*Roth: “Shade is a waxwing, Sybil a swallow (hirondelle), and Hazel a nightingale/pheasant. As far as I know, this arrangement has only one precedent: the myth of Tereus, Procne, Philomel, and Itys. [ ] As you may have guessed, I believe that this is no mere coincidence, and I likewise believe that it supports a reading of the novel wherein there is some kind of unnatural relationship (active or passive) between John Shade and Hazel. In Ovid, it is very clear that Tereus's relationship with Philomel is seen as a form of incest, and the father's devouring of his child is simply an alimentary form of incest. Note too that in one scene in the Metamorphoses, Tereus, while witnessing Philomel embracing her father (the king), wishes that he were her father, so that he could indulge his passion incestuously. (Shade, by the way, twice imagines himself a king in "PF"--see lines 605 and 894; in the latter of these, he, like Kinbote, imagines himself both as a king and as the victim of an assassin.)…We can now also note another link to Eliot's "Game of Chess," which Shade (or Nabokov) parodies in Canto Three.” …

Matt Roth also mentions Shade’s transcription of a few bird sounds: “To-wee and Come here, come herrr (but not chippo, as far as I can tell) can be read as words from Hazel to her father. To-wee becomes "two, we" (we two) and Come here, come herrr becomes a plea for attention and a play on Shade's name, which is, in Spanish, "almost man," just as herr, in German, means ‘mister’."

Dear Jansy,

I guess I'm confused here (or herrrr). Philomel (or Philomela) was raped by her brother-in-law, so not really incest - the rape was aggravated by the rapist's attempt to hide the crime by cutting out Philomela's tongue so she could not tell what had happened to her.

When her sister Procne "read" the truth in a tapestry Philomela had woven, she serves up her and Tereus's (the rapist's) son to him. This I assume is the "alimentary" incest of which Matt Roth writes.

Was the rape incestuous? Only in the way Henry VIII claimed his marriage to Catherine of Aragon was incestuous - that is to say, very tenuously. And why isn't cannibalizing one's own child bad enough, but it has to be "incestuous" too??

If there is any evidence that Shade's relationship with his daughter was unnatural, I have missed it. I have missed how Hazel is either a nightingale (they don't exist on the American continent after all) or a pheasant. Shade is not a waxwing, but the shadow of one, which is only his poetic way of saying that he was watching when a waxwing flew into his window; he could see the bird, whose shadow presumably fell on the poet, but the bird only saw the reflected sky. Sybil is an Irondell, so I suppose she could be said to be a swallow. Sylvia too has avian traits - she is said to perch in between peregrinations. Shade imagining himself a king is too generic an idea to point to the Ovid story ... so Matt is going to have to defend this idea - I just don't get it.

Carolyn