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Re: Botkin/Kinbote/Shade & the versipel muse
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Carolyn & Jansy,
I’m sorry other obligations have made me miss so much of this discussion.
Regarding names: although writers of Nabokov’s comprehensive type rarely make random choices, the names in Pale Fire, as well as Lolita and Pnin all have the characteristic of being American in that they may well be British, Russian, Zemblan or any other nationality. Multi-ethnicity is what America has always been about.
My view is that the name Kinbote is used to provide a mirror reversal of Botkin similar to the reversal of Sudarg of Bokay. Now, whether Kinbote and Botkin are the same person is something I am no longer as sure of as I once was. Botkin would actually make a perfect red herring. I doubt that any reference between PF and RLS’s J&H is so close as to make VN base a primary character’s name on an episode from an RLS story. For one thing, I think by the time he wrote PF, VN knew that he was an artist of an entirely higher order than RLS. As that crude thing, a man, considering the decisions of a greater man, I just don’t see Nabokov basing one of his novels on one of a lesser artist’s stories. Take him for all in all, VN was still a man, and a proud one. Such men don’t do that.
Re: Shade suppressing a knowledge of Russian as well as his homosexuality is an awful lot of suppressing. Too much, I think, to align with the Occam’s Razor of writing that tends away from explanations that are even more difficult than the very writing of the novel itself. In David Copperfield, Aunt Betsy Trotwood’s friend Dick is taught to turn to an alternative manuscript whenever a digression about King Charles I’s head pulls him away from his task of copying legal papers for Mr. Wicklow. That always struck me as a tough task in itself. To take one’s knowledge of Russian, difficult to acquire in the first place, and put it at the service of a figment of one’s delusions, who actually refers to it only in passing linguistic references, seems a great and unnecessary task. To take one’s homosexuality (which, for the gay men I’ve known has been nothing less than the primary reference point and self-identifying factor of their lives) and recreate it imaginatively and comically, as Kinbote does in relating his escapades, seems to be more than one can reasonably ask a fictional character to do.
Let me interject here that these are my views as a writer and, as such, I am something like those musicians in jazz or R & B or other forms who cannot read sheet music.
I have never had a problem with Shade referring to his muse as a versipel. For starters, it is word of three syllables, which helps keep the line at the correct length. Throughout his poem, Shade blends the placid beauty of life with a darker subterranean life. One’s muse can be angelic, and one’s muse can be demonic. When one is a mild and gentleman, fulfilled by the love of one woman, it is painful to be drawn from one’s life and one’s love by the demands of a muse that requires one to study once again the most painful moments through which he has lived. When your muse requires you to dissect the death of your daughter, this relentless self-examination is done under orders not of a dream weaver but of a demon.
Andrew Brown
Search the archive: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/archives/nabokv-l.html
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
I’m sorry other obligations have made me miss so much of this discussion.
Regarding names: although writers of Nabokov’s comprehensive type rarely make random choices, the names in Pale Fire, as well as Lolita and Pnin all have the characteristic of being American in that they may well be British, Russian, Zemblan or any other nationality. Multi-ethnicity is what America has always been about.
My view is that the name Kinbote is used to provide a mirror reversal of Botkin similar to the reversal of Sudarg of Bokay. Now, whether Kinbote and Botkin are the same person is something I am no longer as sure of as I once was. Botkin would actually make a perfect red herring. I doubt that any reference between PF and RLS’s J&H is so close as to make VN base a primary character’s name on an episode from an RLS story. For one thing, I think by the time he wrote PF, VN knew that he was an artist of an entirely higher order than RLS. As that crude thing, a man, considering the decisions of a greater man, I just don’t see Nabokov basing one of his novels on one of a lesser artist’s stories. Take him for all in all, VN was still a man, and a proud one. Such men don’t do that.
Re: Shade suppressing a knowledge of Russian as well as his homosexuality is an awful lot of suppressing. Too much, I think, to align with the Occam’s Razor of writing that tends away from explanations that are even more difficult than the very writing of the novel itself. In David Copperfield, Aunt Betsy Trotwood’s friend Dick is taught to turn to an alternative manuscript whenever a digression about King Charles I’s head pulls him away from his task of copying legal papers for Mr. Wicklow. That always struck me as a tough task in itself. To take one’s knowledge of Russian, difficult to acquire in the first place, and put it at the service of a figment of one’s delusions, who actually refers to it only in passing linguistic references, seems a great and unnecessary task. To take one’s homosexuality (which, for the gay men I’ve known has been nothing less than the primary reference point and self-identifying factor of their lives) and recreate it imaginatively and comically, as Kinbote does in relating his escapades, seems to be more than one can reasonably ask a fictional character to do.
Let me interject here that these are my views as a writer and, as such, I am something like those musicians in jazz or R & B or other forms who cannot read sheet music.
I have never had a problem with Shade referring to his muse as a versipel. For starters, it is word of three syllables, which helps keep the line at the correct length. Throughout his poem, Shade blends the placid beauty of life with a darker subterranean life. One’s muse can be angelic, and one’s muse can be demonic. When one is a mild and gentleman, fulfilled by the love of one woman, it is painful to be drawn from one’s life and one’s love by the demands of a muse that requires one to study once again the most painful moments through which he has lived. When your muse requires you to dissect the death of your daughter, this relentless self-examination is done under orders not of a dream weaver but of a demon.
Andrew Brown
Search the archive: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/archives/nabokv-l.html
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm