MR: I should not have said that the New Wye scenes are a
"fantasy," because I do think they have a degree of reality to them
that the Zembla scenes do not. They are based on real events and
people, but they have been re-collected by an unstable mind that can't
distinguish between actual events and confabulations. The Faculty
Club/encyclopedia scene is crucial to understanding this and can't be
explained away without some extreme conjectural contortions (such as
the idea that whenever Kinbote mentions Zembla, he is, in the real New
Wye, actually saying Russia). Likewise, do we really believe in the
accuracy of the contrived dialogue between Shade and Kinbote in notes
like 549? I do not.
JA's re: This is a mouthful. Well I don't
think, generally speaking, through out the novel, Kinbote ever mentions
his relationship to Zembla to anyone but Shade, the whole thing being
his well guarded secret. He does, I recall, show a picture of Zembla's
king to the dreaded Gerald Emerald, who thinks he looks gay, or
whatever the term was, leading us ever after to wonder if Zembla does
or does not exist in the "real" world of the novel. Though if I had to
take a guess I would assume he spoke directly about Zembla, not
Russia; this would explain the faculty wife in the store who wonders
how Shade and Sybil can stand him, that she considers him to be quite
insane. I should think it would be much more goofy imagining Shade
himself confronting this faculty wife in the grocery store and having
her tell Shade, to his face, she doesn't know how Shade can stand
himself! All right, let's say this scene didn't happen. So which ones
did? Is there a stylistic marker, like Bunnuelle's tinkling bells
in the film Belle de Jour, which signify when we can assume events
stopped being actual? As to the question of strained contortions this
was always a constant feature and danger to Nabokov's work,
compositionally speaking. As a writer, I've always found it funny the
way he has Kinbote and Hermann Karlovich notice things for the reader's
benefit they then doggedly pretend not to have noticed--a problem
Nabokov only solved in Lolita, I think, where he came up with
the simple elegant trick of having Humbert retrospectively realize most
everything he dramatized missing. Thus 2: Do we really believe in the
contrived dialogue of the note to line 549? Nope, but I'm not so sure
this is a "tell" to the reader that the incident didn't happen at all.
It's an inevitable problem of the nature and structure of first person
accounts pretending to be journals or notes, even by sane
characters--they're larded up with dialogue and novelistic attributions
no one in real life would ever use, as you well noted--which Nabokov
himself made fun of while simultaneously indulging. True, he does want
you to question it, but how far? Let's take "The Vane Sisters" as an
example. Now that would seem to be a genuine ghost story (Nabokov's
early 1950s letter to Katherine White tells us so) but let's imagine
this weren't a story, but a real claim: someone actually trying to pass
off that acrostic as a ghostly intervention. It would obviously be a
phony: the super-sleek styling that is the result of calculation and
numerous retwritings, all those allusions to trick reading, including
the mention of a story within the story whose last paragraph contains a
code hidden it so as to mirror readers to what lays hidden in its own
text--come on, we'd think, the whole thing was cold bloddedly
conceived just to get us to find that message. Someone's having us on,
we'd conclude, again. I mean, are we supposed to believe that ghosts
traffic in trick expositonal techniques? Seems like a good old
fashioned ectoplasmic appearance would be simpler than, say, getting
Nabokov to write something he did not want to. My point is that the
conventions of first person fiction foist these stylizations onto any
given work, even when the intention is serious; Nabokov uses this for
humorous effects, to destabilize the reality of the situations
depicted, though to me it just seems he uses mostly to goose the reader
to wonder about the motivations of the narrator, or his take on certain
situations (this leaves aside Ada, Invitation to a Beheading, Bend
Sinister, and a couple other works), while still keeping things for the
most part status quo "realistically" speaking. I.E. I did and do think
that scene happened pretty much the way Kinbote says it did, because
the stylization is just a convention of first person narratives.
However I suspect that Kinbote, in seeing things his own way, has
gifted himself a gusty eloquence. He therefore dominates the argument
while Shade is allowed only a couple of refreshing wise-cracks.
Given these scenes, is your assertion that "N.
wanted the "reality" of Zembla to remain ambiguous, but not that of
New Wye" at least questionable?
JA's re: Interesting question. Yeah, for the
most part, I think so. We question Charles Kinbote's relationship to
New Wye and it's residents, but I assume they are for all intents and
practical purposes real. What's more I don't even think Kinbote
actually believes in the Zembla fantasy. For instance there are times
in the text when he says he has deleted fragments from Shade's poem
that relate to his Zembla and which he later admits may have been
fudged, tee-hee (I don't have quotations yet, sorry). This suggests to
me that while Kinbote indulges in his delusion he has lucid moments,
which force him to be almost honest with himself, such as some of those
expostulations of self-loathing and loneliness and paranoia--maybe this
is what you're seeing as Multiple personality disorder.
Fair enough, as long as we recognize that EVERY theory of Pale
Fire resorts to that argument on one point or another.
JA's re: I would go further to say that
every scrap of fiction, Nabokov's or otherwise, require this suspension
of disbelief due to the necssary truncation and stylization of
experience in order to create genuinely dramatic narrative. In the long
line of humorists who can't help giggling over this fact, he has made
it a consciously entertaining and thematic part of his work.
As for your point that if Kinbote's New Wye narrative is unreal,
then we can't discern whether anything is "true" or not, I have to
disagree. After all, we still have Shade's poem, which, though it
contains its own evasions, gives us ample ground to stand on.
JA's re: fine, but the poem's only a
miniscule part of the whole thing. Thus our terra firm would be reduced
to just a few things: we would know for sure that there was a John and
Sybil Shade, who was his second wife. His parents were dead. He had a
weird Aunt Maude. His ugly daughter may or may not have commited
suicide after having been left before her blind date even began, and
that the poet, despite the evidence of his own experience after his
near death, believes in some sort of after life. We don't even know if
he died on Nabokov's father's birthday or not. Just about everything
else is left to cross referential echoes. I don't think so.
When did the statute of limitations for discovering things run
out?
JA's re: of course the statute of
limitations don't run out on discovering things in a work of
literature, that is refinements, but it's not very reassuring when what
would constitute the central narrative device of a novel, it's real
main plot, is so indecipherable that it would take decades of intense
academic scrutiny to ferret out. That would mean everyone who read the
thing through out the entire sixties never actually understood the
book, no matter their subtlety and brilliance as readers. This is not a
sign of deep writing. It would either suggest incompetence or an author
who had so little confidence in his ideas and themes that he was
somehow afraid to make them overt and using ideas about mysteries and
secrets and divine codes as a sophisticated blanket to cuddle up in and
be protected from seeming cheesiness or incoherence