NPPF: Preliminary: The Epigraph

[Otto]

----- Original Message -----
From: "s~Z" <keithsz at concentric.net>
To: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Monday, July 14, 2003 4:48 AM
Subject: Re: NPPF: Preliminary: The Epigraph

>>>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 that possibility about survival (or whatever kind of "existence" there
may be) after death necessarily is hidden, to all of us, or not? It's a main
theme of the book:

"Nabokov *always* stresses that any form of consciousness beyond the mortal
must be either nonexistent or unimaginable: anything we *can* imagine
collapses under the absurdity of trying to transpose the conditions of
temporality into eternity."
(Boyd, 1999, p. 258)

> 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
--------------------------------

The obvious message is that the ant is dead and the cicada has been
metamorphosed into another/higher form of existence.

The Grasshopper and the Ant
http://www.lafontaine.net/fables/angl/01/01-01-ang.php

"Here Shade boldly reverses La Fontaine's fable: while the ant is lifeless,
the cicada has flown away from its "empty emerald case." It still lives, it
can still sing its song. (...) Shade's later conviction that his near-death
vision of a "fountain" provides some kind of clue to death proves an
illusion, and leads him to his artistic motto, "not text, but texture." The
direct message that the "fountain" seems to offer is wrong, and so, he
claims here, with his customary structural stealth, is La Fontaine (French,
of course, for "fountain"). Yet his reversal of La Fontaine, his implicit
affirmation of survival after death (...) is itself only text, not texture."
(Boyd, 1999, 189/90)

"Life Everlasting-based on a misprint!" (803)

Your interpretation is very daring, Keith. I'm really impressed and I think
it shouldn't be dismissed too easily. Boyd's "theory" is daring as well, but
it explains the correspondences between poem and commentary, something which
yours does not. Your clues are all from the poem.

> >>>I will leave myself open to other theories that Kinbote is
> Botkin, or that Shade wrote the whole thing and invented the deposed king,
> or that Shade is Kinbote's, uh, ghostwriter.<<<
>

I'm sure Boyd would love the expression "ghostwriter" but what do you mean
by it?

>
> I'm beginning to wonder if the commentary isn't designed to reinterpret
< the
> poem to protect Shade from what he perhaps unwittingly reveals about
> himself
> and his activities in the poem. Is it possible that he was molested by
> Aunt
> Maud and then in turn molested Hazel, and that she either committed
> suicide
> because of having been molested or was killed by Shade? Brian Boyd sees
> Shade as an embodiment of sanity and propriety, so I'm probably waxing
> loosely and prematurely, but what the hell.
>

 . . .But that I am forbid
To tell the secrets of my prison-house
I could a tale unfold whose lightest word
Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood. . .
                 Hamlet, I, v, 13-16

"(...) Suspense is by definition a state that cannot be resolved, a field of
force that vanishes once the unknown becomes the known."
(Douglas Fowler: "A Reader's Guide to Gravity's Rainbow," Ann Arbor,
Michigan, 1980, p. 13)

Anybody got this? I bet it would be helpful:
Douglas Fowler: "Reading Nabokov," Cornell University Press, October 1974.

Otto