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CK: you and I are correct French-grammar-wise; no need to
check libretto. As I emailed yesterday, 'prends' is the sing.
imperative; 'prenons' is plural. It's a common slip because prend and
prends are homomphonic, just like Kinbote.
JM: you say Freud never used the word Thanatos in his works. But, it
does appear often in the Greek translations of his vast corpus. A
pretty pair-o'-ducks ;=)
Do you have the book of VN Letters, Harvest/HBJ? I've found two of
relevance to our amicable Pale Fire debate.
1. p. 537 to Alfred Appel, Nov 8 1974 re AA's book N's Dark Cinema (OUP
1974)
Letter mentions VN's cinema-going habits (rare!); knowledge of cinema
titles/stars (limited!); lack of TV viewing (sports only!); mildly
chastises AA for wrongly implying 'cinema' influences on VN's corpus.
" ... you connect me now and then with films and actors whom I have
never seen in my life (I still do not quite know, e.g., who this
'James Bond' is*) ... yet it would be rather unfair if less subtle
people - poor, benighted sheep and so on - were to conclude I had
simply lifted my characters (say GRADUS) from films which you know and
I DON'T."
* One can allow for some VN teasing here, perhaps?
I'm NOT suggesting you have ever fallen into this trap! Your earlier
claim was simply that VN had planted _significant_ clues in Pale Fire
pointing at popular 1950s films & their TV showings which had
various
'split-personality' themes.
These clues, you suggested, were aimed at 'ordinary, non-academic'
readers familiar with 'popular culture' (TV movies, in particular)
rather than VN's more abstruse literary clues aimed at the glitterati.
It's impossible to prove you wrong, but the more I learn about the
state of TV in the 50s (how few major studio movies hit the small
screen until the 60s and later), and reading VN's reaction to AA's
book, the less convincing I find this part of your thesis. It's quite
sufficient, I feel, to see all the usual hints (at levels high and
low) in every VN novel, not just PF, of his intense interest in
multi-faceted humans and the ambiguities of our psyches. To recap:
there's NO doubt of VN's intimate knowledge of Jekyll & Hyde, the
_book_ (we have his Lecture!). The J&H plot can be said to have
various affinities to Pale Fire depending on how many
DID/Split-thingies we detect in the PF characters.
2. p. 212 letter to Jacob Epstein (Doubleday Editor), March 24 1957
This letter (which must have been widely analyzed by many, but may be
new or deemed irrelevant to Carolyn as far as I can judge) reveals
VN's first draft ideas for PALE FIRE [these are VN's caps, not me
_shouting_! - skb] originally but briefly entitled THE HAPPY ATHEIST,
"but the book is too poetical and romantic for that (its thrill and
poetry I cannot reveal to you in a short and matter-of-fact summary.)"
The summary offered is actually quite detailed, readily recognizable,
and might be taken to support the centrality of Kinbote (no mention of
Shade or his Cantos per se, but see later):
"My main creature, an ex-king, is engaged _throughout_ [my emphasis]
PALE FIRE in a certain quest. This quest, or research (which at one
point, _alas_ [me again!] involves some very sophisticated
spiritualism) is divorced from any so-called faith or religion, gods,
God, Heaven, Folklore, etc. ...
My creature's quest is centered in the problem of heretofore and
hereafter, and it is I may say beautifully _solved_ [my emphasis]"
Of interest to Carolyn's theory:
"He [the ex-king] lives more or less incognito _with the lady he
loves_, somewhere on the border of Upstate New York and Montario ..."
That sortof "identifies" the ex-king we now know as Kinbote with the
character we now know as Shade, except, of course, the
sexual-preferences of Kinbote have changed, and the "more or less
incognito" hardly matches a famous poet.
As Dmitri points out in a footnote, by the time PF appeared in 1964
(Putnam)
"its loci, characters and themes had gone through many stages of
evolution, and the structure of the novel had assumed a different and
totally original form. All the real or imagined events of the Kingdom
of Zembla and the story of its ex-monarch are contained in a
_presumably_ [me again] mad commentator's notes to a 999-line poem
composed for the occasion by an invented poet."
In spite of the plot's "evolution" since 1957, it does seem plausible
to view Shade and his Cantos as a "secondary" device, invented as a
prop for poetic ruminations on the afterlife, and sharing a campus
with our narraor. Kinbote remains the "main" character as does the
general story of his being tracked down by an assassin. What does VN
mean by "beautifully _solved_?" Aye, there's the rub!** If the tackled
problem is the eternal "Is there Life after Death?" ça depend! We
wouldn't expect a Yes or No answer, would we?
** Not everybody knows that Shakespeare uses "rub" 15 times, 7 of
these in the literal sense (e.g., "Here, Hamlet, take my napkin, rub
thy brow"), the other 8 times as a Bowling (à la Raleigh) term (as in
Hamlet's famous soliloquy [quarto & folio versions]) meaning some
obstruction to one's throw that needs to be removed.
CTaH