NPPF - Canto 4 - Notes

[Jasper Fidget]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-pynchon-l at waste.org [mailto:owner-pynchon-l at waste.org] On
> Behalf Of Otto
> 
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Paul Mackin" <paul.mackin at verizon.net>
> 
> 
> > On Mon, 2003-08-11 at 18:04, The Great Quail wrote:
> > >
> > >
> > > 977-978: "I'm reasonably sure that we survive/And that my darling
> somewhere
> > > is alive" -- Obviously meaning Hazel; a rather powerful admission at
> the
> end
> > > of the poem.
> >
> > The language of the poet seems particularly powerful and elegant in
> > these closing lines. Unless it can be demonstrated to me that, in the
> > over all scheme of the novel, John Shade's poem is completely and
> > totally irrelevant, I have to believe that Hazel is in some sense alive.
> > I think that much is expected of us.
> >
> 
> This is what Boyd suggests too.
> 
> > >
> > > 979-982: The irony of these lines is sharp, as Shade will be murdered
> this
> > > evening.
> >
> 
> Yes, and since I've read it the first time, and then read Boyd's book I'm
> wondering what to make of this sharp irony. Isn't it as if Shade is being
> "punished" for the hybris of writing those lines? Isn't this sharp
> contrast
> between Shade being sure to wake up the next morning and the "reality" of
> the novel (being shot) mocking his belief of an afterlife?
> 
> Otto

It's interesting that we've shifted from a focus on Hazel's death to a focus
(in absentia granted) on Shade's death.  Surely the two are connected, and
the strongest link is the butterfly.

Boyd has the Dark Vanessa, which is linked to Sybil (see ln 270), as Hazel's
spirit warning Shade of his impending death.  Before reading his _Magic of
Artistic Discovery_, my belief was that it was a simple correlation between
the Butterfly of Doom warning of death and Sybil warning of Kinbote, but
Boyd takes it much further.  Let's see if I can avoid screwing this up (he
does a great dissection in the book, too long to quote):  

In lines 316-319 we have the reversed Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale
where Hazel doesn't transform into the wood duck (rather than the swan,
remember?), and is linked to the Toothwort White, a morose, dingy butterfly
often mistaken for others.  She *ought* to have transformed, given the way
the fairy tale goes, into the kind of beauty connected with her mother, the
Vanessa Atalanta, the "exuberant" "magnificent" Red Admirable.  So it is
only after death that she *is* transformed.  The important scene in the
Haunted Barn plays into this, and I'll point it out when we get there.  Note
that Hazel enters the poem in Canto 2 for the first time as a ghost (ln
290), and is only referred to earlier in connection with the "phantom" of
Shade's daughter's swing.

Jasper