There are various samples of Nabokov's self-reference
in PF, and elsewhere, from his own testimonies during interviews.
Even after he had already finished his novel "Pale
Fire" there was a tendency in his interviewers to focus on "Lolita," while he
tried to introduce "Pale Fire" into the conversation.
In the first published item, in Strong
Opinions, in June 5, 1962, Nabokov said:
"My loathings are simple: stupidity,
oppression, crime, cruelty, sofr music. My pleasures are the most intense known
to man: writing and butterfly hunting." (SO,p.3)
In mid-July 1962, he said: "my more
responsible characters are given some of my own ideas. There is John Shade, in
Pale Fire, the poet. He does borrow some of my opinions.
There is one passage in his poem, which is part of
the book, where he says something I think I can endorse. He says - let me quote
it, if I can remember, yes, I think I can do it: " I loathe such things s jazz,
the white-hosed moron torturing a black bull, rayed with red, abstractist
bric-a-brac, primitivist folk masks, progressive schools, music in
supermarkets,swimming pools, brutes, bores, class-conscious philistines, Freud,
Marx, fake thinkers, puffed-up poets, frauds and sharks." That's how it
goes."(SO, page 18), in an almost Kinbotean show of spontaneous recollection
of what he could access in his own archives - before
writing his answers down for the interview... In this same interview he quoted
his poem about the swallows "that I happened to give to my main character in
that novel." (The Gift)
The most interesting item, as I see it, related to
Shade's "dissociative" crisis involving body-parts (lines 145-156), but
described poetically and in a very "sane" and humoristic
vein:
There was a sudden sunburst
in my
head.[...]
And
then black night. That blackness was sublime.
I felt distributed through
space and time:
One foot upon a mountaintop, one hand
Under the pebbles of
a panting strand,
One ear in Italy, one eye in Spain,
In caves, my blood,
and in the stars, my brain.
There were dull throbs in my Triassic;
green
Optical spots in Upper Pleistocene,
An icy shiver down my Age of
Stone,
And all tomorrows in my funnybone.
In August 18, 1964, while answering about the
places he would have liked to live he wrote:
"I would have to construct a mosaic of time and
space to suit my desires and demands. It would be too complicated to tabulate
all the elements of this combination [...] I think I would like my head to be in
the United States of the nineteen-sixties, but would not mind distributing some
of my other organs and limbs through various centuries and
countries."
When inquired about which of the languages he
considers most beautiful he stated: "My head says English, my heart,
Russian, my ear, French." (SO,p.48-49)*
When, later on, Shade describes his shaving procedures
during his bath, there are also bodily-geographical ennumerations (cheek=Old
Zemblan fields, hands =slaves making hay), in a complicated game with similes
and recondite allusions. This is why I hesitate to consider them,
simply, as an expression of his growing madness. The latter must be identified
by a failing in technical skills, in the verses structure, not by its
images.
I agree with Carolyn ( I had asserted something
similar almost at the same time) that this Canto might profit from
being read side by side with Kinbote's foreword.
There are other striking parallels bt. the poem and
Kinbote's fictive biographical items in the lspirit of bringing
up parallels between "body-cosmos" (the merry-go-round/caleidoscope/car
lights and trucks, vertigo, spiralings and stellar explosions in his
lungs).
The same issue has been precisely rendered by
Kinbote himself, when he describes the approach of Gradus in synchrony with
Shade's process of writing, as he moves like a monkey that moves from paragraph
onto paragraph or rides a train of thought and a lot more.Wonderful
synchronization and metaphors, not at all crazy if considered as metaphors
(which they clearly are). I find in these lines (Shade's and Kinbote's) the
same authorial design.
Once I heard a doctor explain to me that transient
body-parts, such as hair and nails (... shaving a beard and paring
his fingernails) are technically described as "phaneros" from the
Greek, they indicate sudden apparitions, fast disappearing
visions, like those used in words such as "epiphany." We
might also be interested in considering that there is a lot of light in the
bath-room scene or that mirrors, used in shaving, are often hung from a window
with the light streaming over the face and then these illumined fields can be
more clearly seen in the mirror reflexion.
(One of the very few items to remain in Freud's museum
in Vienna is his shaving-mirror which hangs from a lovely window with a
view and its arch blends the outside and the inside).
............................................................................................................
*- I ask the List-readers to forgive me for all
my typos and imprecisions whenever I transcribe a text here. The
references to pages and links will suffice, so I hope, for those who
want to get them down correctly. There were more than ten spelling errors
the "Battel" (shits instead of shifts, for
example).
My chief purpose has been to bring the lines to
our discussion is a more visually practical way.