-------- Original Message --------
Jansy/Jerry: is all this admirably painstaking geographical
reconstruction rendered superfluous if we believe that Kinbote was
"not around in the flesh" to spy on Shade? Carolyn K, and Matt R to
some extent (correct me if I'm misreading), see Kinbote as first
appearing corpo-really (or to coin a cute term corpo-fictionally) on
or shortly after July 21, 1959*, the result
of a purely "symbolic-imagined" fatal-but-not-that-fatal gun shot,
re-interpreted as representing Shade's "symbolic death," namely
a radical personality exchange with
the deranged (at least "misguided?") Kinbote.
One body; two distinct minds, one damned mind after the other.
When we start listing, as "revealed-in-the-only-text-we-have"
all the physical and cultural differences between Shade and Kinbote,
somehow triggered [sic] by a supposed but unsupported "brain
hemorrhage," we meet two types of dubious (I almost, rashly, wrote
'specious') objections:
(i) we can't trust Kinbote whenever his evidence is counter-to-
theory; Kinbote is clearly credible when he corroborates the theory.
(One computer manual carried the warning: Ignore the falsehoods.)
(ii) and this opens all kinds of polemical worms: we tick off happily
all those matching Shade/Kinbote features. But if a Shadean
characteristic is the diametric opposite to Kinbote's, we can appeal
to Nabokov's love of mirrors, symmetries, involutions, paradoxes, etc.
The more opposites, the better!
Plus ca (Shade) change, plus c'est (Kinbote) le meme homme?
* "Immediately after my dear friend's death I prevailed upon
his distraught widow ..." (PF Fwd p 15).
Yet, I will defend all PF theories against the argument that if a
universally-acceptable, self-evident "correct" solution exists, it
MUST have emerged after 50 years of intense scrutiny.
skb