NPPF: Canto Three: Some Notes (2)

[Jasper Fidget]

ln 680: "Lolita swept from Florida to Maine": summer and autumn of 1958 when
the bestseller lists included _Lolita_.

ln 682: "Lang made your portrait. And one night I died": Boyd notes that VN
admired the "incomparably beautiful" drawings of butterflies by a person
named Lang (_Speak Memory_, 122).

ln 690: "Stood up and pointed with his pipe at me": as at VN's father in
Germany, aiming for another.  Shade's death parallels that of VN senior's.
See also line 732-734.

ln 691-693: "And then it happened -- the attack, the trance": compare to
Shade's fits from ln 140

ln 704-705: "A system of cells interlinked within / Cells interlinked within
cells interlinked": another spiral, here surrounding the fountain...

ln 707: "Against the dark, a tall white fountain played.": See the note on
Poe's Pym.  See also line 758.  In King Alfred's "Boethius", a fountain
represents the promise of life.

Oh! truly blessed     a man would be
Here in all things,     had he the power to see
The bright and spotless     heavenly stream,
That grand fountain     of every good;
And if from himself     he might hurl away
The swart mist,     his spirit's darkness.

http://beowulf.engl.uky.edu/~kiernan/ENG720/SdgTrans/SedgefieldMetersTrans.h
tm

ln 739: "The quiddity": "The inherent nature or essence of a person or
thing; that which constitutes a person or thing" (OED).  Makes me think of
Joyce of course.

ln 767: "Jim Coates": Perhaps the father in the movie _Old Yeller_ (1957),
who has the line, "Now and then, for no good reason, life will haul off and
knock a man flat."

Probably not the intention, but this is another baseball player, debuted in
1956 and played mainly for the Yankees.

http://www.baseball-reference.com/c/coateji01.shtml

ln 782-784: "Blue", "Mon Blon", "Matterhorn": all mountains, forecasting ln
801: "_Mountain_, not _fountain_.  The majestic touch"

ln 806-815: "But all at once it dawned on me that _this_ / Was the real
point, the contrapuntal theme:" etc.

If one buys the Shadean theory, this verse may be the moment of Kinbote's
creation, the "contrapuntal theme" indicating the Shade-Kinbote
Poem-Commentary fugue.  "Just this: not text but texture": the feel instead
of the fact, the way life feels, its palpable reality, and the patterns in
it, the web of sense, plexed artistry.  Shade creates the texture that
allows him to gesture beyond life by creating a web with strands stuck
partly to the poem and partly to the Commentary.

"Playing a game of worlds, promoting pawns / To ivory unicorns and ebon
fauns" (ln 819-820): From the chessboard universe to the fairy tale --
multiple wor[l]ds -- an infinite progress of patterns pointing to infinity:
patterns in seasons (Shade dies in summer, poem begins in winter), physical
universes to atoms, patterns within patterns and so on, infinite varieties
of life and art and nature, promise of continuation beyond death.  The book
mimics these infinite patterns and attempts to show how they may be
interpreted.