal counterpart of a very shaggy dog with hair hanging over its eyes." Nevertheless, at that time Nabokov had already been enslaved by a phantom dog, whose presence is felt through Clare Bishop (Clare possessed "that real sense of beauty which has far less to do with art than with the constant readiness to discern the halo round a frying-pan or the likeness between a weeping-willow and a Skye terrier." RLSK,p.63), in Nabokov's first novel in English. We find a dog in "Lolita" ("Lo, leaving the dog as she would leave me some day, rose from her haunches")and, earlier, in connection to Nabokov's first love: "And now a delightful thing happens...I try again to recall the name of Colette's dog - and, sure enough, along those remote beaches, over the glossy evening sands of the past, where each footprint slowly fills up with sunset water, here it comes, here it comes, echoing and vibrating: Floss, Floss, Floss!" (Speak Memory,p.488 Library of America) In Pale Fire there's Aunt Maud's half-paralyzed Skye terrier who belongs to "the breed called in our country 'weeping-willow dog'.
The theme of a squatting child and a shaggy woolly black pup is present in Laura: "Flora, rummaging all around her seat for her small formless vanity bag, a blind black puppy..Here it is, cried an anonymous girl, squatting quietly." Nevertheless, there's another shaggy dog which must be accounted for. In "A Nursery Tale," Erwin "chooses the same girl twice (a nymphet)" (as Nabokov describes years afterwards), for his first and, inadvertently, his last addition to his wishing list. Erwin's young girl "squatted down to tousle with two fingers a fat shaggy pup..." Although he must admit his defeat by having "recognized the girl who had been playing that morning with a woolly black pup" in the one he had just added to his list, before the stroke of midnight, his joy is still real because he "immediately remembered, immediately understood all her charm, tender warmth, priceless radiance."
** - I'd already mentioned the hero Celadon in the list and a blue cat. I had searched through Dryden's Secret Love, or The Maiden Queen and [cf. Nab-L 21/02/2009] his play "Astrea." There's also celadon as a Chinese blue-green porcelain and, after Eric Rohmer's movie, Celadon et Astrée, fashionable items such as brands of wine and eyeshadow.[...] In Mon, 23 Feb 2009 Stan Kelly-Bootle observes that he can "agree that such allusions/sightings add to our sheer reading pleasure. What I find boring about much of my non-Nabokov-fiction reading is the absence of ³lexical challenge.² But I must say that ³celadan eyes² are more intriguing than the almost commonplace idiom ³light of my life.²...³Celadan² will certainly have me brushing up my somewhat stale Dryden, and re-reading RLSK for further clues of relevance beyond the mere fact (coincidence?) of usage...." I was not particularly enchanted by Eric Rohmer's movie-adaptation of Honoré d'Urfé's work, preferring to focus on Dryden's play, also because I reached it through Dr. Samuel Johnson's Lives (where he also discurred on Dryden's "Don Sebastian.").
Dave Haan just sent me two links (off-list) and they helped me to realize that, perhaps, Nabokov's Celadon probably derives from the more ancient French ( we know that Nabokov studied the French pastorals and medieval texts in Cambridge). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celadon#Etymology and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honor%C3%A9_d'Urf%C3%A9#Works. Dave Haan noted that I "took it for Dryden's 2 yrs ago, but this is earlier (and more prominent in the lit), and the auto-brother-graphy nails it. But not to preclude secondary allusions. Dryden, Ovid's Metamorphoses, and the breed of cat known as the 'Russian Blue'."
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In RLSK, while interviewing him V. learns that Sebastian "saw no one except my informant...a handsome friendship...They were both interested in English literature, and Sebastian's friend was already then planning that first work of his, The Laws of Literary Imagination, which, two or three years later, won for him the Montgomery Prize.[...] 'I must confess,' said he as he stroked a soft blue cat with celadon eyes which had appeared from nowhere and now made itself comfortable in his lap, 'I must confess that Sebastian rather pained me [...] In those days, he wrote far better than he spoke, but still there was something vaguely un-English about his poems...He put down the cat and rummaged awhile among some papers in a drawer,' [...] I don't know what's the matter with this cat, she does not seem to know milk all of a sudden'. " Sebastian's half-brother V. believes that "women with a very few exceptions were nothing but cats" and the sound of the word "cat" is depreciatingly related to "sex" (ks,ks catcall...Cathay ) when V. dismisses the importance of Sebastian's companion Clare in his love-life: "the very sound of the word 'sex' with its hissing vulgarity and the 'ks, ks' catcall at the end, seems so inane to me that I cannot help doubting whether there is any real idea behind the word...letting the the 'sexual idea', if such a thing exists, pervade and 'explain' all...is a grave error of reasoning." Now V. proceeds to quote paragraphs from some of his brother's novels: 'The breaking of a wave cannot explain the whole sea, from its moon to its serpent; but a pool in the cup of a rock and the diamond-rippled road to Cathay are both water,' (The Back of the Moon.) There is subdued allusion to Freud ("letting the 'sexual idea...explain" all") and its very discretion is curious.
.............................................................................
* -In a 1965 interview, with Robert Hughes, Nabokov recognizes that "a good deal of Kinbote's commentary was written here in the Montreux Palace garden...I'm especially fond of its weeping cedar, the arboreal counterpart of a very shaggy dog with hair hanging over its eyes." Nevertheless, at that time Nabokov had already been enslaved by a phantom dog, whose presence is felt through Clare Bishop (Clare possessed "that real sense of beauty which has far less to do with art than with the constant readiness to discern the halo round a frying-pan or the likeness between a weeping-willow and a Skye terrier." RLSK,p.63), in Nabokov's first novel in English. We find a dog in "Lolita" ("Lo, leaving the dog as she would leave me some day, rose from her haunches")and, earlier, in connection to Nabokov's first love: "And now a delightful thing happens...I try again to recall the name of Colette's dog - and, sure enough, along those remote beaches, over the glossy evening sands of the past, where each footprint slowly fills up with sunset water, here it comes, here it comes, echoing and vibrating: Floss, Floss, Floss!" (Speak Memory,p.488 Library of America) In Pale Fire there's Aunt Maud's half-paralyzed Skye terrier who belongs to "the breed called in our country 'weeping-willow dog'.
The theme of a squatting child and a shaggy woolly black pup is present in Laura: "Flora, rummaging all around her seat for her small formless vanity bag, a blind black puppy..Here it is, cried an anonymous girl, squatting quietly." Nevertheless, there's another shaggy dog which must be accounted for. In "A Nursery Tale," Erwin "chooses the same girl twice (a nymphet)" (as Nabokov describes years afterwards), for his first and, inadvertently, his last addition to his wishing list. Erwin's young girl "squatted down to tousle with two fingers a fat shaggy pup..." Although he must admit his defeat by having "recognized the girl who had been playing that morning with a woolly black pup" in the one he had just added to his list, before the stroke of midnight, his joy is still real because he "immediately remembered, immediately understood all her charm, tender warmth, priceless radiance."
** - I'd already mentioned the hero Celadon in the list and a blue cat. I had searched through Dryden's Secret Love, or The Maiden Queen and [cf. Nab-L 21/02/2009] his play "Astrea." There's also celadon as a Chinese blue-green porcelain and, after Eric Rohmer's movie, Celadon et Astrée, fashionable items such as brands of wine and eyeshadow.[...] In Mon, 23 Feb 2009 Stan Kelly-Bootle observes that he can "agree that such allusions/sightings add to our sheer reading pleasure. What I find boring about much of my non-Nabokov-fiction reading is the absence of ³lexical challenge.² But I must say that ³celadan eyes² are more intriguing than the almost commonplace idiom ³light of my life.²...³Celadan² will certainly have me brushing up my somewhat stale Dryden, and re-reading RLSK for further clues of relevance beyond the mere fact (coincidence?) of usage...." I was not particularly enchanted by Eric Rohmer's movie-adaptation of Honoré d'Urfé's work, preferring to focus on Dryden's play, also because I reached it through Dr. Samuel Johnson's Lives (where he also discurred on Dryden's "Don Sebastian.").
Dave Haan just sent me two links (off-list) and they helped me to realize that, perhaps, Nabokov's Celadon probably derives from the more ancient French ( we know that Nabokov studied the French pastorals and medieval texts in Cambridge). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celadon#Etymology and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honor%C3%A9_d'Urf%C3%A9#Works. Dave Haan noted that I "took it for Dryden's 2 yrs ago, but this is earlier (and more prominent in the lit), and the auto-brother-graphy nails it. But not to preclude secondary allusions. Dryden, Ovid's Metamorphoses, and the breed of cat known as the 'Russian Blue'."
Search archive with Google:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
Visit "Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
Manage subscription options: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/