From STAN KELLY-BOOTLE
Jerry: when a mathematical proof ends with Q.E.D. (quod erat demonstrandum = “which was to be demonstrated”) both tradition and syntax demand that Q.E.D. must follow a precise recap of what one has claimed to have just proved! It is then up to one’s peers to verify, find errors or suggest improvements in the proof. Historically, the “court may be out” for ages; indeed judgments can be reversed and restored several times, as has happened with some of Euclid’s Theorems that he ended with a bold Q.E.D. Serious provers and proof-checkers would shun phrases like “proof beyond ultimate proof,” although one hears such claims in the amateur, popular literature. You will know that a faulty proof, or the absence of a valid proof, tells us nothing about the truth of the target proposition. Some truths are provably unprovable. Honest. (In passing, note the other terminating phrase associated with Euclid: Q.E.F, quod erat faciendum (“which was to be done/achieved”), more appropriate where one has promised to do or construct something. Nabokovian precision rules, OK?)
Allowing for the obvious fact that the so-called Pale Fire Puzzle is not a mathematical problem, we are still entitled to a clear statement (or list of statements) before a Q.E.D. Is flourished as to “what has been demonstrated.” Here are some possibilities associated with your previous postings (not that I can claim to have read or understood them all; apologies offered and corrections expected.)
1. Pale Fire covers many topics but “death/mortality,” “other worlds,” “the after-world,” and “diverse modes of survival” play a major role.
[Hard to deny]
2. Some of VN’s characters claim a belief in, and “reported events” indicate, some form of “physical life after death.”
[Reasonable statement]
3. ONE purpose of Pale Fire is to prove some form of “physical life after death,” and, taken together with VN’s other works, that we attach some factual, evidential support from (2). Also that VN himself generally shares the beliefs of (2)
[Here, some doubts start a-peeping with regards to ‘character honesty.’ Which parts of PF are ‘true-fiction’ and which ‘false-fiction?’ World fiction has many credible accounts of seances and other evidence of ghostly survivals. Dante, Ulysses and Ezekiel wouldn’t lie! But, non-fictional reports of ‘life after death’ have, so far, failed to meet ‘Humean’ standards of ‘evidence.’ Statement 3 remains plausible, subject to one’s definition of ‘literary-truth” and “proof.’ The big advantage of (3) is that it doesn’t necessarily contradict the many other readings of PF, apart perhaps for the widely-held feeling that Nabokov’s novels have no such didactic intent!
4. THE sole purpose of Pale Fire is as in (3) and that sole purpose is clearly indicated by VN’s text (and other extra-textual clues). Furthermore, that purpose has been achieved. Careful readers can be defined as those convinced by Pale Fire that [I don’t believe that Statement 4 has been proved yet. I can envisage variations of 4 that increase its plausibility. but it seems unconvincing that such a complex, multilayered novel should be reduced to a re-statement of VN’s putative views on time, survival, memory, resurrection, transcendence (and other hand-waving terms ;=))
One character that needs more attention is the Gardner, the last person named in Shade’s final lines. I identify him with Gerald Gardner, the founder of the modern “Wicca” (or “Wica”) pagan pantheist, Witchcraft movement (1954). Its pentagram logo would satisfy the wildest Nabokovian demand for symmetry (mirror-folding and rotational). Also, most Wiccans believe in various forms of life-after-death and are active in spirit communications. Hazel’s Old Barn experience would not surprise my Gardner. This link supports theory (3) above.
I also wonder if the link Wordsworth -> Wadsworth -> Longfellow -> Dante has been explored? My Archive searches reveal only an inconsequential ref. in 2003 to Longfellow’s plodding poem “The Wreck of the Hesperus” which has no real connection with the “Hesperus” (planet/star Venus) of Canto 3, line 529. (Kinbote’s commentry is silent whereas he is usually quick to locate Shade’s allusions to other poets) Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was first American to translate Dante’s Comedy. (See Matthew Pearl’s enthralling “The Dante Club,” a real Whodunit) Several Shade-Longfellow “coincidences”: both college professor/poets of great popularity and inferior quality (e.g., often unintentionally funny); both experiment with European verse-forms; both lost loved ones through accident.
PS: In Kinbote’s farewell at end of his final meandering commentary, “ ... I may ... cook up a stage play, an old fashioned melodrama with three principles: “
But he then lists three principals: the lunatic assassin, the lunatic king, and “a distinguished old poet who stumbles by chance into the line of fire, and perishes in the clash between the two figments.”
Is this a typo in my Penguin Classics Pale Fire, reprinted 2000? Or some intended subtlety throwing light on Kinbote’s state-of-mind? I can’t locate any prior discussion. The principals seem unprincipled.
Kinbote also uses “confusely” (p 149) “ ... but [Shade] also made me regret that I prevented him from getting to the point he was confusely and self-consciously making (for as I have said in an earlier note, he never cared to refer to his dead child) ...”
“Confusely” lies uneasily between the usual dictionary options: “confusedly” and “confusingly.” Any ideas?
And surely Kinbote is the confused one, since by the time he wrote this note, Shade had referred to Hazel often in the Cantos.
It does remind me, though, that Longfellow was silent: gaps between his wife’s and daughter’s deaths and his writing poems about them.
Finally, for Jim Twiggs: O Lawd! That movie Pi! Such a mix of truths (numbers are the language of nature; there are patterns in nature) and UTTER, dangerous NONSENSE (the Bible encodes God-given gematrial truths via the abitrary numeric values of Hebrew and Greek letters; the Stock Market fluctuations have patterns that can lead to reliable predictions). In addition to the helpful Skeptical Inquirer citations you posted, a book called “The Tiger that Isn’t” (Michael Blastland [sic] & Andrew Dilnot [sic again], Profile Books, 2007) is a readable layperson’s warning against statistical bamboozles.
skb
On 03/04/2009 16:29, "NABOKV-L" <NABOKV-L@HOLYCROSS.EDU> wrote:
Jerry Friedman writes:
Jim, thanks for the link to the Alexandrov essay. Before
we decide whether Nabokov's characters can have free will
and what that implies about ethics in hi sbooks, maybe
we'd better settle the definition of free will first.
Alexandrov mentions that the meanings of "awareness" and
"consciousness" are problematic, but not this problem.
A striking thing about both Alexandrov's and Don Johnson's
books is that (as I recall) their essays on /Pale Fire/
don't say what their essays on other Nabokov books say:
that it's an example of his otherworlds theme. Yet I
think it's a remarkable example of regression: Nabokov
created Kinbote, who created Eystein and Hodinski, who
created dubious kinds of art. In the /Cycnos/ essay,
Alexandrov says in general that the flaunted "madeness"
of Nabokov's novels can be seen as a "model" of the
madeness of our world by God. I imagine he intends this
to apply to /Pale Fire/ as much as to the others.
Your reference to the movie /Pi/ (which I haven't seen)
reminds me of a real sufferer from the same mania--I
forget his name. When I was in college in the early '80s
I saw a pamphlet he had written about the messages in
stock-market numbers and the like. He would close his
numerical demonstrations with phrases such as "Q.E.D.,
Q.E.D., proof beyond ultimate proof!" I feel like
closing my arguments about /Pale Fire/ the same way.
Jerry Friedman