-------- Original Message --------
--- On Fri, 3/6/09, Carolyn Kunin <chaiselongue@EARTHLINK.NET>
wrote:
> Dear Stan,
>
> You have found the major flaw in Pale Fire. And it is a
> BIGGY - - in order to fool the reader into accepting Shade
> and Kinbote as " two distinct corporeal entities "
> he shows them in scenes in which they appear to interact in
> public. I got this argument years ago on the list and Don
> Johnson came to my rescue by pointing out that Nabokov had
> done the same thing in his early (originally in Russian)
> novel The Eye. The narrator and the character Smurov appear
> as two DCEs but the reader is lead to the conclusion
> eventually that they are one person.
Dear Carolyn,
Are you referring to this post?
"While not being convinced by CK's Jeckel & Hyde thesis, I might
mention that both THE EYE and LATH! certainly feature one protagaonist
with two discrete personalities Don Johnson"
http://listserv.ucsb.edu/lsv-cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0610&L=nabokv-l&T=0&P=31020
It says they have discrete personalities, not that the
personalities appear as discrete corporeal entities. I'd say
more, but I'm trying not to reveal that I haven't read /The
Eye/. :-)
I agree with Steve Arons that the multiple personalities are
Kinbote and Botkin. I'd take references to J&H, or /The Three
Faces of Eve/ or any other real or fictional case of
multiple-personality disorder, as part of the Botkin-Kinbote
reading stated by VN unless there's some specific connection
to a Shade-Kinbote reading.
I also agree with Tim Henderson in thinking that /Pale Fire/
has the same feature as the ending of /Bend Sinister/, and
I've already mentioned the ending of /Invitation to a
Beheading/ in this connection. But it's much subtler
in PF (and I think there are more examples than just the
Wordsmith University Library). What's clear in /Pale Fire/
is that Nabokov's frequent device of putting himself into
the book, as an anagram or narrator or whatever, has a
connection with a central theme, namely Canto Three of the
poem.
By the way, I recently (finally) wrote to William Dowling to
ask about the paper that he had promised would follow the
one Tim Henderson cited. Prof. Dowling replied to my
disappointment that because of other projects, he might well
never write that paper. However, he was glad that people
were still taking /Pale Fire/ seriously.
Jerry Friedman