-------- Original Message --------
Matt Roth wrote:
>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.
As they are in Shade's mind when he starts the poem, before Kinbote
takes over?
> 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?
Shade would rather be like his pitiful neighbor than forget his
life. He may get the imagery from things Sybil says to him.
3. Shade's birthday is also Kinbote and Gradus' birthday. [...]
If you don't believe Kinbote ever talked to Shade, why do you
believe what he says about his birthday? Even in a reading
that accepts most of what Kinbote says about New Wye, I've long
thought that he lies about his birthday to embarrass Sybil. In
his description of his activities that day, he never mentions
that it's his birthday.
(I'll skip Vseslav, since of course I agree with you about
it.)
> 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? [...]
I agree with Joseph Aisenberg on this. If Nabokov knew it,
Kinbote could. Kinbote is or thinks of himself as a professor
of literature, incidentally, and it's clear that he doesn't
specialize in Russian literature.
> 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. [...]
The problem with this approach is that it can explain anything.
All similarities are clues, and all differences are mirror-
image clues to the same thing.
> 7. Finally, I would remind everyone of Gerard DeVries's discovery
> of a definite reference to Jekyll & Hyde in PF. [...] If the
> multiple personality relationship is merely Botkin-Kinbote,
> Shade's poem shouldn't enter into the equation.
It seems to me Nabokov could bury a clue to the interpretation
of "Danish stiletto" in Shade's poem, without meaning that
"Jekyll" applies to Shade too.
I would apply Joseph Aisenberg's word "cheating" in the sense
that the way your and Tiffany DeRewal's story works isn't the
way real or fictional MPD works. I didn't see anything in
Myers about a secondary personality claiming to have interactions
in reality with the primary, or anything about the secondary
one's speaking his native language as a foreigner, which
Kinbote does. And what about Jack Grey? As I understand
your theory, not only does the secondary personality invent a
murderer to explain what happened to the primary, and fit
this invention in with his delusion, but he also invents a
"real" murderer so the reader can see through his delusion!
This is fun to describe, but I can't believe it's something
Nabokov wanted us to see as a possible solution.
Jerry Friedman