2 from Mike M:

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: Jansy on flute
Date: Tue, 7 Aug 2012 06:55:40 -0700
From: Mike Marcus <mmkcm@COMCAST.NET>
To: <NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU>
CC: Mike Marcus <mmkcm@COMCAST.NET>


Certain identities fluctuate wildly in Ada, so Percy de Prey doesn't at all times represent Vere, though here he does, predominantly. The "daughter with pitcher" reminds me of the passage in Genesis 24, when Rebekah, with a pitcher on her shoulder, offers water to the parched Isaac, who is her second cousin and whom she marries (relatives marrying; Cordula is also Van's second cousin). Tartar as Turk?

"Pitcher peri" must be the angel with the pitcher, whoever she is, no? Vere and Sidney were enemies, and Ardis is the Sidney arrowhead -- a "stab of Ardis"?

MM

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JM wrote .. It's so interesting to see that Percy first appears holding "a flute of champagne," and the "fluted glass" in BS, with a Shakespearean whiff. To connect all the "flutes", I bring up once again one of the quotes related to Percy de Prey "One supposes it might have been a kind of suite for flute, a series of ‘movements’ such as, say: I’m alive — who’s that? — civilian — sympathy — thirsty — daughter with pitcher — that’s my damned gun — don’t... et cetera or rather no cetera... while Broken-Arm Bill prayed his Roman deity in a frenzy of fear for the Tartar to finish his job and go. But, of course, an invaluable detail in that strip of thought would have been — perhaps, next to the pitcher peri — a glint, a shadow, a stab of Ardis.)





-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Nabokov's double
Date: Tue, 7 Aug 2012 07:39:38 -0700
From: Mike Marcus <mmkcm@COMCAST.NET>
To: <NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU>
CC: Mike Marcus <mmkcm@COMCAST.NET>


In her January 2004 essay published in the MLR ('Nabokov's Ada and Sidney's Arcadia, The Regeneration of a Phoenix'), Penny McCarthy claimed that there were three reasons "why Nabokov might have seen himself as Sidney's double": exiled prince; imaginative obsession with sibling incest; and literary innovation. I can't see it. If he imagined himself as anyone's double, it would have been Hamlet.

Hamlet worshipped his dead father, who was assassinated. Hamlet was exiled to England. He pretended eccentricity in his language. For Hamlet, "the time is out of joint - O cursed spite, that ever I was born to set it right". In his introduction to Bend Sinister, Nabokov wrote that the choice of title implied "a distortion in the mirror of being", and in Ada of " a distortive glass of our distorted glebe"(Hamlet uses the phrase "distorted globe"). Hamlet perceives his role as one of remediation; somewhere Nabokov said that he would one day be seen not as a capricious phrase-monger but as a rigid moralist (from memory, can't remember the source) curing ethical ills.

I suppose this is old hat?

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