Vladimir Nabokov

NABOKV-L post 0016185, Sun, 13 Apr 2008 23:44:11 -0300

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Fw: [NABOKV-L] sans anything?
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Carolyn wrote: "Sans wine, sans song, sans singer, sans end." Fitzgerald's Rubaiyat.
Tom Rymour [ Glad to her from ya!]: Willie Woggledagger's seventh age of man: "...sans eyes, sans teeth, sans everything."
Jerry Friedman: The "sans"es suggest the "All the world's a stage" speech from /As You Like It/.
Mary Krimmel: "Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything." is Jacques's description of the seventh age of man in Shakespeare's "As You Like It". Surely others will answer the question below. Note that Jacques's fourth "sans" is "everything" and Kinbote's fourth is "anything but his art". What a difference!

Carolyn Kunin brought a quote from the Rubaiyat. And yet, the predominant reference here points to Jacques in "As You Like It".
If Kinbote's "sans fame, sans future, sans audience, sans anything but his art" suggests a redemption through art (even if "sans audience") then his pompous grandeur wouldn't end in suicide because defeat would only have come to him as "a figment", not as a "character".

The spirit of John Donne's "Death Be Not Proud" (Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,/ And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell;And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well/And better than thy stroke; why swell'st thou then?/One short sleep past, we wake eternally,/And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die..") is not absent from the novel's closing lines. This pauline defiance fits well in Kinbote's certainty that Shade's line 1000 is a return to line 1...

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