Also of great interest in this concluding paragraph of Pale Fire, of course, is the blurring of the line between Kinbote and his maker ("I may turn up yet, on another campus, as an old, happy, healthy, heterosexual Russian, a writer in exile, sans fame, sans future, sans audience, sans anything but his art"), coupled with the speaker's theist reference to another maker ("God will help me..."). Who is the "me?" Who, for that matter, is the "God?"

----- Original Message -----
From: jansymello <jansy@AETERN.US>
Date: Friday, April 11, 2008 2:06 pm
Subject: [NABOKV-L] [NABOKOV] [ THOUGHTS] Gradus and Shade converge on a birthday; Ashen Glow and Pale Fire
To: NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU

> What does Kinbote express at the end of his note to line 1000 (=
> Line1...???????)" 'And you, what will you be doing with
> yourself, poor King...?'
> God will help me, I trust, to rid myself of any desire to follow
> the example of two other characters in this work. I shall
> continue to exist...I may cook up..an old-fashioned melodrama
> with three principles: a lunatic..., another lunatic...and a
> distinguished old poet who stumbles by chance into the line of
> fire, and perishes in the clash between the two figments ... but
> whatever happens, wherever the scene is laid, somebody,
> somewhere, will quietly set out... a bigger, more respectable,
> more competent Gradus."
>
> Cocteau wrote a variant of a theme to which VN constantly
> returns. " La vie est une chute horizontale" ( we drop not in
> space but in time).
> Dealing with "chronophobia" and "memory" Nabokov created the
> unforgettable image about our cradle-tumb balancing-act over two
> eternities of darkness. When the advance of the assassin,
> Gradus, is synchronized to "Pale Fire" on the day of it's
> author's, John Shade's, birthday, this might be considered
> as still another rendering of the same metaphor.
>
> Shade is a famous poet in New Wye ( fiction) and also in the
> "world" ( fiction inside fiction), for he is read in Zembla.
> Nabokov ( non-fiction poet, commentator, writer) considers Shade
> to be the greatest fictional poet and this assessment creates,
> at least, another involuted world ( is only one of them real?).
> Just like in the story of the poet in the play "The Enchanted
> Hunters" we find a poet at the vortex of a convolution...
> Fictional Kinbote describes another fictional poet who has to be
> distinguished from two fictional fictions ("poet" versus
> "figments", but Kinbote who tells us that story about poet and
> figments is also one of the latter...).
> Nabokov, if we consider him to be the unmentioned Earth of "Pale
> Fire", might have made his reflective appearance (an "ashen-
> glow") in the novel by revealing the real contours of a waxing
> or crescent moon, together with the motion of the sun on Earth
> whereas, as the Earth itself, Nabokov holds his ground as the
> locus in which everything else is taking place.
>
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Sam
Sam Schuman,

Interim Dean of the Faculty
Phillips Hall 151, The University of North Carolina, Asheville
Asheville, NC 28804
(828) 250-2379 sschuman@unca.edu

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