Barrie Akin [to Jansy's the odd thing is Shade
mentioning that Maud "lived to see the next babe cry" and a certain consensus on
that he must have meant Hazel (who was sixteen when Maud died)..Charles Kinbote
informs that she was "Samuel Shade's sister. At her death,
Hazel (born 1934) was not exactly a "babe" as implied in line 90."The
reader has only access to the (not always reliable) Kinbote's
informations.Apparently the idea that Hazel is the implied babe stems from
him.] On the "next babe cry" point, I do not really see a difficulty. The
line does not say when Maud died, merely that she was alive when Hazel was born
(who else could the 'next babe' be?) I just don't see it as conflicting in any
way what Kinbote says.
Jansy Mello: I still
believe that it's Kinbote who is inducing the reader to believe
that the "next babe" was Hazel for, as you inquire, who else could it be? That's
my point, exactly. Who can this babe be? A
sentence stating that Maud lived to see "it" cry, when we learn that
Maud Shade continued to live for at least sixteen more years is, in my eyes,
very odd!
Pale Fire has its mysteries. If my
calculations are not too incorrect, John Shade and Sybil Irondell were married
rather young, aged 20. Did Sybil replace the Canadian maid and her niece in
taking care of the house together with Maud?
Sybil "came of Canadian stock, as
did Shade's maternal grandmother (a first cousin of Sybil's grandfather, if I'm
not greatly mistaken) and wasn't Maud's blood-relation, for she
was John's father's sister."
Laurence Hochard finds
it "odd too that the 2 ghosts (Hazel's and john's) should go
to so much trouble to help and humour Kinbote but make not the least effort to
comfort Sybil who has lost not only a husband but also her husband's last poem,
in the creation of which she took such an interest! "
Indeed. Nevertheless it's impossible to evaluate ghost "logic"
and stories. Should we accept their existence we must
also believe that John and Hazel enjoy a busy
artistic afterlife.
The next question then must be: why is Zembla so
important to everyone concerned (i.e., to Nabokov?)
In a Book Review
on "Pale Fire" isak.typepad.com/.../book-review-pale-fire-by-vl...
we read (excerpts):
"It is unclear that the land of Zembla
does not, in fact, exist...The sheer preponderance of detail about Zembla that
Kinbote lays on, including Zemblan language, history, and customs, makes us
question if perhaps there isn't more truth than it might seem... Or perhaps
Zembla is a pseudonym for another country? There is a clue in the reference to
Zembla in Alexander Pope's ""An Essay On
Man" , which Kinbote explicitly cites:
But where th' extreme of vice, was ne'er agreed:
Ask
where's the North? at York, 'tis on the Tweed;
In Scotland, at the Orcades;
and there,
At Greenland, Zembla, or the Lord knows where:
No creature owns
it in the first degree,
But thinks his neighbour farther gone than
he!
In the end, I think Nabokov is at play with the idea of "farther
gone" in his rendering of Kinbote... a particularly potent idea for ... the
literary enthusiast who wishes his own "truth" to be told through the artful
(and I mean "artful" in both its meanings) form of poetry.
Mary McCarthy
...writes: "... there is actually a Nova Zembla, a group of islands in the
Arctic Ocean, north of Archangel. The name is derived from the Russian Novaya
Zemlya, which means 'new land.' Or terre neuve, Newfoundland, New World.
Therefore Appalachia = Zembla." I'd argue that the alphabetical symmetry
(A-Z) is further evidence that this is what Nabokov had in mind. And in a
totally speculated aside, I wonder if Kinbote's endless reflections on the
landscape and culture of this north country didn't at all parallel Nabokov's own
daydreaming as he composed this book: not all that long before Pale
Fire was published, Nabokov left America for Bern, Switzerland, where he
lived until the end of his life in 1977."
If this is the case, all the friendly ghosts are intent on
preserving VN's magic homage to America.