Steve Norquist: "...your comments about searching for the "real" within VN's fiction are intriguing! In the statement about "coming before himself," HH seems to be imagining himself as a criminal court judge sitting in judgment of a rapist. Do you see a hint in this sentence ("...I would have given Humbert at least thirty-five years for rape, and dismissed the rest of the charges...") that perhaps the murder of Quilty is "imaginary" after all? What judge worth his/her salt would nonchalantly dismiss a murder (generally considered the most serious crime of all)?"

JM: In "Solomon and the Witch" W.B. Yeats poetically renders a division between a person's subjective constructions and what is external to them: "Maybe the bride-bed brings despair,/ For each an imagined image brings/ And finds a real image there.." This gap between an individual's variegated distorted representations set against the world's constancy may be potentialized by writers, like Nabokov. For me (quite surprisingly) it's easier to approach a fictional character's "real" in "Pale Fire" than in "Lolita". When Humbert Humbert imagines himself as a defendant and a judge at the same time, a legitimate invention in common-life, in his case this also entails a description and an actualization of the way he feels and acts under such a "splitting process." He is scattered all over the world... The only moment of fictional "real", in my opinion, is when all the pieces fleetingly reunite and he laments Dolly's fate and describes his "beard and his putrefaction" ("life is not a joke"). This is the most impressive moment in the entire novel, but only for me and carrying the burden of a reader's caprice. After all VN, in the Afterword, chose another scene, one that is considered as HH's "moral apotheosis" - and his knowledge about what he intended to write is supreme.

However, delusion sets in again soon enough and Kinbote will attempt to distort the perception of all Shade's future readers and make his verses conform to his, Kinbote's, "imaged image." He distorts the original poem and the original "biographical elements" to suit his needs...

In parallel to this, Kinbote introduces Zembla and Gradus, which obey the logic of the realm of fables. Zembla and Gradus preserve a fictional consistency that is often absent from Kinbote's invention of Wordsmith (it sounds reasonably like a satire of the real thing)!

In PF I encounter two "terra firma" (to borrow B.Stone's use of the words):(a) a poetic one (John Shade's autonomous poem, if we manage to clean it from any false variants); (b) a fabulous one (Zembla and Gradus). The rest is a flock of iridules in an unclouded sky.. I suppose that, metafictionally, there is also the firm ground constituted by the novel's (VN) style and structure. .