Dear Jansy,
No Matt Roth agrees with me that King Charles, having survived the coup in Zembla, parachutes into the New World (my memory of the details are hazy) and finds housing and employment near John Shade in New Wye. We also agree that Shade is not shot, but lives on as King Charles. Don't know why you write that Kinbote "must be arriving from somewhere other than Zembla" because that it is exactly where he does arrive from, Zembla being the place in
his unconscious where Shade has stored all his suppressed homosexual fantasies.
I'm trying to place one of the Escher-like fugues in the novel. I recall that while King Charles is cooling his heels under house arrest in the palace, before his escape, he is also actually Shade cooling his heels in a mental institution. The key is that the king is wearing Shade's slippers. How could that be, if he is still in Zembla? You see the problem. Charles escaped following Shade's earlier attack, and yet there he is still in Zembla after the poet has been "shot." That's why I wrote "both seem to be
true."
Not quite correct that I "see links" between PF and J & H, more that the latter is actually the source of the former. In their paper Roth and deRewal write "Like Kunin, we feel that this parasitic image [of Jekyll to Hyde] is one of the original germs of Pale Fire."
Carolyn
pertinent from the archives:
Subject: |  | |
From: | | jansymello <[log in to unmask]> |
Reply-To: | | Vladimir Nabokov Forum <[log in to unmask]> |
Date: | | Fri, 31 Oct 2008 14:57:26 -0200 |
Matt Roth: ... with regard to the question of fugal structure in VN's work, I would like to recommend Gerard de Vries's article from Cycnos, "Nabokov's Pale Fire, Its Structure and the Last Works of J.S. Bach." I think it's accessible here: http://revel.unice.fr/cycnos/document.html?id=1052
JM: Some time in the past there was a reference to Douglas Hofstadter's book on Bach & The Art of the Fugue. My copy is at my office and I couldn't manage List-googling to recover a posting in which Dmitri Nabokov expressed his opinions about Hofstadter.
JM: Some time in the past there was a reference to Douglas Hofstadter's book on Bach & The Art of the Fugue. My copy is at my office and I couldn't manage List-googling to recover a posting in which Dmitri Nabokov expressed his opinions about Hofstadter.
I only found my own message posted on August 03, 2003 12:16 PM with the subject: Editor's Notes on Sebastian Knight - another
approach?
Here is the text:
Hi, Don
There is a very interesting book by Douglas Hofstadter ( " Escher, Gödel and Bach, the eternal golden braid") where he discusses the hypothesis that BACH died after he wrote a fugue using the musical notes that corresponded to his name and created a self-referential theme.
Jansy
Here is the text:
Hi, Don
There is a very interesting book by Douglas Hofstadter ( " Escher, Gödel and Bach, the eternal golden braid") where he discusses the hypothesis that BACH died after he wrote a fugue using the musical notes that corresponded to his name and created a self-referential theme.
Jansy
This reference to Bach's death after including in his last Fugue the notes BACH (in the German notation) might fit in with MR's interest in fugal themes and Kinbote's suicide.
From: Jansy Mello <jansy.nabokv-L@AETERN.US>
To: NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU
Sent: Tuesday, March 4, 2014 3:42 PM
Subject: [NABOKV-L] RES: [NABOKV-L] RES: [NABOKV-L] RES: [NABOKV-L] RES: [NABOKV-L] RES: [NABOKV-L] topology/fugal time; Kinbote/Gradus
C. Kunin:Would suppressed personalities obey the rules of chronological order? From their own point of view, I suppose they must, but from their "host"? perhaps not. And from their creator's? it's beyond me. 'I do seem to recall that Nabokov does let at least one mistake occur - the simultaneous appearance at a faculty lunch of both Shade and Kinbote. Or perhaps the error is Kinbote, an unreliable narrator - I think we all agree on that. As I recall, Don Johnson says that VN made a similar error in an earlier novel.Escher-like, as you realized, is the key. But who came first - Escher or VN?
Jansy Mello: Who came first? (does it matter?) I
checked trivial dates: b. 17 June 1898 – d. 27 March 1972. Perhaps we could include J.S.Bach (and other musicians) in the list of priorities. I cannot remember why Dmitri criticized Hofstadter’s “Goedel,Escher,Bach – The Eternal Golden Braid.” It’s very informative, particularly for laics.
Your thesis differs from Matt Roth’s when it comes to Shade’s transformations or, at least, that’s what it seemed to me when I read his last note to the List [MR: … Kinbote’s “arrival” is coincident with Shade’s attack. He becomes the dominant personality at the time of Shade’s “death.” ] Since Kinbote must be arriving from somewhere other than Zembla, I suppose he means that Kinbote lay dormant in Shade, fully equipped like Athena in Zeus’s forehead - but actually I know nothing about the theory of “multiple personalities” so I’d better leave others to opine and clarify.
You see links in PF to Stevenson’s J&H, a fantastic tale of “doublings”, am I right? And I ignore Matt’s and Tiffany’s position about this allusion.
Objectively, the poem was ready before VN finished writing C.K’s annotations. Perhaps we could begin by distinguishing “fugal time” and Escher recurrences as they appear in the poem itself from CK’s later contributions.
PS: Thanks to B. Akin for the information about the French Biot (and the marvelous coincidence of having “Lucette” own a glass-blowers’s shop and industry) Quite mind boggling.
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