Dear Carolyn: will you marry me? We can leave SB to handle the dowry details. Dificil sorte, Jansy, but that’s how the biscoito crumbles.
I quote from VN’s LoL page 183
“3. There are really three personalities -- Jekyll, Hyde, and a third, the Jekyll residue when Hyde takes over.
[VN then draws the ccomplicated diagrams I mentioned. They boil down to showing various shaded circles for J and H, with certain internal squares for “good” and slants for “evil.” There are sequences of circles showing the gradual, later accelerating, effect of the drug.]
VN continues: If you look closely you see that within this big, luminous, pleasantly tweedy Jekyll there are scattered rudiments of evil. When the magic drug starts to work, a dark concentration of this evil starts forming.
[VN draws another circle with a central core showing the slants of “evil” -- it then gets more complex with one circle representing a “smoke ring” or a “halo.” And very VN, reminding me of his drawings of L Bloom’s abode, he sketches the Jekyll’s house floor-plans which mirror the split J and H personalities]
VN concludes, after all his diagrams:
“It follows that Jekyll’s transformation implies a concentration of evil that already inhabited him, rather than a complex metamorphosis. Jekyll is not pure good, and Hyde (Jekyll’s statement to the contrary) is not pure evil, for just as parts of unacceptable Hyde dwell within acceptable Jekyll, so over Hyde hovers a halo of Jekyll, horrified at his worser half’s iniquity.”
I suppose one could argue from this that the “number of personalities” exhibited by J&H depends on the definition of “personalities” and in what sense they can be “counted.” I don’t really mind, pace VN, if we just take J’s as the starting personality, with H’s as the final extreme, giving a count two as, I think, the average layperson digs the plot! That count of two need not vitiate VN’s analysis, in that we can count J’s initial state as one personality even if it is tainted with 1% (whatever) of H’s. Likewise when H has “maxed out evilly” as far as the drug takes him, however much of J survives, we can plausibly label that the second personality. (CK: this agreement on two J&H personalities bodes well for our future marital bliss?) As I recall from the movies, we are treated to the terrifying (I was young at the time; now they would raise a laugh?) continuous transitions from J to H, (Oscars for Make-up, surely!) but, again, we don’t admit to an infinite number, X%-J + (100 – X)%-H, of personalities with X ranging from 99 to 1.
I’m sure this is all useful in understanding RLS’s novel with its drug-induced, graduated personality changes in a single character. What I’m anxious to understand is its relevance to Pale Fire. For here we find, in the text, Shade and Kinbote, as two distinct corporeal entities, two clearly delineated characters, both, at various points in the “surface plot,” interacting side by side, and going about their separate ways. So, to what extent are we justified in “rewriting” Kinbote’s “narrative” on the grounds that he’s a proven liar and madman? Who wrote the Cantos? Who married Sybil? Who shot Shade? Can we “docment” how, when, why, how often the “splits” occurred as we can with J&H? In other VN novels/contexts, we accept “fantastic” events and places as “real” (suspension of disbelief)
My next ACM Queue col. (due out soon) is titled One Peut-Être, Two Peut-Être, Three Peut-Être, More.
It attempts to get Computing Scientists interested in VN the scientist/poet, and esp. in the possibility of applying graph theory to Pale Fire. I suggest, rather boldly, that PF is a PORISM, i.e., there may not be a soution, but once one is found, an infinity of solutions must exist. I won’t reveal too much until the ACM editor has completed her textual harassment (only joking; she is most respectueuse, like Sartre’s heroine)
CTaH
On 06/03/2009 01:48, "Carolyn Kunin" <chaiselongue@EARTHLINK.NET> wrote:
On Mar 5, 2009, at 12:28 PM, Nabokv-L wrote:
Further, I wonder how VN’s complex diagrams of the three personalities involved in J&H tie in with the Shade-Kinbote “split-personality” theory. S K-B
Dear Stan,
I'm glad we are speaking to each other - - much nicer. Thank you for reminding me about the lecture on Bleak House - - I should have known that Nabokov would have the good sense to admire Dickens, who has been in declining favor with academics for fifty years or more.
I'm not too sure that I understand what you mean about three personalities - - in Jekyll and Hyde there are only two. I think in his lecture Nabokov was showing that the two personalities Jekyll and Hyde share some areas in what? Jekyll's brain perhaps? But surely there are only two personalities?
Carolyn