CK :I don't
know about allthat, but Hazel resembles Kinbote because - - strange as it seems
- - she is his daughter.
Jansy: Carolyn sees
Kinbote as a split off aspect of John Shade and, in that respect resemblances
are certain. It was slanting gasping Shade, through idealized lithe long-legged
Kinbote, that engendered plump awkward Hazel. Thomas Mann wrote a very amusing novel called "The transposed heads",
where he discusses what part of the masculine anatomy corresponds to a
man's real "self": is it the head? is the body? From what I remember,
his view favored the predominance of the head (i.e, he viewed a
decapitation, never a "decorpitation"). He apparently ignored
the other fathering devices appended to the aforementioned body. I
wonder why Shade was not more generously inclined towards his offspring: he
could have idealized Hazel in the same way as he would have
pictured Kinbote....
S. Soloviev wrote
that "the opinion that the poem in itself is "weak" and not
a good poetry (forcefully presented at this list) is justified by several really
weak and even ridiculous places in the text. But it could be much farther form
the final version planned by Shade, than Kinbote wants us to believe!/ And this conjecture makes
the "post-mortem destiny" of a poem (and poet) even more dramatic" .
SS clearly believes Kinbote and Shade
as distinct individuals, differently from CK, but I remember Carolyn
Kunin's suggestion that the effects of madness had already begun to make
themselves felt from Canto III onwards - an argument that accepts
the views on Shade's poetic failings.
Both CK and SS seem to share one idea, though: that
if there are any deficiencies found in Pale
Fire they must have been deliberately planned by Nabokov himself.
Professor Hurley's professional assessment ( Hurley is not mentioned
in the Index - at least, he is absent from a special entry under
his name) is even more damning, he could not see the poem's
elegant unity in a glass, darkly.I am sure Kinbote did his best to
promote the poem...