NPPF: Preliminary: The Epigraph

[Jasper Fidget]

On
> Behalf Of s~Z
> >>>Pope has always seemed the touchstone here and Rape of the Lock is a
> good
> guess as to Nabokov's intended tone.<<<
> 
> And a subtitle for the poem Pale Fire could be "The Rape of the Shade"
> couldn't it? Doesn't the imagery of the first two Cantos suggest Aunt Maud
> forced Shade to quench her thirst with his pure tongue? Isn't the truth
> being hidden from him, not so much truth about survival after death, but
> the
> truth that his memory has dimmed regarding being forced to orally pleasure
> Aunt Maud? My favorite references are how his childish palate loved the
> taste/Half-fish, half-honey, of that golden paste (nature's glue, lines
> 103-5), -- the cryptic erotic description of lines 147-156, "How ludicrous
> these efforts to translate/Into one's private tongue a public fate!"
> (lines
> 231-2) and
> 
> Life is a message scribbled in the dark.
> Anonymous.
>                       Espied on a pine's bark.
> As we were walking home the day she died,
> An empty emerald case, squat and frog-eyed,
> Hugging the trunk; and its companion piece,
> A gum-logged ant. (235-40)
> 
> Aunt Maud = a 'gum'-logged aunt.
> 
> Ant = insect
> Aunt = incest


This is truly disturbing -- I've never considered this before.  I don't want
to believe it, but at first glance it seems compelling....