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[NABOKOV-L] Nabokovian, Spring 2011,66: "Fey"
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The post brought "The Nabokovian" Spring issue, n. 66, with an article by Rachel Trousdale and a full section of "Notes and Brief Commentaries" featuring Victor Fet & D. Herlihy, Gerard de Vries, Gavriel Shapiro, Alexey Sklyarenko, Yannicke Chupin and Jens J. Jensen. Brian Boyds Annotations to Ada (ch.32) close the issue.
In "," G. de Vries mentions paranormal phenomena and ghosts and informs about Dr. Johnson's trip, with Boswell, to the Highlands and to the island of Skye. One important bibliographical reference he uses is Andrew Lang's twenty-four volume Border Edition, London, 1900, from where he selects a special meaning for the word "fey" (vol.VII 307-310), as applied by seers to people whose approaching death they have perceived.
De Vries offers various examples from Walter Scott, before he cites an example from Nabokov's "Pale Fire" ( "the consonne d'appui, Echo's fey child..." from ines 967-970). The author explores Nabokov's interest in the occult, including prophetic powers and stories about visions which forewhadow future events. He also shows the importance of echoes and voices (hearing the voices of the dead calling one's name) in connection to Kinbote's hearing a call from an absent John Shade(258-9) and Shade's imminent death.
According to De Vries "Shade has predicted his own death by his versification." although "the present reading of some of the lines of Canto IV are rather dependent on some familiarity with Scottish letters and lore" ( "Dictionaries present 'fey' as a Scottish word. Next, the Scottish connections in Pale Fire are rather conspicuous..." Cf. Hazel Shade/The Lady of the Lake, Aunt Maud's Skye terrier; King Charles' tutor; Angus M'Diarmid, Lochanhead...)
From my first readings of "Lolita"* and "Speak,Memory"** I've always been particularly interested in this same word, "fey" through its associations to feverish states and mild auditory hallucinations.
Although "fey" can mean, as argued by De Vries, "person who is approaching death," the word "fey" for me carries wider etymological branchings# which I obtained from Nabokov's writings. In "Ada" we only gradually learn to discern Lucette's "fey" quality (it seems that Nabokov made a synthesis of the word's various meanings!)*** and other rather vague intimations that associate her to Blanche, Cinderella and pumpkin-coated coachmen.
The auditory hallucinations appear mainly in connection to Aqua, but (who knows) they may be return through a coachman named Dorofey!***(c)
Peter Lubin seems to agree with De Vries when he writes in "Kickshaws and Motley" (Cf. www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/lubin1.htm -)
'Take the honest kersey fey, a wordlet with an old and venerable history. From the Anglo-Saxon faege, it means fated or doomed to die, dying, having the air of one under a doom or spell. ("Ocymore, dyspotme, oligochronien," as Ronsard glossed it.) It is a common epithet for the kemps and menskful kings struggling on a field, gules, in the old battle poems of Maldon and Brunanburh and, later, in Layamon. Through contamination with fay it may also mean "able to see fairies, be clairvoyant, have an unworldly air or attitude." Latterly fey has been stretched to cover "bizarre, strange, coy, whimsical," and is even applied to male pale fires and outlandish dress. But Nabokov naturally uses it exactly as it should be used. We recall a passage in Pale Fire, perhaps the best use of the word anywhere: "the consonne d'appui/Echo's fey child," one instance of his noble rescue and resurrection of a word that was slowly being put to death by other writers. " (De Vries quotes Boyd's contribution to the understanding of the "consonne d' appui", its "echoing" powers...)
Although this word is not employed by Nabokov very often, whenever it does appear it literally conjures up warnings, echoes and calls which serve to enhance its apparently trivial import - in the ears of some scholars, at least.
.........................................................................
* Lolita:
a."certain mysterious characteristics, the fey grace, the elusive, shifty, soul-shattering, insidious charm that separates the nymphet from such coevals of hers"
b. "...Lolita, when she used to visit me in her dear dirty blue jeans, smelling of orchards in nymphetland; awkward and fey, and dimly depraved...A great French doctor once told my father that in near relatives the faintest gastric gurgle has the same 'voice'. "
c. "I should have understood that ...the nymphean evil breathing through every pore of the fey child that I had prepared for my secret delectation, would make the secrecy impossible, and the delectation lethal."
** - Speak, Memory (ch.2,p.;36/37) "One day, after a long illness, as I lay in bed still very weak, I found myself basking in an unusual euphoria of lightness and repose. I knew my mother had gone to buy me the daily present that made those convalescences so delightful. What it would be this time I could not guess, but through the crystal of my strangely translucent state I vividly visualized her driving away.." (this chapter carries an interesting appraisal of "hearing voices")
*** - ADA: a. (feverish/not fey): "Actually it was Lucette, the younger one, a neutral child of eight, with a fringe of shiny reddish-blond hair and a freckled button for nose: she had had pneumonia in spring and was still veiled by an odd air of remoteness that children, especially impish children, retain for some time after brushing through death."
b. "The mind could hardly grasp the fact that this very morning, at dawn, a fey character out of some Dormilona novel for servant maids had spoken to him, half-naked and shivering, in the toolroom of Ardis Hall."
c. The name "Dorofey" brings together "coachman", "Cinderella" and "sleep", but it also indicates Aqua's watery auditory hallucinations and the "dorophone":
"bits of holly or laurel here and there on the soap-smelling floor, Dorofey, like Onegin's coachman, said priehali ('we have arrived') and gently propelled Van, past two screened beds, toward a third one near the window."
d."Upon entering [at Ovenman's], he stopped for a moment to surrender his coat...He headed for the bar, and ...the girl whose silhouette he recalled having seen now and then ...ever since his pubescence, passing alone, drinking alone, always alone, like Blok's Incognita. [He] went up to her in silence. There she was...The glossy red lips are parted, avid and fey, offering a side gleam of large upper teeth...Her Irish profile sweetened by a touch of Russian softness, which adds a look of mysterious expectancy and wistful surprise to her beauty, must be seen..."
# - A more modest dictionary (COD) offers:
fey: 1a. strange; otherwordly;elfin; whimsical;clairvoyant; 2.Sc. a: fated to die soon;b.overexcited or elated, as formerly associated with the state of mind of a person about to die, feyly:adv. feyness n. [Old English fäege, from Germanic]
.
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In "," G. de Vries mentions paranormal phenomena and ghosts and informs about Dr. Johnson's trip, with Boswell, to the Highlands and to the island of Skye. One important bibliographical reference he uses is Andrew Lang's twenty-four volume Border Edition, London, 1900, from where he selects a special meaning for the word "fey" (vol.VII 307-310), as applied by seers to people whose approaching death they have perceived.
De Vries offers various examples from Walter Scott, before he cites an example from Nabokov's "Pale Fire" ( "the consonne d'appui, Echo's fey child..." from ines 967-970). The author explores Nabokov's interest in the occult, including prophetic powers and stories about visions which forewhadow future events. He also shows the importance of echoes and voices (hearing the voices of the dead calling one's name) in connection to Kinbote's hearing a call from an absent John Shade(258-9) and Shade's imminent death.
According to De Vries "Shade has predicted his own death by his versification." although "the present reading of some of the lines of Canto IV are rather dependent on some familiarity with Scottish letters and lore" ( "Dictionaries present 'fey' as a Scottish word. Next, the Scottish connections in Pale Fire are rather conspicuous..." Cf. Hazel Shade/The Lady of the Lake, Aunt Maud's Skye terrier; King Charles' tutor; Angus M'Diarmid, Lochanhead...)
From my first readings of "Lolita"* and "Speak,Memory"** I've always been particularly interested in this same word, "fey" through its associations to feverish states and mild auditory hallucinations.
Although "fey" can mean, as argued by De Vries, "person who is approaching death," the word "fey" for me carries wider etymological branchings# which I obtained from Nabokov's writings. In "Ada" we only gradually learn to discern Lucette's "fey" quality (it seems that Nabokov made a synthesis of the word's various meanings!)*** and other rather vague intimations that associate her to Blanche, Cinderella and pumpkin-coated coachmen.
The auditory hallucinations appear mainly in connection to Aqua, but (who knows) they may be return through a coachman named Dorofey!***(c)
Peter Lubin seems to agree with De Vries when he writes in "Kickshaws and Motley" (Cf. www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/lubin1.htm -)
'Take the honest kersey fey, a wordlet with an old and venerable history. From the Anglo-Saxon faege, it means fated or doomed to die, dying, having the air of one under a doom or spell. ("Ocymore, dyspotme, oligochronien," as Ronsard glossed it.) It is a common epithet for the kemps and menskful kings struggling on a field, gules, in the old battle poems of Maldon and Brunanburh and, later, in Layamon. Through contamination with fay it may also mean "able to see fairies, be clairvoyant, have an unworldly air or attitude." Latterly fey has been stretched to cover "bizarre, strange, coy, whimsical," and is even applied to male pale fires and outlandish dress. But Nabokov naturally uses it exactly as it should be used. We recall a passage in Pale Fire, perhaps the best use of the word anywhere: "the consonne d'appui/Echo's fey child," one instance of his noble rescue and resurrection of a word that was slowly being put to death by other writers. " (De Vries quotes Boyd's contribution to the understanding of the "consonne d' appui", its "echoing" powers...)
Although this word is not employed by Nabokov very often, whenever it does appear it literally conjures up warnings, echoes and calls which serve to enhance its apparently trivial import - in the ears of some scholars, at least.
.........................................................................
* Lolita:
a."certain mysterious characteristics, the fey grace, the elusive, shifty, soul-shattering, insidious charm that separates the nymphet from such coevals of hers"
b. "...Lolita, when she used to visit me in her dear dirty blue jeans, smelling of orchards in nymphetland; awkward and fey, and dimly depraved...A great French doctor once told my father that in near relatives the faintest gastric gurgle has the same 'voice'. "
c. "I should have understood that ...the nymphean evil breathing through every pore of the fey child that I had prepared for my secret delectation, would make the secrecy impossible, and the delectation lethal."
** - Speak, Memory (ch.2,p.;36/37) "One day, after a long illness, as I lay in bed still very weak, I found myself basking in an unusual euphoria of lightness and repose. I knew my mother had gone to buy me the daily present that made those convalescences so delightful. What it would be this time I could not guess, but through the crystal of my strangely translucent state I vividly visualized her driving away.." (this chapter carries an interesting appraisal of "hearing voices")
*** - ADA: a. (feverish/not fey): "Actually it was Lucette, the younger one, a neutral child of eight, with a fringe of shiny reddish-blond hair and a freckled button for nose: she had had pneumonia in spring and was still veiled by an odd air of remoteness that children, especially impish children, retain for some time after brushing through death."
b. "The mind could hardly grasp the fact that this very morning, at dawn, a fey character out of some Dormilona novel for servant maids had spoken to him, half-naked and shivering, in the toolroom of Ardis Hall."
c. The name "Dorofey" brings together "coachman", "Cinderella" and "sleep", but it also indicates Aqua's watery auditory hallucinations and the "dorophone":
"bits of holly or laurel here and there on the soap-smelling floor, Dorofey, like Onegin's coachman, said priehali ('we have arrived') and gently propelled Van, past two screened beds, toward a third one near the window."
d."Upon entering [at Ovenman's], he stopped for a moment to surrender his coat...He headed for the bar, and ...the girl whose silhouette he recalled having seen now and then ...ever since his pubescence, passing alone, drinking alone, always alone, like Blok's Incognita. [He] went up to her in silence. There she was...The glossy red lips are parted, avid and fey, offering a side gleam of large upper teeth...Her Irish profile sweetened by a touch of Russian softness, which adds a look of mysterious expectancy and wistful surprise to her beauty, must be seen..."
# - A more modest dictionary (COD) offers:
fey: 1a. strange; otherwordly;elfin; whimsical;clairvoyant; 2.Sc. a: fated to die soon;b.overexcited or elated, as formerly associated with the state of mind of a person about to die, feyly:adv. feyness n. [Old English fäege, from Germanic]
.
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/