I re-read J.Friedman's message and understood his
meaning after he explained (humorously ?)that there was "an
oddly placed adverbial phrase (how Nabokovian of me)".
I want to
thank Studdard for his comforting comments because, before JF's clarification
arrived, I felt that I'd been too clumsy for words...
Although I
enjoyed very much JF's "connection between the red admiral
and Tereus [...] the beginning of a chorus from Swinburne's /Atalanta in
Calydon/" I continue to hold to my opinion that the indications about
the transmigration of souls, communication with the dead, &
father-daughter incest were placed in Pale
Fire (1962) either as a trap to discredit viennese quacks, an
indication leading onto something else ( "And that
secret, ta-ta, ta-ta-ta, ta-ta,/But more than that I may not tell
you…" ) or a wish-fulfillment fantasy in relation to his
father's survival after death (Cf. P.Meyer's Find What the Sailor
Has Hidden: Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire for
precise quotes I have not at hand right now).
Here we find Shade's
poignant emphatic lines about IPH:" It missed the gist of the whole
thing[...]; For we die every day; oblivion
thrives/ Not on dry
thighbones but on blood-ripe lives[...] I’m ready to become
a floweret/ Or a fat fly, but
never, to forget./ And I’ll turn down
eternity unless/ The melancholy and the
tenderness/ Of mortal life;
the passion and the pain;[...]/ Are found in Heaven by the
newlydead/ Stored in its
strongholds through the years."
In addition, we can compare what VN
wrote in “The Art of Literature and Commonsense” (1951): “human life is but a first instalment of a serial soul and that
one's individual secret is not lost in the process of earthly dissolution,
becomes something more than an optimistic conjecture, and even more than a
matter of religious faith, when we remember that only commonsense rules
immortality out” and in Pnin, (1957): "Unless
a film of flesh envelops us, we die. Man exists only insofar as he is separated
from his surroundings. The cranium is a spacetraveller's helmet. Stay inside or
you perish. Death is divestment, death is communion. It may be wonderful to mix
with the landscape, but to do so is the end of the tender ego". (
obviously all these sentences were cut off from
their context...)