Dear Carolyn,

"Puzzles," as Gertrude Stein famously remarked, "are not literature." I may have butchered the quote, but you get the point. And your response might well be, "They are when they're written by Nabokov." We could go round and round on this for a few years longer. More productively, we might both go reread the conclusion of Brian Boyd's fine book on Pale Fire, where, in responding to Michael Wood's criticisms, he gives the question of puzzles, solutions, and art a good airing out. I'm still on the side of Wood, but I need to think harder on it than I've so far done. Your position is different. You agree with Boyd that the novel is a puzzle (or riddle) with a definite answer, but your answer is very different from his. And so it goes, round and round. It's not just the evidence that's in question but also the very nature of the evidence--and what the hell counts as evidence any damn how? We are never going to agree on any of this, are we? Is this our fault? Is it the book's? Is it even a fault? (Jansy, Matt, and Stan--to name only three of our regulars--would, I take it, join me in saying no to all three questions .)

Assuming the word "schreib" isn't an insult of some kind, I'm grateful for Piers Smith's fast and funny response. It points up the idea that, at least in some general metaphorical sense, Shade and Kinbote are, indeed, one and the same. Writer and reader--two sides of the same coin. And although postmodernism gets a bad rap in Boyd and on this List, I know of no other novel in which the notions of the death of the author, dissemination, the free play of the signifier, and mise en abyme are given such a vigorous workout, but without being named. When Nabokov was doing his tricks, the postmodern vocabulary was not yet in place. Some deconstructionists dislike the book intensely, for the simple reason that Nabokov is, at every turn, a step or two ahead of them. Like the fellow says, you can’t kid a kidder.

Piers is also right to call us on our constant reliance on the author's intentions. When we're considering books as puzzles with definite solutions, this is unavoidable. Unfortunately, it's also hard to avoid anytime we talk seriously about a book, puzzle or not, for more than a minute. I'm about to err once again when I say that Pale Fire is above all else a great novel about reading and writing. A reason for setting up (I've just smuggled intention back in) such an extreme opposition as Shade and Kinbote may well have been to show what happens, not only in this case but, on a lesser scale, in all cases of writing and reading and all cases of speaking and hearing and trying to understand one another. As Conrad put it, "each man understands each word after the fashion of his own folly and conceit."

I laughed out loud at Piers's Song of the Truffle. I hope for his next number he'll do us a riff on "cherry picking."

Back to you, Carolyn, I assume you’re being ironical, and at my expense, by the time you get to Harry Geduld and (especially) Martin Gardner. If by chance you’re not, can you give us a reference to Geduld’s writing on Pale Fire? He sounds like someone we all ought to be reading. And have you seen the movie I mentioned earlier, Lynch’s Lost Highway? I’d be interested to know what you think of it in connection with your ideas about Pale Fire.

I agree with Stan that you've made too much of the phrase "your favorite." This is surely no more than a rhetorical flourish, a bit of announcer-talk or magician’s patter, a filler if you will, empty of significant meaning, an idiom that's easier to use than it is to explain. In this context, it actually means (to the extent that it achieves meaning at all) something closer to "my [Kinbote's] favorite." In my long-ago days as an editor, I could have cited authorities to provide examples and back me up on this. Your typical Grand Poobahs, if you catch my drift. But even then there would be room for doubt. Maybe Kinbote/Shade really IS addressing Sybil . . . Round and round, I tell you, round and round--like the carousel blaring away in that infernal amusement park outside my window.

Despite all my doubts, I still find your fugue theory interesting and well worth trying to follow in all its ramifications.

Best ever,

Jim