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The purpose of this site is to provide a glossary to some of the references in The Moor's Last Sigh. In addition, literary works and characters that are mentioned frequently or play a major role in the text are listed along with a brief description. Links to appropriate web sites for further information have also been included.
Annotations
Pg. 4 line 3 top of page; "Virgils"; Reference to Dante's Inferno. Virgil led the speaker of that poem on a guided tour of Hell.
Pg. 5 second full paragraph; "Paradise and Pandaemonium"; Reference to John Milton's epic poem of the struggle between heaven and hell, Paradise Lost. Paradise is of course Heaven, whereas Pandaemonium is the great city of Hell. This and the above reference can also be seen on page 126.
Pg. 11 second to last paragraph; "What shall we do with a shrunken tailor?"; Sailing song, "What shall we do with a drunken sailor?" The song goes on to suggest a number of methods of sobering him up including forcing him to drink from the bilges (shipboard sewers).
Pg. 29 second paragraph; "See See See Pee"; CCCP- Cyrillic for U.S.S.R (see below)
Pg. 31 third paragraph; "Cyrillic script"; Russian alphabet, based on Greek and Latin, invented by Byzantine monks to visually represent the sounds of the spoken Russian language.
Pg. 68 second paragraph; "Great family trees from little corns." Play on words between acorns and peppercorns, spices and pepper being the foundations of the da Gama/Zogoiby family.
Pg. 73 fifth paragraph; "Obeah, jadoo, fo, fum, chicken entrails, kingdom come. Ju-ju, voodoo, fee, fi, piddle cocktails, time to die." From Jack the Giant Killer's giant's "Fee Fie Fo Fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman?"
Pg. 94 first paragraph; "this church that only startofied because some Piss-in-Boots old king wanted a sexy younger wife." Refers to the Church of England, which was founded by Henry VIII in order to divorce Catherine of Aragon, which the Pope in Rome, Leo X, would not allow.
Pg. 115 last paragraph; "Cyrano-fashion, he hired a local accordionist and ballad-singer who serenaded her in the courtyard below her window, while he, Abraham, stood idiotically beside the music-man and mouthed the words of the old love-songs." Cyrano de Bergerac helped his friend to win the heart of his lady love by serving as his friend's voice while the friend lip-synched.
Pg. 130 "Crazy as a monkey in a monkey-puzzle tree." A monkey-puzzle is a particularly evil tree. Every possible surface is covered by extremely sharp spines and in fact the leaves themselves are pointed at the apex and capable of piercing the skin.
Pg. 137 second paragraph; "Bollywood" Indian Subcontinental counterpart to our own Hollywood
Pg. 241 paragraph 3; "a Kaspar Hauser, a Mowgli." Kasper Hauser was the title character in a play/screenplay by Werner Herzog called The Enigma of Kasper Hauser, also known as Everyman for Himself and God Against All. Mowgli was raised by wild animals instead of his own human kind in Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book.
Pg. 245 paragraph 4; "Laurel and Hardon" Phallic pun on Laurel and Hardy, one of whom was tall and thin, whereas the other was short and stout.
Pg. 292 paragraph 4; "go ask Alice, as the old song goes." There was a song about Alice in Wonderland being a metaphor for drug use by Jefferson Airplane called White Rabbit which this line is a direct quote from.
Pg. 296 first paragraph; "I will wear my shame and name it with pride--will wear it, great Aurora, like a scarlet letter blazoned on my breast." Alludes to The Scarlet Letter by Nathanial Hawthorne, where the heroine wore a scarlet "A" on her breast to show she was an adulteress. Shows up with an interesting correlation between the Moor's love for Uma as a betrayal of his love for his mother, Aurora.
Pg. 417 third paragraph; "Blofeld, Mogambo, Don Vito Corleone:" The first is one of James Bond's Nemesises, the second is described in the book as an Indian movie mob boss, and the last is none other than The Godfather of the American movie series about the Sicilian Mafia.
Pg. 418 bottom of page; "I was fortune's, and my parents', fool." Similar to Romeo's "I am Fortune's fool!" in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet.
Pg. 421 third paragraph; "Scherazade" Classic adventure tale, Classical music work by Rimsky-Korssakoff.
Pg. 433 second paragraph; "Arthur sleeps in Avalon, Barbarossa in his cave. Finn MacCool lies in the Irish hillsides and the Worm Ouroboros on the bed of the Sundering Sea. Australia's ancestors, the Wandjina, take their ease underground, and somewhere, in a tangle of thorns, a beauty in a glass coffin awaits a prince's kiss." Arthur is King Arthur, asleep and waiting for a new world. Finn MacCool is a giant in Irish legend, who sleeps as well. The Worm Ouroboros appears in a book of the same name by E.R. Eddison and sleeps until wakened by dramatic change. The Wandjina created the Autralian continent and the aborigines of that island(according to legend). The beauty under glass is none other than Sleeping Beauty. All of these characters/entities are sleeping and go to sleep in one world but will awake in a different one.
Major Literary Sources and Characters Quoted/Mentioned Repeatedly or Significantly
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Author: Frederick (John) Bailey, Fall 1997
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