JM: It's often complicated to check all
the entries, inspite of google and search-tools at our disposal.
Actually, my queries arose as casual
questions while I was searching into a different matter,
mostly related to Gradus. The three Nab-L postings from 2010,
which Jim Twiggs reminded me of, are an excellent "open answer"
to my first query. They've added important information - and
that'll need to be re-addressed in the future.
The Nab-L archives carry the complete texts. I'm
posting a few extracts to consider here only the elements
that answer or illuminate my question or add a new edge to
it.
These elements are:
Jim Twiggs: (1) "Kinbote, after mentioning a
doctor and then referring to the doctor, finally addresses a doctor
directly--suggesting, perhaps, that he is not in a cabin in Cedarn but rather in
an asylum. The Cedarn story, on this reading, may be as fictional as the Zembla
story. It is at this point that almost everything in the Commentary, much of
which (quite apart from the Zembla story) is hard to accept anyway, begins to
crumble..." ;
Jim Twiggs (2) "... a person living out a delusion
might well be aware, at least part of the time (and regardless of how one might
conceptualize the matter) of his "real" identity. The first passage, being a
quick slip of the mask, is easy to overlook; the second, at the very end of the
Commentary, is as close to being a key to the book as we are likely to find."
Jim Twiggs (3): "(Dowling) goes on to say that in Pale
Fire, the Nabokov-like narrator is telling the story as a voice that, if it
survives, will have exactly the same status as John Shade and
Kinbote's. Here, it seems to me, he is either wrong or his point is
trivial...In Pale Fire as most of us read it, Shade, Kinbote, and Jack Grey
are on the same fictive level. Gradus, however is not on this level. Gradus is a
character within Kinbote's story...If the N-LN's sole function is to
be Nabokov's stand-in as creator of the novel, this is only slightly more
interesting than Hitchcock strolling into one of his own movies...structurally
it is trivial. All it does is push Kinbote, Shade, Grey, and Gradus up one notch
on the fictive scale. All the old questions remain untouched.The second
possibility is that the N-LN and Kinbote are one and the same. In this version,
the N-LN is the ground-level personality whose insanity lies in thinking he is
Charles the Beloved, the deposed king of Zembla. It is the N-LN, so conceived,
who comes into view when the Kinbote mask slips." ..."In the second passage
Kinbote goes in and out of his two identities. In describing a possible play, he
gives away the plot of the novel (as he sees it) and shows a clear awareness
that he is a deranged figment of his (as it turns out, Botkin's) own
imagination. In the final possibility (and I believe the one that has come
true)-- "I may huddle and groan in a madhouse"
Mary Bellino: "I assume a fairly straightforward,
"traditional" reading of PF, positing an insane Kinbote who may or may not be V.
Botkin, whose Zemblan life is a figment of his imagination but whose reportage
of _events_ in New Wye is reliable (he did receive a note that said "You have
h.......s real bad") even though his _interpretation_ of these events is wildly
and transparently inaccurate (the note referred to halitosis, not
hallucinations). This reading may also be extended to cover the Shade-as-author
theory, if we assume that Shade went to extraordinary lengths to create
verisimilitude in the account of the writing and publishing of "Kinbote's"
commentary."
(this is the first instalment, part II will be submitted to our Eds soon. I
wish the postings were briefer.)
..........................................................
* "Gradus is now much nearer to us in
space and time...his human incompleteness ...we may concede, doctor, that our
half-man was also half mad" and "My own opinion, which I
would like the doctor to confirm, is that the French sandwich was engaged in
an intestinal internecine war..." Compare
to Shade: "But, Doctor, I was
dead!/ He smiled. "Not quite: just half a
shade." Or Kinbote's
note to it: "Another
fine example of our poet’s special brand of combinational magic. The subtle pun
here turns on two additional meanings of "shade"...The doctor is made to suggest
that not only did Shade retain in his trance half of his identity but that he
was also half a ghost. Knowing the particular medical man who treated my friend
at the time, I venture to add that he is far too stodgy to have displayed any
such wit."