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CK: before you drop us all list-wise on matters PaeleoFological,
thanks for the "ride," and for the useful refs. to Prof HMG (a most
authoritarian abbreviation) whom I plan to pursue (platonically, of
course, unlike Kinbote after his alter-ego Shade!) HMG's reply to your
inquiry, and your note of retirement to us, both have Nabokovian
echoes. I'm trying hard to recall where VN wrote "I've said all I have
to say," to whom and about which topic. I expect many will rush to
remind me.
I welcome your offer to answer specific questions hors-de-liste. But I
think
you'll agree that the list is entitled to carry on the eternal PF
debate,
comparing, for example, MR's forthcoming "defense" with _all_ the
others, especially now we know of earlier (or parallel) versions of
your own theory.
I stress "versions" because there's quite a difference between HMG's
verifiable
observation of J&H "influences" (inter many alia) and stretching
those
"influences" to posit PF as a "re-write" of RLS's Victorian gothic
horror.
I now address the V-list rather than CK directly (she's welcome to read
on!)
Last night I carefully retrieved my battered copy of BB's VN-TAY (its
ample binding refuses to sit flat without stillicidal-depagination --
why is page 571 floating loose, with the mocking title "Tidying Up?"*)
and re-read Chapter 18, Pale Fire. This tour-de-force is as gripping
as any D L Sayers' whodunnit (a
sincere compliment). Just when you're convinced of the separate
Shade/Kinbote
=Botkin identities, there's a sudden shift at the end of BB's section
VI as doubts set in over the supposedly-distinct authorships of Cantos
and Commentary. Stylistic and Allusional "clues" emerge go leor
revealing bits of Shade in the Annotations and bits of Kinbote-Botkin
in the Poem. BB cites VN's "Law of Coincidences" from the post-PF
novel Ada:
"Some law of logic should fix the number of coincidences in a given
domain,
after which they cease to be coincidences, and form, instead, the
living organism of a new truth."
Space precludes (that shameless excuse!) a decent digression into the
very Karl Popper previously cited by BB on p 435. Here, Popper is
correctly invoked against those who "look only for verifications of
one's ideas -- the method that allows people to believe in astrology,
rain dances, sooth-saying, and a great deal else. Once this second
attitude [i.e., the refusal to seek falsifications -skb] is adopted,
Popper writes, 'every conceivable case will become a verifying
instance.'"
Science does have its honed, empirical tricks, based on observation
and "explanatory power" (a favorite Popperian phrase), to separate
"coincidence" from plausible Laws of Nature. Not all (a euphemism for
'few!') Nabokovians appreciate the subtle realities of Mathematical
Probability, and even VN is often hard to pin down (We await Stephen
B's book from OUP in September). A recurring example is the "fatidic"
date, which ignores some elementary facts: given 23 people in a room,
chances are over 50% that two at least share the same birthday. For 30
people, the probability exceeds 70%, for 50, 97%, and for a 100
people, the chances are a near certainty (99.996% to be precise. See
e.g., Arthur T Benjamin's The Joy of Mathematics, dvd disc 4, lecture
22, The Teaching Company)
BB's conclusion is that VN's clues (an abundance of 'planted'
coincidences) are intended to point the attuned reader to identify
Poet and Annotator as "one." Leaving aside which one "survives" the
reported murder (if such occurred), or
whether there were ever two distinct persons, one of whom may have
invented, or
suffered a transformation into, the other, BB makes a plausible case
for Shade
being that "one." Whether others prefer Kinbote-Botkin as candidate
for the "onlie begetter," and even if BB himself has moved from the
"Shadean" hypothesis, the latter remains convincing up to a point,
where the meaning of "point" is subject to much entertaining debate
"over tease-levels of Nabokovian discourse." I realize much of this is
boringly familiar to seasoned PFers. Patience.
Re-donning Karl Popper's bowler-hat/melon (significantly known in
Scouse as a "blocker!"), we carefully compare the two implications:
(i) IF Shade = Kinbote-Botkin THEN expect strong evidence in
overlapping content/style/clues of Cantos/Commentary
(ii) IF strong evidence of overlapping content/style/clues THEN Shade
= Kinbote-Botkin.
Popper would accept (i) but throw doubt on (ii) while allowing that
the hypothesis "Shade = Kinbote-Botkin" is NOT INconsistent with the
evidence of
common themes, allusions etc. (All the while, we remind ourselves that
PF is
not a rigorous exercise in axiomatics and deductive logics. Further,
that VN
wrote both Poem and Annotations! Both Foreword and Index! His cunning
as promoter of SALES for his Pale Fire, the commodity, can be found on
p 25 where Kinbote (whoever) offers an alternative to cutting up the
book in order to cross-reference its non-linear parts:
" ... or, even more simply, purchasing TWO COPIES of the same work
which can then be placed in adjacent positions on a comfortable table
...")
One line (or rather, lines) pursued by BB in determining "who wrote
what" remain problematical to many PF addicts. BB's argument in favor
of Shade as "sole" author is that the Cantos are "tender, brave, wise,
and witty," such a "brilliant achievement in its own right," that the
person signing himself as Charles Kinbote, Cedarn, Utana, could not
possibly have risen to such poetic
"rhyme-revitalizing" heights. "English poetry has few things better to
offer than Pale Fire." (VN-TAY, p 440) On the other hand, Shade _is_
clearly bright enough, it seems, to invent all that Kinbotean fantasy
and false-scholarship, with its mock-critical apparatus. Now if you
take the view that "a poem is as
great as its greatest line," Shade's opening two lines usher him (VN
is already there!) into that Keatsian valhalla we all crave. Others
say "a poem is as weak as its weakest link," and here we must ask if
VN is deliberately (and brilliantly) poking fun at a sad, ageing
campus expert-on-Pope with folie-de-grandeur, unable to match Pope's
"heroic" couplets with any consistency. The comic rot, as it were,
sets in as early as line 3: "I was the smudge of ashen fluff ..."**
and one couplet in particular belongs in any decent Anthology of Comic
Verse & Worse:
"A blurry shape stepped off the reedy bank
Into a crackling, gulping swamp, and sank."
(quoted by BB as offering "haunting counterpoint" as Hazel's parents
watch TV. p 449, ibid)
In the context of a drowning daughter, each word is so drowned in
bathos as to
be Nabokov at his "cruel best." As BB rightly points out, the Cantos,
also forming "part of a larger work [it] asks to be read in a second
way." But we
can't pretend that in setting up the Cantos as the novel's master
plot-core, VN was presenting Shade as anything but an uneven,
once-great poet. The intermittent doggerel is itself poignant, and
wonderfully crafted as such, teasingly interspersed with genuine
flashes of the former master, as revealed in our other glimpse of
Shade's work: "The Nature of Electricity." (Not without _its_ share of
hilarious cliché: " ... above the livid plain/Forked lightning plays
..." During VN's lifetime it was certainly established that we are
all, indeed, made of "electricity," in the form of electrons and
related elementary particles. Although it's far-fetched to suppose, as
Shade's sonnet does, that
"Shakespeare floods a whole/Town with innumerable lights," it's
possible to estimate the non-zero probability that an electron once
forming part of the Bard is right now one of the billions keeping my
screen's pale fire aglow.)
It remains open, as ever, how well the Wye/Zembla "mirror" analogy
works. We can hardly overlook the many trade-mark Nabokovian
"reversed-images" at diverse levels. Unlike Shadows [sic], Mirrors
reverse chirality, the subject of recent discoveries in molecular
behavior at the quantum level ("Inducing Chirality with Circularly
Polarized Light," R J Cave [sic], Science, 13 March 2009. You read it
here first? Great relevance to VN's "stranger-danger" syndrome. As
Cave explains: "Each hand is chiral ... When we extend right hands,
they can CLASP because the thumbs point in opposite directions."
More re-reading ahead. And deepest thanks to BB for a superb
biography-cum-exposition. Can I sue Princeton Univ. Press for the cost
of duct-tape rebinding?
* Elsewhere in VN-TAY, Brian mentions the similarly battered (I love
the trade term "foxed") state of VN's large EO volumes in many
University Libraries, reflecting the referencing zeal of Pushkin's
students.
** A cynic might claim that VN would only offer this line with a
straight-face if it occurred "literally" in Onegin.
CTaH