JM (if such you be!) It’s important to note that Joyce’s Dublin in Ulysses was a real historical location, unlike VN’s New Wye. We follow Bloom and Dedalus around the city on that monumentally busy, fatidic day! The itineraries are described in detail with street and pub names, public buildings, parks and all. People marvel at the toponymical accuracy but, of course, Joyce, in exile, supplemented his Dublin memories with well-thumbed MAPS and GUIDES dating from 1904! The oft-repeated tale that if Dublin were destroyed, it could be rebuilt from Joyce’s descriptions, should not be taken without a few firkins of Guinness.
Moving to Pale Fire, VN gives us minimal (but sufficient for his purposes!) topographical details. A US East-coast campus-suburb familiar to most readers. And hints of a Zemblan landscape not found in authentic terrestial charts (but reminiscent of a Hollywood Ruritanian kingdom?). Would anyone accept a parallel with VN’s notes on Joyce and Tolstoy:
The effort of drawing blackboard maps of VN’s New Wye and Zembla – without understanding of which Pale Fire makes NO sense?
I even have doubts about VN’s original statement about Ulysses and Anna Karenin. Of course it HELPS to know all sorts of things about a novel’s AUTHOR, characters and environments, and the more you know, the more the enjoyment (VN’s magical frisson). But, Ulysses needs hard work in many directions before spines and omoplates tingle. Indeed, making SENSE of either Ulysses or Pale Fire is, for me, an ever-receding target. I would HATE to arrive.
On 30/05/2010 22:40, "NABOKV-L" <NABOKV-L@HOLYCROSS.EDU> wrote:
Nabokov wrote in Strong Opinions (V.22) about "the effort of drawing on the blackboard a map of James Joyce's Dublin or the arrangement of the semi-sleeping car of the St.Petersburg-Moscow express in the early 1870s - without understanding of which neither Ulysses nor Anna Karenin, respectively, makes sense."
Shade's last lines have already been discussed to exhaustion, but I'm still in the dark about one item. Perhaps someone with a good head for topography and maps might be able to clarify my fuzziness. I was examining Kinbote's early reference to the gardener (lines 47/48), whom Shade will mention in lines 998/99 as "trundling an empty barrow up the lane."
If Balthazar is going "up the lane", can we find out whereto he was going? And how was it possible for him to spy on the pair (JS and CK) from behind a shrubbery and whack Gradus/Grey on the pat with a spade*?
I'm disoriented by CK's mapping instructions: about how he met Sybil in the drive and then quickly moved towards Shade, in his "nest", nor their route across the lawn towards CK's porch. The lines in the poem and CK's use of them are "scrambled" ( in a different sense of its employ by CK, meaning "the flagged walk that scrambled along a side lawn"** - a very unusual, anthropomorphic sense of a "scrambling" route?)
After all, why does Kinbote insist to say that Shade has been writing his last lines just then, when the indications in its lines imply that Shade was in his study, on the second floor, looking at Dr.Sutton's windows and down to the garden where Sybil had been standing?***
From other commentaries we learned that, when Kinbote's "casement window ceased to function," he found "at the end of the veranda, an ivied corner from which I could view rather amply the front of the poet’s house. If I wanted to see its south side I could go down to the back of my garage and look from behind a tulip tree across the curving downhill road at several precious bright windows... If I yearned for the opposite side, all I had to do was walk uphill to the top of my garden" then look down from the clump of black junipers towards a "patch of pale light under the lone streetlamp on the road below. By the onset of the season ...I ...rather enjoyed following in the dark a weedy and rocky easterly projection of my grounds ending in a locust grove on a slightly higher level than the north side of the poet’s house."
Jerry Friedman once offered a map from the neighborhood in New Wye ( I cannot retrieve it now). We need no great effort to learn that the teacher's houses (with Prof. Hurley's at the top) were lined on a small hill, whereas the other neighboring houses were cluttered below. Nevertheless I cannot picture all their motions at the time of the murder, namely up?down? Did their porches stand front to front? (I don't think so). Why is Kinbote lying about how he took possession of Shade's notecards (the entire set)?
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* "You will chide me, my modest man... you saved my life. You and I were the last people who saw John Shade alive, and you admitted afterwards to a strange premonition which made you interrupt your work as you noticed us from the shrubbery walking toward the porch where stood — (Superstitiously I cannot write out the odd dark word you employed.)" What odd dark word would that be?
** "We had reached the Goldsworth side of the lane, and the flagged walk that scrambled along a side lawn to connect with the gravel path leading up from Dulwich road to the Goldsworth front door, when Shade remarked: "You have a caller."...I outstripped John who until then had been in front of me... One of the bullets that spared me struck him in the side and went through his heart....to complete the farce of fate, my gardener’s spade dealt gunman Jack from behind the hedge a tremendous blow on the pate..."
***(line 991)..."Through the trees I distinguished John...he sat in his Nest...the arborlike porch or veranda I have mentioned in my note to lines 47-48....I openly walked up to his porch or perch... 'I have here' ...practically the entire product....We crossed the lawn, we crossed the road. Clink-clank, came the horseshoe music ..."