"Vera Nabokov has been quoted as saying that the afterlife was the theme behind much of VN’s writing." (AB)

 

Whenever I read the poem "Pale Fire" I cannot avoid the impression that the theme of "IPH" and "personal ressurrection" has been systematically treated in a parodic way by John Shade. Although his personal fears and misgivings seem to be serious enough, he describes his religious feelings in a most childish way. Actually, this is exactly the element in the novel as a whole that so fascinates me with its ambiguities and contradictions. The richness of small details of how "we are most artistically caged" always leads me away from investigating the author's particular beliefs, towards admiring how he rendered his own prison bars and, at last, invites me to examine mine own under a new light.

 

While I was going through SO to check my quotes I couldn't resist glancing through my notes on "Speak Memory" . There I found two paragraphs that  bear a certain relation to our discussion.

 

In the first one, chapter 2, VN describes his mother's religiosity and, curiously, it carries a sentence that suggests Kinbote's (!) New Testament quotation. "A streak of sectarianism ran through her direct ancestry...The schismatic mood revealed itself in her healthy distate for the ritual of the Greek Catholic Church and for its priests. She found a deep appeal in the moral and poetical side of the Gospels, but felt no need in the support of any dogma.  The appaling insecurity of an afterlife and its lack of privacy did not enter her thoughts. Her intense and pure religiousness took the form of her having equal faith in the existence of another world and in the impossibility of comprehending it in terms of earthly life.  All one could do was to glimpse, amid the haze and the chimeras, something real ahead..."  

 

The second element is to be found on SM ch 5 ( in my translation of SM almost every chapter carries a title: Ch 2 is "Portrait of My Mother" and Ch 5 is named "Mademoiselle O". Also in the translated "Pnin" we find titles to certain chapters and references to where these had been originally published. I didn't find this information in "Pnin" 's edition in English).

"I loathe Somnus... I had nothing - except one token light in the potentially refulgent chandelier of Mademoiselle's bedroom, whose door, by our family doctor's decree ( I salute you, Dr. Sokolov!), remained slightly ajar. Its vertical line of lambency ( which a child's tears could transform into dazzling rays of compassion) was something I could cling to, since in absolute darkness my head would swim and my mind melt in a travesty of the death struggle."

 

Now that I copied it down here I find it difficult to point out how this description made me think of Kinbote's agonies with a noisy caroussel and its changing colours turning into hoary car lights and ..."the old man/ Dying in a motel, with the loud fan/...bits of colored light/ reaching his bed like dark hands of the past/Offering gems; and death is coming fast..."

 

Apparently I have misgivings about afterlife that echo VN's: "the appaling insecurity of afterlife and its lack of privacy did not enter her thoughts"...

Jansy