Dear
Andrew and dear List,
The
expression "fundamentalist Christian" carries an ironic ring to my ears. It was
a clever way of blending Christian faith and fanatics (such as Kinbote) and
there was no need of any Rosetta-stone to decypher that. But there are one or
two questions I'd like to ask.
You wrote: "Kinbote’s Zemblan
religious practices, particularly his acolyte memories, bear no resemblance to
any Christian service I’ve ever seen. VN never claimed to be Christian, and I do
not think he heavily researched any Protestant or Catholic religious practices
in order to make Charles Kinbote into a “real” one. There would be no
place for such a character in Pale Fire."
Like you, I think there is
no place in VN's fiction for the explicitation of real-life characters (their
reality has to be felt by other means). Still, I remember a lot of
information about the Biblical translations that were chosen by VN in Brian
Boyd's annotations ( found at the Zemblan ADA On-line).
Biblical reading is
not only for those who have religious faith. It is also good literature. I doubt
VN would have given it only a light reading.
When you wrote about the
young priest episode (note to lines 47-48) you considered him as "the subject
of one of Charles Kinbote’s Zemblan childhood memories. Assuming Kinbote had an
actual past that was not the creation of another mind." Are you here
implying that you agree that Kinbote and John Shade are the same individual
(like C.Kunin), do you think he might be the mysterious Dr. Botkin - or was he
someone else altogether?
If, "in the end, Shade’s soul flies
free, in defiance of the old expression of a ghost, a shade, being “laid” as in
“laid to rest.”...we can assume Shade reached a paradise of some kind. And
Kinbote, what do you think happened to him?
Jansy