Subject
Re: Split personality in PF
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Jansy,
Now that strikes me as an excellent point, and one that hadn¹t occurred to
me. I mean the idea of Shade as the versipel. The more I think of it, the
better it sounds.
For one thing reflections. Writers and poets only have one age and it is
not always the one with gray hair and bags beneath the eyes. Seeing oneself
in a chance reflection is always a wake up call and one not often greeted
cheerily. Ask the cedar waxwing, confused by reflections in an azure tinted
window pane. You could even ask Shade¹s furniture, reflected in a wintry
pane one day and on another day, joining the snow, thanks to a domestic
ghost.
More later. Have to go out now.
AndrewB
On 10/10/06 9:30 PM, "jansymello" <jansy@AETERN.US> wrote:
> Dear Andrew and List,
>
> Of course you, Andrew, didn't annoy me by the simultaneous address: the CK&JM
> (C=J) fusion seems to be flourishing anyway. Still, I've already talked enough
> about why I don't subscribe to the "multiple personality disorder" issue since
> it adds nothing to my enjoyment in "Pale Fire", which I continue to see as a
> work of fiction. I'm not even curious about what VN might have added - except
> as an expanded commentary to Kinbote's already profuse explanations -
> concerning the novel per se ( it has an "open ended" sort of frame, but there
> is a frame - even if it comprises merely the printed novel's two covers, an
> idea VN explores in "Ada" with very interesting consequences).
>
> Kinbote's own perception of his situation is rather complex. He might "cook up
> a stage play, an old-fashioned melodrama with three principles: a lunatic who
> intends to kill an imaginary king, another lunatic who imagines himself to be
> that king, and a distinguished old poet who stumbles by chance into the line
> of fire, and persihes in the clash between the two figments."
> Jack Grey is, apparently, unimportant although, somehow, he knows that these
> two figments will manage to inflict a "real" death and, of course, we
> encounter Kinbote's partial awareness of his "lunacy".
> On his commentary of line 347 Kinbote observed that 'there are always "three
> nights" in fairy tales' but in his imaginary melodrama we shall find no three
> knights but, possibly, his principles referred to the three "parcae" (Cloto,
> Atropos, Lachesis spinning and weaving and cutting life's thread, like an
> Author) in masculine disguise.
>
> Perhaps I was not politically correct ( you said: I had no humorous intentions
> toward absent-minded seniors, which I think would be unkind) but I didn't mean
> it was you who used humor concerning seniors, but VN, and I meant that he was
> realistic and compassionate in this rendering of comb/shoehorn/spoon
> transformations. I know this by experience although my "changelings" are
> somewhat different from Shade's.
>
> I'm sure I annoyed you by calling "Shade" a mawkish character ( "... driving
> himself mad in the process of digesting and commentating Shade¹s mawkish epic
> The Daughteriad aka Pale Fire.") but, whatever revelations are to be gleaned
> about fictional Shade, I cannot forget the lines where he wrote that "like a
> fool I sobbed in the men's room" because his little girl was not cast as a
> fairy or an elf ( now, for the first time, do I notice a mysterious connection
> bt "elves", Mother Time and Shade's future references to Goethe's Erlkönig in
> contrast to Eliot's poem and Webster's "White Devil" ...) since he never
> seemed to get over his disappointment that she looked like him, not Sybil.
> Shade is presented as someone that is as blind to his family's plights and to
> his fellow-men as Kinbote must have been, but forced on himself a discourse
> on pity and grief.
> Now what about this for a "versipel": " His misshapen body, that gray mop of
> abundant hair, the yellow nails of his pudgy fingers, the bags under his
> lustreless eyes, were only intelligible if regarded as the waste products
> eliminated from his intrinsic self by the same forces of perfection which
> purified and chiseled his verse. He was his own cancellation." ?
>
> Jansy ( sans serif )
> Search the Nabokv-L archive at UCSB
> <http://listserv.ucsb.edu/archives/nabokv-l.html>
> Contact the Editors <mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu>
> All private editorial communications, without exception, are read by both
> co-editors.
> Visit Zembla <http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm>
> View Nabokv-L Policies <http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm>
>
Search the archive: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/archives/nabokv-l.html
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Now that strikes me as an excellent point, and one that hadn¹t occurred to
me. I mean the idea of Shade as the versipel. The more I think of it, the
better it sounds.
For one thing reflections. Writers and poets only have one age and it is
not always the one with gray hair and bags beneath the eyes. Seeing oneself
in a chance reflection is always a wake up call and one not often greeted
cheerily. Ask the cedar waxwing, confused by reflections in an azure tinted
window pane. You could even ask Shade¹s furniture, reflected in a wintry
pane one day and on another day, joining the snow, thanks to a domestic
ghost.
More later. Have to go out now.
AndrewB
On 10/10/06 9:30 PM, "jansymello" <jansy@AETERN.US> wrote:
> Dear Andrew and List,
>
> Of course you, Andrew, didn't annoy me by the simultaneous address: the CK&JM
> (C=J) fusion seems to be flourishing anyway. Still, I've already talked enough
> about why I don't subscribe to the "multiple personality disorder" issue since
> it adds nothing to my enjoyment in "Pale Fire", which I continue to see as a
> work of fiction. I'm not even curious about what VN might have added - except
> as an expanded commentary to Kinbote's already profuse explanations -
> concerning the novel per se ( it has an "open ended" sort of frame, but there
> is a frame - even if it comprises merely the printed novel's two covers, an
> idea VN explores in "Ada" with very interesting consequences).
>
> Kinbote's own perception of his situation is rather complex. He might "cook up
> a stage play, an old-fashioned melodrama with three principles: a lunatic who
> intends to kill an imaginary king, another lunatic who imagines himself to be
> that king, and a distinguished old poet who stumbles by chance into the line
> of fire, and persihes in the clash between the two figments."
> Jack Grey is, apparently, unimportant although, somehow, he knows that these
> two figments will manage to inflict a "real" death and, of course, we
> encounter Kinbote's partial awareness of his "lunacy".
> On his commentary of line 347 Kinbote observed that 'there are always "three
> nights" in fairy tales' but in his imaginary melodrama we shall find no three
> knights but, possibly, his principles referred to the three "parcae" (Cloto,
> Atropos, Lachesis spinning and weaving and cutting life's thread, like an
> Author) in masculine disguise.
>
> Perhaps I was not politically correct ( you said: I had no humorous intentions
> toward absent-minded seniors, which I think would be unkind) but I didn't mean
> it was you who used humor concerning seniors, but VN, and I meant that he was
> realistic and compassionate in this rendering of comb/shoehorn/spoon
> transformations. I know this by experience although my "changelings" are
> somewhat different from Shade's.
>
> I'm sure I annoyed you by calling "Shade" a mawkish character ( "... driving
> himself mad in the process of digesting and commentating Shade¹s mawkish epic
> The Daughteriad aka Pale Fire.") but, whatever revelations are to be gleaned
> about fictional Shade, I cannot forget the lines where he wrote that "like a
> fool I sobbed in the men's room" because his little girl was not cast as a
> fairy or an elf ( now, for the first time, do I notice a mysterious connection
> bt "elves", Mother Time and Shade's future references to Goethe's Erlkönig in
> contrast to Eliot's poem and Webster's "White Devil" ...) since he never
> seemed to get over his disappointment that she looked like him, not Sybil.
> Shade is presented as someone that is as blind to his family's plights and to
> his fellow-men as Kinbote must have been, but forced on himself a discourse
> on pity and grief.
> Now what about this for a "versipel": " His misshapen body, that gray mop of
> abundant hair, the yellow nails of his pudgy fingers, the bags under his
> lustreless eyes, were only intelligible if regarded as the waste products
> eliminated from his intrinsic self by the same forces of perfection which
> purified and chiseled his verse. He was his own cancellation." ?
>
> Jansy ( sans serif )
> Search the Nabokv-L archive at UCSB
> <http://listserv.ucsb.edu/archives/nabokv-l.html>
> Contact the Editors <mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu>
> All private editorial communications, without exception, are read by both
> co-editors.
> Visit Zembla <http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm>
> View Nabokv-L Policies <http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm>
>
Search the archive: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/archives/nabokv-l.html
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm