MR/CK: probably well-known, since it’s from Wiki:
The book [TFoE] by Thigpen and Cleckley was rushed into publication and film rights immediately sold to director Nunnally Johnson in 1957, apparently to capitalize on public interest in multiple personalities following the publication of Shirley Jackson's 1954 novel The Birds' Nest,[2] which was made into the 1957 film Lizzie.
Controversy exists as to the veracity of Thigpen and Cleckley's book. Chris Costner Sizemore herself has denounced the book as heavily fictionalized. She wrote her own book, I'm Eve, and a followup book, A Mind Of My Own, to set the record straight as to her actual experiences and therapy.
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So, dear source-hunters & huntresses [!], you now have additional potential books and movies from which to match words (or failing that, their anagrams or, failing that, their near-anagrams) and seek suggestive allusions in Pale Fire. The sediments (waxed wing feathers) in those plural Birds’ singular Nest must offer endless happy links (VN surely sipped their Soup, and he has been known to use Bird’s Opening in Chess: 1. P-KB4 (f4 in modern notation) dangerously exposing King-Kinbote to Fool’s Mate via a Queen or Bishop on h4 - the evidence accumulates in inexorably ... ). We pause only to note (again!) that Nabokov disowned all such fancies published during his lifetime. I reckon he would have also disowned “the” correct “solution” (assuming such exists) had it been published before he died. Why reduce debate and book-sales? From the intro to Bend Sinister:
“I am not ‘sincere,’ I am not ‘provocative.’ I am neither a didacticist nor an ALLEGORIZER [my caps] [VN then ridicules claims of of Bend Sinister [I resist the abbreviation BS!] or ItaB (Invitation to a Beheading)* being influenced by Kafka and the mediocre Orwell] ... Similarly, the influence of my epoch on my present book is as negligible as the influence of my books, or at least of this book, on my epoch. [VN then relents un peu by admitting the influences of the Soviet and Nazi regimes. Logicians will notice the subtlety of “X-on-Y is as negligible as Y-on-X”: once VN has admitted some influence of Epoch-on-Bend-Sinister, he has allowed for some influence of Bend-Sinister-on-Epoch.
* Someone on the List recently suggested the influence of Flatland on ItaB. I have no proof either way, but I see no evidence of VN having read Abbot’s classic, or any mathematical works (popular or otherwise) on the higher dimensions (with the exception perhaps of the fading Eddington’s senilities. There were rumours of Euler’s Letters to a Princess, published in Russian in St Petersberg, being catalogued in VN’s father’s library. Brian Boyd or Stephen Blackwell might know and judge whether VN ever read Euler?) But, the suggestion gives me the opportunity to plug my colleague Ian Stewart’s update called Flatterland!
http://kasmana.people.cofc.edu/MATHFICT/mfview.php?callnumber=mf198
BTW: I’m not sure why CK invokes “films on TV in the 50s?” Although TVs and their antennae feature flittingly in PF, I would need proof that the full-length films she cites had reached home TV screens from the movie houses until much later. We are now so used to multi-channel TV re-runs (my Sky Movie menu offers exactly 100 choices) we forget how limited the choices and poor the images were in the 50s. A few hours of “History of TV/Cinema” googling seems to indicate (I welcome refutation) how unlikely a TV showing of TFoE (or Lizzie) would be until the 60s or later. A few factoids: New Hampshire’s first licenced TV station came in 1954. Maine was 1953. Conn. and Mass. were 1948. Further, and key, not until NBC’s Saturday Night at the Movies, starting 1961, were the first studio movies shown regularly on TV, and seldom the big screen hits. The growing clash between the Film Studios and network TV was not because TV were showing major movies but, rather, were nevertheless keeping viewers at home with a mix of sports, plays, comic & quiz shows not often found on the big screen. I’m not sure how this might intrude on CK’s theory. I would have thought that claims of “multiple-personality” influences in Pale Fire (or TRLOSK etc etc) need no more than the obvious fact that VN was fascinated with and widely read in (not to mention, highly sceptical OF!) all facets of normal and “abnormal” psychology, plus the equally obvious fact that the “schizo/MPD” theme in all its variations and diagnoses** has been a staple of art/literature long before “psychobabble” arrived. To rely on a particuar surge of interest in the 50s (or adjacent epochs, whether via Cinema, TV or books) as a hidden “clue” to the Shade/Kinbote identity*** seemed unnecessary, and I’m glad that she has now RELEGATED TFoE to a SPRINKLING. But I may be able to help your theory along. Rather than count the number of “ditches,” look for VN’s clinching use of “did”! CASE-shifted Dissociative Identity Disorder, cunningly encoded (and this has spooky Proustian resonances) in all those forms of the PAST DEFINITE!
** [Wiki] The controversial nature of the dissociation hypothesis is shown quite clearly by the manner in which the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) has addressed, and re-addressed, the categorization over the years.
The second edition of the DSM referred to this diagnostic profile as multiple personality disorder. The third edition grouped MPD in with the other four major dissociative disorders. The current edition, the DSM-IV-TR, categorizes the disorder as dissociative identity disorder (DID). The ICD-10 (International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems) continues to list the condition as multiple personality disorder.
*** CK “writes off” Kinbote as a near-anagram of the Russian for “nobody.” But so is Botkin. Clearly these “clues” are aimed at a tiny number of readers. Yet, open to your mass “target” Anglohone TV-viewing public, we have the other main character named SHADE. Without dictionaries or crossword-mangling, this name would suggest someone SUBORDINATE (subumbrate!) to his annotator, and more likely to PRE-DECEASE (shades as spirits) the crafty Kinbote. The point is that ALL the PF interpretations I’ve read (so far) share the same problem I find in yours. In the PROFUSION of so-called “clues,” each “solution” seems free to cherry-pick, that is brush aside any mis-matches, either by ignoring them, or by declaring them “non-clues!”
Do let the explorations continue. It took 300 years to resolve Fermat’s Last “Theorem.”
BTW: I MAY know something Alexey doesn’t know. Lenin was one of the first to use the term “cherry-pick” in relation to criticizing some distortions in Tsarist production statistics. I’ll need to dig out a column I wrote 20 years ago for chapter and verse (I saw only the English translation of Lenin’s report)). Unless, of course, Alexey already knows!
CTaH
On 02/03/2009 16:18, "Carolyn Kunin" <chaiselongue@EARTHLINK.NET> wrote:
Dear Matthew,
Three Faces really is the sprinkling on top and is not necessary to my interpretation, whereas Dorian Gray, Jekyll & Hyde are really more important. It seems to have been a redundancy as is the Hogg work.
The way I got to Three Faces by the way was not through the word "ditch" but through my belief that Nabokov wanted PF to be solvable by anyone who had a tv and would have seen the films that were shown on tv in the fifties. I did myself remember seeing those three films on tv. I further concluded that VN wished his non-scholarly reader to go to the texts and read those three works. Which is what I did and which is when those word clues jumped out at me. In other words, the word clues act as confirmation to the reader that Nabokov intended him to read these particular works.
Hogg is different - - that was clearly a clue for the more scholarly reader. But the more sophisticated clue-words "cresset" and "parahelion" still work as confirmation in the same way. If any other puzzle was ever constructed like this, i.e. with pre--planned confirmations, I'm not aware of it.
Carolyn
On Mar 2, 2009, at 6:30 AM, Matthew Roth wrote:
The next issue of the Nabokov Online Journal will include an article by Tiffany DeRewal and me that lays out our version of a Shade-Kinbote multiple personality theory. We don't talk about TFoE, but I've always been interested in that possible link. At the very least, its popularity in the 50s makes clear that a lot of people were thinking about split personalities at that time. And we know, from notes in the Berg Archive, that Nabokov in the late 1950s was reading DJ West's Psychical Research Today and paid particular attention to several multiple personality case studies therein.
That said, I don't think Carolyn's idea of "word links," especially with a word as mundane as "ditch," gets us very far. There would have to be a whole host of stronger associations between PF and TFoE before I'd be willing to sprinkle that one on top.
Matt Roth