--- Matthew Roth wrote:

 

> I have a sincere (truly!) question or two for those who see Shade and
> Kinbote as separate people within the real world of New Wye.
> 
> 1. What do you think about those portions of the text which seem to
> unite
> Kinbote and Shade's narratives? Four examples: Shade's "not text, but
> texture" epiphany, which seems a better description of VN's PF than
> Shade's poem alone;

 

I think it works fine in the poem after the mountain/fountain
episode, though it certainly does apply to the whole novel.

 

> the coincidence of the black boy pushing the clockwork
> wheelbarrow and the black gardener (we learn from Kinbote) pushing the
> wheelbarrow just before Shade's death;

 

Nabokov at work, for me, though we learn them both from Kinbote
as you say, so we're free to imagine he made either or both of
them up.  (In fact, you could take Kinbote's disagreement with
Shade over the phrase "some neighbor" as evidence that Kinbote
invented his gardener--but why would he make him "impotent"?)

 

> "Man's life as commentary to abstruse / Unfinished poem";

 

That's a really good question, in my opinion.  I think it's
quite hard to explain for those who see Shade as writing the
poem with no idea about Kinbote's commentary.

 

> Zembla's appearance (via Pope, we assume) in
> Shade's poem and Kinbote's Zembla fantasy.

 

If we believe Kinbote, he told Shade about Zembla before Shade
started the poem (n. 12 and n. 42).  We're also free to imagine
that Kinbote made up all the Zembla material, or at least changed
it, after reading the poem.  If he can change Gordon's garment as
he's writing, he can change other delusions over a period of
months.

 

> Are these all just incredible
> coincidences? Dramatic irony? VN, outside the real world of the novel,
> dropping meta clues?

 

He always does that, right?

 

I hope nobody's getting tired of this sentence, quoted by
Anatoly Dolinin from Pekka Tammi: "We may talk of a
pronouncedly anti-polyphonic feature in the author's writing:
an overriding tendency to make explicit the presence of a
creative consciousness behind every fictive construction."
(/Problems of Nabokov's Poetics/, p. 100.)  But with the
awareness of a fictive consciousness, it's hard to find a
"real" story, in my view.

 

In any case, it's hard to whether a correspondence is a
clue to the underlying story or part of a thematic interplay
that doesn't shed light on what happened.  How about Kinbote's
dictionary?  "Eavesdrop, cavesdrop" strikes me as very
unlikely, and calling a lemniscate "bicircular" is wrong
(except for the c=1 case of the lemniscate of Booth, according
to Wikipedia, but the lemniscate of Bernoulli is much more
commonly referred to).  Maybe the value of "cavesdrop" as
decoration and that of "bicircular" as a clue to young Shade's
envy outweigh the implausibility of the dictionary entries, or
maybe the implausibility means Kinbote invented his dictionary.
(I feel sure Nabokov could have found another way to get
"cavesdrop" in there.)

 

> 2. One compelling argument by nonintegrationists is that when we
> collapse
> Kinbote and Shade's characters into one, we lose our enjoyment of the
> interplay b/w Kinbote and Shade. That being so, do nonintegrationists
> also
> find all the scenes with (imaginary)Gradus--many of which are very
> detailed
> and action-oriented--unsatisfying? Less satisfying?

 

You might ask the same question about all the king-of-Zembla
material.  Personally, I can enjoy a story within a story,
even if it's a delusion, but I find the King story more fun
than the Gradus story.

 

But them I'm one of the few non-real-story-ists, so I shouldn't
even be answering your questions.  :-)

 

Jerry Friedman