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Re: THOUGHTS: More bits of S in K, and vice-versa
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Now I think I understand a little bit more of why you think this, but why would this reading be preferable to the way in which, say, Brian Boyd originally interpreted the book in his Vladimir Nabokov, The American Years. In that, you remember, he suggested Shade consciously created the Kinbote persona as a kind of experiment in Mortality. I don't like this reading either, but it seems better than the Double personality concept, because yours means the book is filled with so much cheating; there's no confrontation scene that would pull everything together, since the whole idea is something you have to entirely construct of clues, which in my opinion is pretty ineffective story telling: a novel filled with arty intentions rather than dramatic structure. BTW. The clue point 3, the birthdays: in The Gift Nabokov uses a similar device, Fyodor, his father, and Chernyshevski, and maybe proust, I don't remember now, all also share a July birthday. It
shows an inner coherence and of course it made things easier for Nabokov to keep straight while composing. He said in interviews he liked to use well known dates for the purposes of editing. As to point 5. But Nabokov was a Russian and a madman himself--so then how did he know all the stuff he wrote? And that icicle seems, to me anyway, pretty tenuous. The details you bring up in order to enumerate the diametrical oppositeness of S&K, Kinbote's being a King sized botfly, and some of the things about their the appearance, are, I think, a bit more suggestive, but I don't believe these kinds of chain-links (?) necessarily say any more than that Nabokov was an exacting artist who understood that if he was going to make this freaky intro, poem, commntary, index, structure take on the shape of a novel that Kinbote didn't want it to have then all the details would have correlate and form some kind of an actual plot, otherwise it would have
just been a fractured experiment that had no hold the imagination. Let me put this another way. I do think that Nabokov is trying to make us believe first at one point, then at another, that Shade or Kinbote may possibly be one and the same person: after all Shade has been given one of those obvious kinds of book names that practically begs us to question his existence, and Kinbote's experience is so kooky, such fun flashy pastiche as Kunin points out, that you can't help doubting him, with good reason. But at the end this doesn't resolve itself in any kind of concrete dramatic form, and Kinbote suggests that he, like V of The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, or the hero of Bend Sinister, comes close to meeting or somehow crazily intuiting the author himself, the happy hetorsexual Russian, and the illusion disappears, the fiction is dismissed. The question that remains, is why with all the clues did we become so emotionally involved with such
shiny artifice; and two, we laugh at how compelling the idea of seeing correspondences all over the place is, yet in spite of ourselves continue to see them proliferate--as Shade tells us, the correspondences in of themselves really don't matter, it's the urge to find them that does: Nabokov suggests that this obssessive need to discover ultimate meanings is both pathetic and poignant, a foible that makes us fumble in all kinds of brutal and ludicrous ways, but poignant because it represents the genuinely spiritual part of ourselves as well, the part looking for transcendance, the part that makes us see Lolita's pain through Humbert's sociopathy.
--- On Mon, 3/9/09, Nabokv-L <nabokv-l@UTK.EDU> wrote:
From: Nabokv-L <nabokv-l@UTK.EDU>
Subject: [NABOKV-L] THOUGHTS: More bits of S in K, and vice-versa
To: NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU
Date: Monday, March 9, 2009, 8:18 AM
-------- Original Message --------
Subject:
THOUGHTS: More bits of S in K, and vice-versa
Date:
Sun, 08 Mar 2009 23:34:40 -0400
From:
Matthew Roth <mroth@messiah.edu>
To:
<NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU>
On Mar 8, 2009, at 5:53 AM, jansymello wrote to Carolyn: I'll be convinced
by your interesting theory after you show Shadian bits and pieces shining
thru, or around K.
Okay, I'll bite:
1. The three birds (shadow, fluff, bird that flies on in reflected sky) in
Shade's opening lines seem to remarkably align with Gradus, Shade, and
Kinbote.
2. Shade says he would rather be a fat fly or a floweret than to forget his
life. Kinbote IS a fat fly (a king-size botfly) and a pansy to boot. Surely
we are meant to notice this coincidence. But what does it mean within a
non-Shadean reading of the novel?
3. Shade's birthday is also Kinbote and Gradus' birthday. I don't see why it
matters that they aren't the same age. Secondary personalities don't have to
be the same age as their primary personality.
4. Shade's muse is a versipel (werewolf) and Kinbote's middle name is
Vseslav (which can only be a reference to the legendary werewolf of that
name, as explained in "The Vseslav Epos," by Jakobson and Szeftel).
5. Kinbote's Zembla tale is a nothing but a pastiche of various western
works of literature and English history (with a sprinkling of Norse
mythology thrown in). If it truly proceeds from Botkin, "a Russian and a
madman," why does the Zembla tale show so little Russian influence? And
isn't it more than a little amazing that Botkin is apparently, like John
Shade, an expert on Pope? So much so that his final words about Zembla are
directly drawn from "The Rape of the Lock"? Add in Matthew Arnold, Anthony
Hope's Prisoner of Zenda, The Scarlet Pimpernel, Twenty Years After, and all
of the Charles I and II historical references, and we begin to see how much
Botkin's subconscious most resembles a learned American or Englishman's.
6. What of the fact that Kinbote and Shade seem to be remarkably opposite
each other, almost like a photo and its negative? Left-Handed/right-handed,
bearded/clean-shaven (though there is a beard "inveterate" in Shade after
all), homo/hetero, long-gaited/shuffling, vegetarian/carnivore, etc. What
does Kinbote say about differences and resemblances?
7. Finally, I would remind everyone of Gerard DeVries's discovery of a
definite reference to Jekyll & Hyde in PF. There are two stilettos in PF.
The first is found in Shade's reference to icicles, and the other is
Kinbote's definition of a bot(d)kin as a "Danish stiletto." DeVries reminds
us that in his J&H lecture, VN says that Jekyll is Danish for icicle; thus,
while Danish stiletto is a reference to Hamlet's "bare bodkin," it also
takes us to Shade's icicle and Jekyll's Danish name. If we accept this
immaculate connection, we then have to ask why Shade is involved. If the
multiple personality relationship is merely Botkin-Kinbote, Shade's poem
shouldn't enter into the equation.
There are more glimmers than these, but that's enough for now.
Matt Roth
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shows an inner coherence and of course it made things easier for Nabokov to keep straight while composing. He said in interviews he liked to use well known dates for the purposes of editing. As to point 5. But Nabokov was a Russian and a madman himself--so then how did he know all the stuff he wrote? And that icicle seems, to me anyway, pretty tenuous. The details you bring up in order to enumerate the diametrical oppositeness of S&K, Kinbote's being a King sized botfly, and some of the things about their the appearance, are, I think, a bit more suggestive, but I don't believe these kinds of chain-links (?) necessarily say any more than that Nabokov was an exacting artist who understood that if he was going to make this freaky intro, poem, commntary, index, structure take on the shape of a novel that Kinbote didn't want it to have then all the details would have correlate and form some kind of an actual plot, otherwise it would have
just been a fractured experiment that had no hold the imagination. Let me put this another way. I do think that Nabokov is trying to make us believe first at one point, then at another, that Shade or Kinbote may possibly be one and the same person: after all Shade has been given one of those obvious kinds of book names that practically begs us to question his existence, and Kinbote's experience is so kooky, such fun flashy pastiche as Kunin points out, that you can't help doubting him, with good reason. But at the end this doesn't resolve itself in any kind of concrete dramatic form, and Kinbote suggests that he, like V of The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, or the hero of Bend Sinister, comes close to meeting or somehow crazily intuiting the author himself, the happy hetorsexual Russian, and the illusion disappears, the fiction is dismissed. The question that remains, is why with all the clues did we become so emotionally involved with such
shiny artifice; and two, we laugh at how compelling the idea of seeing correspondences all over the place is, yet in spite of ourselves continue to see them proliferate--as Shade tells us, the correspondences in of themselves really don't matter, it's the urge to find them that does: Nabokov suggests that this obssessive need to discover ultimate meanings is both pathetic and poignant, a foible that makes us fumble in all kinds of brutal and ludicrous ways, but poignant because it represents the genuinely spiritual part of ourselves as well, the part looking for transcendance, the part that makes us see Lolita's pain through Humbert's sociopathy.
--- On Mon, 3/9/09, Nabokv-L <nabokv-l@UTK.EDU> wrote:
From: Nabokv-L <nabokv-l@UTK.EDU>
Subject: [NABOKV-L] THOUGHTS: More bits of S in K, and vice-versa
To: NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU
Date: Monday, March 9, 2009, 8:18 AM
-------- Original Message --------
Subject:
THOUGHTS: More bits of S in K, and vice-versa
Date:
Sun, 08 Mar 2009 23:34:40 -0400
From:
Matthew Roth <mroth@messiah.edu>
To:
<NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU>
On Mar 8, 2009, at 5:53 AM, jansymello wrote to Carolyn: I'll be convinced
by your interesting theory after you show Shadian bits and pieces shining
thru, or around K.
Okay, I'll bite:
1. The three birds (shadow, fluff, bird that flies on in reflected sky) in
Shade's opening lines seem to remarkably align with Gradus, Shade, and
Kinbote.
2. Shade says he would rather be a fat fly or a floweret than to forget his
life. Kinbote IS a fat fly (a king-size botfly) and a pansy to boot. Surely
we are meant to notice this coincidence. But what does it mean within a
non-Shadean reading of the novel?
3. Shade's birthday is also Kinbote and Gradus' birthday. I don't see why it
matters that they aren't the same age. Secondary personalities don't have to
be the same age as their primary personality.
4. Shade's muse is a versipel (werewolf) and Kinbote's middle name is
Vseslav (which can only be a reference to the legendary werewolf of that
name, as explained in "The Vseslav Epos," by Jakobson and Szeftel).
5. Kinbote's Zembla tale is a nothing but a pastiche of various western
works of literature and English history (with a sprinkling of Norse
mythology thrown in). If it truly proceeds from Botkin, "a Russian and a
madman," why does the Zembla tale show so little Russian influence? And
isn't it more than a little amazing that Botkin is apparently, like John
Shade, an expert on Pope? So much so that his final words about Zembla are
directly drawn from "The Rape of the Lock"? Add in Matthew Arnold, Anthony
Hope's Prisoner of Zenda, The Scarlet Pimpernel, Twenty Years After, and all
of the Charles I and II historical references, and we begin to see how much
Botkin's subconscious most resembles a learned American or Englishman's.
6. What of the fact that Kinbote and Shade seem to be remarkably opposite
each other, almost like a photo and its negative? Left-Handed/right-handed,
bearded/clean-shaven (though there is a beard "inveterate" in Shade after
all), homo/hetero, long-gaited/shuffling, vegetarian/carnivore, etc. What
does Kinbote say about differences and resemblances?
7. Finally, I would remind everyone of Gerard DeVries's discovery of a
definite reference to Jekyll & Hyde in PF. There are two stilettos in PF.
The first is found in Shade's reference to icicles, and the other is
Kinbote's definition of a bot(d)kin as a "Danish stiletto." DeVries reminds
us that in his J&H lecture, VN says that Jekyll is Danish for icicle; thus,
while Danish stiletto is a reference to Hamlet's "bare bodkin," it also
takes us to Shade's icicle and Jekyll's Danish name. If we accept this
immaculate connection, we then have to ask why Shade is involved. If the
multiple personality relationship is merely Botkin-Kinbote, Shade's poem
shouldn't enter into the equation.
There are more glimmers than these, but that's enough for now.
Matt Roth
Search the archive
Contact the Editors
Visit "Nabokov Online Journal"
Visit Zembla
View Nabokv-L Policies
Manage subscription options
All private editorial communications, without exception, are read by both co-editors.
Search archive with Google:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
Visit "Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
Manage subscription options: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/