JM: Inspite of my very insufficient scholarship and
means, my slow progress along "Pale Fire" ( and "RLSK") insistently led me
to medieval texts that emerge as if shining through a random blend of
more recent works contained in a palimpsest.
Part of my puzzlement has been admitted as a note in "The Nabokovian"
(62),Spring 2009, in "When a Clown Develops Wings," where I link Nabokov's
reference to Shakespeare's "arrased eavesdropper" to other names
lurking together behind an arras (namely, Adan d'Arras, Chaucer
behind Keats, Troyen's chansons and Cock Robin nursery rhymes).
My interpretation of "clowns and angels" led me to conclude that Nabokov,
in his novels, mingled the sacred and the profane as a ruse to hide
his personal strivings towards imortality and the hereafter.
Although this hypothesis is not necessarily invalidated by Shannon
Chamberlain's fascinating study, it acquires a secondary status in relation
to what S.C outlined concerning Nabokov's main literary pursuits.
For S.Chamberlain the "structure of Pale Fire, found object
of found object, is constructed as distraction from art considered as art: by
deliberately shrouding the poem’s provenance in the insufficient scholarship of
its commentary, Nabokov lays a trap for the scholar unwilling to consider the
aesthetic qualities of John Shade’s poem* " - something I'm unable
to evaluate. Nevertheless everything else in the artice provides
fundamental information concerning the debate bt. Shadeans,
non-Shadeans, Alter's separate Shade and Kinbote, Bryan
Boyd’s Hazel's and John Shade's ghostly interventions,
Don Johnson's contention that Charles Kinbote represents "another
level of fiction," - arguments which are conducive to SC's
own arguments about "the broad similarities between Kinbote’s
story and Igor’s"[...] and his demonstration, by way of analogy to the
Slovo, that Shade’s poem would be "the authentic output of a lone
artist."
Am I wrong
to understand that S.Chamberlain's conclusion endorses both
D.B.Johnson's and Robert Alter's contentions that Shade and Kinbote
are separate individuals?
.................................................................................
* For S.Chamberlain "Truth for Nabokov did not lie in the philology of
Mazon and Jakobson (both of whom are parodied in Kinbote) or in any kind of
traditionally-defined “scholarship” at all. [...] “Insufficient scholarship” is,
in both the Slovo and Pale Fire, improper attentiveness to art qua
art"