This is really interesting, but I only have two almost
substantive things to say.

 

Matthew Roth wrote:

 

...

 

> In C.1000 Kinbote quotes from Matthew Arnold's poem "The Scholar
> Gypsy": "still clutching the inviolable Shade."  The significance of
> this,
> beyond the obvious reference to John Shade, is twofold, it seems to me.
>
> The first level of significance has to do with the ways in which certain
>
> elements of the narrative of that poem mirror Kinbote's character and
> story. In some ways, Kinbote himself seems to be the "scholar gypsy."
> He
> is, after all, a professor who has traveled far and wide without a home.
...

 

Silly me.  "Scholar-gypsy" is exactly the phrase that came to my
mind in reading both /Pale Fire/ and /Pnin/ (not to mention a
biography of Paul Erdos), but I never reread the poem.

 

> "[A]nd I see not why the phancy of one man may not determine the
> cogitation
> of another rightly qualified, as easily as his bodily motion. This
> influence seems to be no more unreasonable, then that of one string of a
>
> Lute upon another; when a stroak on it causeth a proportionable motion
> in
> the sympathizing consort, which is distant from it and not sensibly
> touched."
>
> The entire point, then, of the SG story in Glanvill is to show how,
> through
> the power of imagination, one person might be able to puargument that
> Boyd
> makes concerning the effect of Hazel and John Shade's ghosts on
> Kinbote's
> commentary?  They bind his thoughts and contribute to his narrative.

 

You may not have noticed that you lost something important in
editing the above paragraph.

 

Jerry Friedman