Vladimir Nabokov

NABOKV-L post 0025143, Sat, 1 Mar 2014 21:40:58 -0800

Subject
Re: RES: [NABOKV-L] RES: [NABOKV-L] topology/fugal time;
Kinbote/Gradus
Date
Body
Dear Jansy,

Yes, I did not mean tempus fugit, but neither did I mean the stories dropping off and picking up. There are some definite time markers in Pale Fire (birthdays come to mind and other specific dates) but aside from that time is hard to pin down. I found this in the archive and it may answer your question:

Dear Matthew Roth,


This is  small point, but of course I realize that Kinbote ends up in Cedarn

Utana. My interpretation has him incarcerated in a mental institution (or as
he depicts himself, in palace confinement following the Zemblan revolution)
before his escape from Zembla, thence to New York and points North by
Northwest (?).
 
By the way, maybe it's not so small a point - - because here we start to get
into the Escher-like fugue pattern that the chronology of PF sets up. Did
Kinbote escape from Zembla as Tiffany thinks (& mostly so do I) coincident
with Shade's 1957 attack, or after Shade is "shot"? Both seem to be true.
 
Carolyn 


________________________________
From: Jansy Mello <jansy.nabokv-L@AETERN.US>
To: NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU
Sent: Friday, February 28, 2014 5:56 PM
Subject: [NABOKV-L] RES: [NABOKV-L] RES: [NABOKV-L] topology/fugal time; Kinbote/Gradus



C.Kunin [to JM’s “Can you write more about what you consider ‘the fugal nature of time in the novel?’] ” The fugues in Pale Fire are various. There is the fugue in the sense of chase/pursuit in Gradus' pursuit of Charles/Shade…Then there is the pun on the early term for multiple personality, "fugue state"; and then there is the nature of time itself …Ah - nice incorporation! but did I endow Gradus with the body of Kinbote? They are his suppressed personalities, not bodies. 
 
Jansy Mello: I didn’t grasp your explanation about “the fugal nature of time.” You didn’t mean it in the sense of “tempus fugit,” right? Are you thinking of the different stories that run in parallel to one another, that arise and disappear at different intervals?   
 
You quoted a former Nab-L indication concerning multiple personalities and fugue states, but the added Freud/Breuer quotations are applicable to another kind of dissociative episodes (linked to hysteria), unlike Shade’s. And I forgot that in your interpretation Kinbote, like Gradus, is a suppressed Shade personality.                            

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