SES: The listserv that hosts our electronic forum made
some changes on Monday, and at the moment there seems to be a problem accessing
the NABOKV-L archiver anonymously, without having to enter a password.
They're working on it.
JM: I hope they fix the
problem soon because even when using the google-page one cannot access the Nab-L
archives even now.
When we go back to Nab criticism and ancient reviews, we end up
tempted to re-read various Nabokov novels, or chapters, sometimes with
surprising results. Writing about "Pale Fire" in TNR, Mary McCarthy relates love
to loss, moving through longing ("a kind of homesickness") to the image of a
platonic "phantom half" and the kinbotean "phantom toe" and "phantom
extensions beyond the board," all of which she related to a chess-move in
the novel*.
Right now my chief interest lies in "The Luzhin Defense" and therefore the
chess-connection, dealing with knights and a black horse,
interested me anew. These phantoms, in my view, are also related to "The
Enchanter," when "Arthur's" erotic fantasies envelop the innocent
girl to achieve a climax without touching her body ( as it also
happens with Humbert Humbert in the couch scene with his little Carmen and
apple), although in their case those standing in the marginal file to feel
phantom extensions do have an effect on the "real play."
John Shade (lines 659...663):"What glided down
the roof and made that thud?"/"It is old winter tumbling in the mud."/ "And
now what shall I do? My knight is pinned."// Who rides so late in the night
and the wind?/It is the writer’s grief..."
Kinbote: "Jacques d’Argus ...strolled like a
pigeon with his hands behind him...From my rented cloudlet I contemplate him
with quiet surprise...We must assume, I think, that the forward projection of
what imagination he had, stopped at the act, on the brink of all its possible
consequences; ghost consequences, comparable to the ghost toes of an amputee or
to the fanning out of additional squares which a chess knight (that skip-space
piece), standing on a marginal file, "feels" in phantom extensions beyond the
board, but which have no effect whatever on his real moves, on the real
play."
.................................................................................................................................................................................................
*
"Love is the burden of Pale Fire, love and loss. Love is felt as a kind of
homesickness, that yearning for union described by Plato, the pining for the
other half of a once-whole body, the straining of the soul's black horse to
unite with the white. The sense of loss in love, of separation (the room beyond,
projected onto the snow, the phantom moves of the chess knight, that deviate
piece, off the board's edge onto ghostly squares), binds mortal men in a common
pattern..." (TNR, "A Bolt from the Blue")