Stan Kelly writes [to
JM] "...Jokes are jokes are jokes, resisting
over-reductionism. A multi-lingual miracle mind, like VN’s, buzzes with
grammatical and literary bric-a-brac. Out come puns, anagrams, allusions,
threads, patches and snatches at the drop of nothing in particular....This is a
parallel process oft resisting a single gotcha, and I agree with your term
‘open-ended’."
Jansy Mello: The subject's title for this
sequence of postings is the "real Cantaboff solution" and it was
offered by Carolyn Kunin quoting Frances Assa, not by me.
In brief, we seem to be in agreement that
over-reductionism and the single gotcha are to be avoided, since
VN's puzzles are "open-ended." Although I ignore the subtleties
of philosophical debates about nominalism, I fear we disagree about a
small detail in connection to "VN's multi-lingual miracle
mind," should you thereby suggest that puns, anagrams,
allusions (and etc) are deliberately engendered by Nabokov's
conscious "miracle mind."
I believe that many Nabokovian productions result
from the effects of the signifiers, of elaborate hidden roots and
from linguistic associative deviations giving rise to
polisemmia.
Like John Shade concluded, poets may imitate this
"game of the Gods."( & although he used this word (Gods), in my
opinion he was the original "Happy Atheist" in Pale Fire (and he
didn't die happily in his bed*, as it is said to be the case of Conmal
and Goethe...)
.............................................................................
* Sergei Soloview writes (qua "Perhaps John Shade (and
Nabokov) saw the 'otherworld' differently. Nabokov most certainly wasn't an
'athée du bonheur'."] that "it seems to me that
Nabokov might mean merely that the idea of an Atheist dying happily in his own
bed is "against all rules" (for an Amercian novel)...And Pushkin means simply
that he doesn't believe in happinness as others do not believe in
God."