A comment for Carolyn, Jansy, et al.:
Unfortunately I must mercilessly budget my time and can
participate only passively in the current lively and variegated
discourse about the many facets of Pale Fire. In the first
paragraph of the letter below, we read "The idea that Shade or Kinbote
is the inventor of the other is another theory entirely, a theory that
Nabokov himself ridiculed." This notion is expressed in an
authoritative tone, as if it were a previously established given in
need of no further discussion. Can we really be so sure? Where does
Nabokov conclusively affirm it? If one enlightened me in this regard, I
think I could make an interesting comment.
Greetings,
DN
Jansy asks "why did Kinbote have to hide away the cards with the poem,"
and wonders when Kinbote became an invention of Shade's.
Dear Jansy,
My theory is that Pale Fire is Nabokov's re-invention of Robert
Louis Stevenson's Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and that Kinbote and
Gradus are suppressed alternate personalities of John Shade who are
able to take over his consciousness following the stroke described in
the fourth canto. The idea that Shade or Kinbote is the inventor of the
other is another theory entirely, a theory that Nabokov himself
ridiculed.
The insane John Shade ("Kinbote") has to hide the poem because Sybil
and several professors want to get it away from him, fearing what he
might do with it.
After Shade's personality is "killed" and the alternate personality of
Kinbote emerges, to his wife and colleagues it seems that Shade has
gone completely mad. He is hospitalized for a while, but manages to
escape. All this Kinbote narrates as if he were the King of Zembla
escaping a revolution.
This explains the chronology problem that you mentioned. It seems that
Kinbote's perception of the present (during Shade's hospitalization
for example) is projected into the past (the Zemblan revolution).
Possibly because he was "born" when Shade was 14 or 15, his perception
of time is distorted into a kind of fugue. Nabokov may have been aware
that the periods when an alternate personality emerges into
consciousness used to be called a "fugue state," experienced by the
dominant personality as a blackout.
Carolyn