----- Original Message -----

 

 

Dear A.Brown, Carolyn, Stephen and List, 

 

I also agree that we' should to pursue the religious thread that goes from "fundamentalist Christianity", the "Shade-shave-slave-slavs" lurking in "Staroverblue" (SB/CK)  to the spiritualist world of ghosts in afterlife - but without losing track of their reference to the novel "Pale Fire". 

 

What surprised me ( I've already mentioned it in the List) was how many serious traditional arguments were voiced by Kinbote and not by Shade.

Even Shade's reference to "pity" sounds displaced, in his arguments with Kinbote, since real charity seems to be absent from the reproaches of our egotist poet( JS), in his quest for eternal life to be enjoyed side by side to his leotard-clad blonde ( I'm sure Carolyn would agree with the inclusion of the student's name in Shade's heaven).

 

If Kinbote were indeed Shade gone mad it would have been an improvement, I think. Unfortunately Kinbote cannot write in heroic couplets... 

 

The Shadean brand of  "pity" was taken up, somewhat differently from my own views, both by Alfred Appel Jr. ("Introduction", xxii,  "The Annotated Lolita",) and by R. Rorty ( "Introduction" to "Pale Fire", XV, Everyman's Library).

 

1. A. Appel Jr: 'even in his most parodic novels, such as Lolita, he makes audible through all the playfulness a cry of pain. "Pity", says John Shade, "is the password." ...The transcendence of solipsism is a central concern in Nabokov...'

 

2. R.Rorty: "When Kinbote asks Shade for a password, Shade gives him 'pity'. We can be pretty sure that Shade here speaks for his creator, for in his "Lectures on Literature" Nabokov wrote, 'Beauty plus pity - that is the closes we can get to a definition of art'."  

 

What I'm trying to illustrate, contrary to Appel and Rorty's inclusion of pity then quoted directly from "Pale Fire" as an example of VN's own view about art, lies in the fact that it is Shade who words it. 

 Jansy