Vladimir Nabokov

NABOKV-L post 0017792, Mon, 2 Mar 2009 08:18:18 -0800

Subject
Re: Three Faces of Eve
Date
Body
Dear Matthew,

Three Faces really is the sprinkling on top and is not necessary to my
interpretation, whereas Dorian Gray, Jekyll & Hyde are really more
important. It seems to have been a redundancy as is the Hogg work.

The way I got to Three Faces by the way was not through the word
"ditch" but through my belief that Nabokov wanted PF to be solvable by
anyone who had a tv and would have seen the films that were shown on
tv in the fifties. I did myself remember seeing those three films on
tv. I further concluded that VN wished his non-scholarly reader to go
to the texts and read those three works. Which is what I did and which
is when those word clues jumped out at me. In other words, the word
clues act as confirmation to the reader that Nabokov intended him to
read these particular works.

Hogg is different - - that was clearly a clue for the more scholarly
reader. But the more sophisticated clue-words "cresset" and
"parahelion" still work as confirmation in the same way. If any other
puzzle was ever constructed like this, i.e. with pre--planned
confirmations, I'm not aware of it.

Carolyn


On Mar 2, 2009, at 6:30 AM, Matthew Roth wrote:

The next issue of the Nabokov Online Journal will include an article
by Tiffany DeRewal and me that lays out our version of a Shade-Kinbote
multiple personality theory. We don't talk about TFoE, but I've always
been interested in that possible link. At the very least, its
popularity in the 50s makes clear that a lot of people were thinking
about split personalities at that time. And we know, from notes in the
Berg Archive, that Nabokov in the late 1950s was reading DJ West's
Psychical Research Today and paid particular attention to several
multiple personality case studies therein.

That said, I don't think Carolyn's idea of "word links," especially
with a word as mundane as "ditch," gets us very far. There would have
to be a whole host of stronger associations between PF and TFoE before
I'd be willing to sprinkle that one on top.

Matt Roth
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