Stan K-Bootle:"...There’s always a lurking chess piece to spice up the
action. (Hardly surprising: the pieces are named AFTER real-world counterparts!
Thereafter, any comparisons between Chess and Human Warfare are quite
superficial!)...The tingle in my spine, re-reading Mike M’s PF extract, comes
with CK’s I once had to leave in the MIDST of a concert.
Attentive ‘Native Anglophones’ will applaud Nabokov’s brilliant choice
of the near-archaic/literary MIDST in the context of leaving a concert. ‘In the
MIDST of’ is no longer fully synonymous with ‘In the MIDDLE of.’ One leaves, for
example, an open-air concert in the MIDST of a
rainstorm."
Jansy Mello: Great
warnings related to allusionists and to the possibly
deliberate near-archaic/literary use of "in the
midst"
Unlike Mike Marcus's developments in
relation to "ululations," *I would dismiss
any association to Macbeth in the lines: "Hardly had the girls settled
down when an electric storm that was to last all night enveloped their refuge
with such theatrical ululations and flashes as to make it impossible to attend
to any indoor sounds or lights."
The word
is usually applied to the hooting sound produced by Mediterranean and
Asian women in a
celebratory mood, and it's also used (in Portuguese, at least)
to recreate the howling winds during a
tempest. I have the feeling that Nabokov employed it in this sense, adding to
its scandal the kind of "theatrical" imitation, so dear to
Kinbote, with no mind for its owlish origin.
...............................................................................................................................
* - he wrote that he'd
forgotten "to mention that the "ululations" in the
barn might hint at another Macbeth allusion, since ulula in Latin means 'owl'.
When Macbeth embarks on his regicide mission against King Duncan -- regicide
being 'kibote' in Zemblan, or so Shade claims -- Lady Macbeth hears a faint
noise, says "Hark! Peace! / It was the owl that shriek'd, the fatal bellman /
Which gives the stern'st good-night. He [Macbeth] is about it". The morning
after the murder, a Lord tells Macbeth about the weird goings-on during the
night: lamentations and screaming, "the obscure bird / Clamour'd the livelong
night". The owl is the obscure bird, and is associated with Macbeth
himself."