Matt: not sure if we can or need to answer why “exactly” with regard to VN’s decision to cast Shade as an orphan. As others have hinted, it seems a natural narrative choice: Shade is pondering the hereafter and VN gives him a dead parent and a dead daughter to feed his ruminations.
By coincidence, I’ve just watched (Sky Arts 2 TV) the Australian Opera performing the G&S “The Pirates of Penzance” in which ORPHAN BOYS play a highly COMICAL role. Then again, the fun side of being orphaned appears in “The Importance of Being Earnest”: the stern Lady Bracknell warns: “To lose one parent may be considered a misfortune. To lose both seems like
carelessness.” Likewise in the old joke about the boy who murders both parents, then appeals for mercy from the court on the grounds that he’s a orphan.
PS^1: British ornithologists report the unusual arrival of WAXWINGS in many parts of the UK! Apparently, the dearth of red berries has coaxed the birds here from their normal Siberian habitat at this time of the year! Search the timesonline.co.uk site for details and a cute photograph. No reports yet of smashed fan-lights in Bloomsbury.
PS^2: Delayed comment on your “cedarn” links to Milton. Apologies if I’m repeating previously posted notions. Every English schoolboy learns “... and spiced dainties every one, From silken Samarcand to cedared Lebanon.” We tend to alliterate the S’s by pronouncing it “Sedared,” but the Greeks called the tree KEDOS! Note that we have no qualms in saying “SamarKand” (as in the modern spelling). So why not alliterate the K’s: “SamarKand to Kedared Lebanon?” Just another reminder to those who might see some innate “magic” in the sound of “Sedar!” Blame the quirks of Latin <-> Greek transliterations which survive in the jungle known as “English Orthography.”
There’s a natural but rather archaic link from “cedared” (populated by cedars) to “cedarn” (made from cedar wood); one sees a similarly antiquated link from “leather” to “leathered” and “leathern.” Why certain wondrous word-forms fade away, or remain tagged in dictionaries as poetic is beyond fathomage.
PS^3: Jansy: yes, killing off a parent by lightning (not to be confused with “lightening!”) is quite a dramatic “deus ex machina” type of trick. It would hardly have “worked” as a device for getting rid of Lolita’s poor Mum! The latter’s TIMELY DEMISE was more realistically engineered via a more mundane “machina ex dei?”
Stan Kelly-Bootle
On 08/11/2008 04:19, "jansymello" <jansy@AETERN.US> wrote:
MR: It might be interesting to think about why exactly VN chose to make JS an orphan, and whether or not this fits with the way orphans have traditionally functioned in literary narratives.
JM: Unlike aunts, evil stepmothers are fairly common in " real fairy-tales". In VN's fiction we find both: stepfathers and aunts. Didn't elves switch human babies as a prank?
Van was raised by an aunt, Aqua, under the ilusion that she was his real mother, something rather uncommon before DNA testing. Most of the time this is actually the case with betrayed fathers, such as Sebastian's, in TRLSK, and it seems to have taken place quite often in ADA. ( geneaologies are not to be trusted, even when marked by a "sinister bend")
btw & concerning orphaned kids: what other character's mother besides HH's, has been killed by lightining?