Subject: [NABOKV-L] Fw: [NABOKV-L] Pale Fire Commentary on Line 130
From: Jansy <[email-masked]>
To: [email-masked]
Date: Wed, 18 Jul 2012 17:55:07 -0300

Barrie Akin: I have a couple of observations on the commentary to line 130 ("I never bounced a ball or swung a bat"). 
1.Kinbote's references to soccer and cricket (first line of this commentary) ...why the reference to cricket? The later reference to the insect in this part of the commentary ("A cricket cricked.") can't be the only reason for using "cricket" in its sporting sense. ...I think that there is a class-related theme here...if cricket was a "high class" sport, the apparent fact that Kinbote/the young Charles Xavier played it would perhaps fit in with the persona that Kinbote projects throughout the work.From a class perspective, "soccer" and "rugger"(see below) were originally both sports played by the upper classes (but not exclusively) - but by the start of the twentieth century, "soccer" was almost exclusively a working class game in England - "rugger" was almost exclusively the game played by the upper classes.So it's curious that Kinbote/Charles Xavier (and presumably all high class young Zemblans at the time) played the more upper class cricket in the summer but the more working class "soccer" in the winter. I find the use of the word "soccer" interesting too...
2. "Escalier Dérobé":I am surely not the first person to connect this phrase (in the paragraph that begins with Beauchamp and Campbell's game of chess and ends with the boys moaning like doves) with Victor Hugo's Hernani?  ...Hernani (1830) is (partly) concerned with a plot to kill the king of Spain - Don Carlos.
The play opens:-Serait-ce déjà lui? - C'est bien à l'escalier/dérobé....It was at this point on the play's opening night that a riot broke out at the Comédie Française because the classical faction in the audience was outraged by Hugo's use of enjambement. So, in addition to the portrait of Iris Acht and the "green-carpeted steps" (as in "green room"), we have an indication  that there will be a theatre at the end of the secret passage and angry voices! And an allusion to a plot to kill a king called Charles.

Jansy Mello: I'm sure your interesting observations will ellicit various commentaries from the List. The first will be related to soccer. Vladimir Nabokov was a soccer player when he lived in Europe ( a goal keeper) If we down-play the arguments about class-related allusions, the answers may become simpler. Bat swinging wouldn't necessarily indicate cricket, but also baseball. There are references to Chapman's homer, even to a shape that suggests a baseball bat in Shade's poem..The author must have been making fun of Kinbote's ignorance about sports... The connection between cricket, game and insect, must be an important one, as you 've noticed.Not only butterflies, but lots of other insects appear in Shade's poem (and all over Nabokov's novels: grasshoppers, cicadas, glow-worms, ants.katydid,etc). Glow-worms are related to Shakespeare and to Hazel's lights in Pale Fire...
Wonderful quote from Hugo's Hernani, and subsequent developments about regicide.  When you mentioned Beauchamp and Campbell, who have distinct significations in the poem, I was also reminded of the artist Marcel Duchamp's famos "Nude Descending the Stairs." - but your find, as I see it, clinches it. .   

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