Dear Andrew and List,
Of course you, Andrew, didn't annoy me by the simultaneous
address: the CK&JM (C=J) fusion seems to be flourishing
anyway. Still, I've already talked enough about why I don't subscribe to the
"multiple personality disorder" issue since it adds nothing to my enjoyment
in "Pale Fire", which I continue to see as a work of fiction. I'm not
even curious about what VN might have added - except as an expanded
commentary to Kinbote's already profuse explanations - concerning the
novel per se ( it has an "open ended" sort of frame, but there
is a frame - even if it comprises merely the printed novel's two
covers, an idea VN explores in "Ada" with very interesting
consequences).
Kinbote's own perception of his situation is rather complex. He
might "cook up a stage play, an old-fashioned melodrama with three
principles: a lunatic who intends to kill an imaginary king, another lunatic who
imagines himself to be that king, and a distinguished old poet who stumbles by
chance into the line of fire, and persihes in the clash between the two
figments."
Jack Grey is, apparently, unimportant although,
somehow, he knows that these two figments will manage to inflict a
"real" death and, of course, we encounter Kinbote's partial awareness of
his "lunacy".
On his commentary of line 347 Kinbote observed
that 'there are always "three nights" in fairy tales' but in
his imaginary melodrama we shall find no three knights but,
possibly, his principles referred to the three "parcae" (Cloto,
Atropos, Lachesis spinning and weaving and cutting life's thread, like an
Author) in masculine disguise.
Perhaps I was not politically correct (
you said: I had no humorous intentions toward
absent-minded seniors, which I think would be
unkind) but I didn't mean it was you who used humor
concerning seniors, but VN, and I meant that he was realistic
and compassionate in this rendering of comb/shoehorn/spoon
transformations. I know this by experience although my "changelings" are
somewhat different from Shade's.
I'm sure I
annoyed you by calling "Shade" a mawkish character ( "... driving
himself mad in the process of digesting and commentating Shade’s mawkish epic
The Daughteriad aka Pale Fire.") but, whatever
revelations are to be gleaned about fictional Shade, I
cannot forget the lines where he wrote that "like a fool I sobbed in
the men's room" because his little girl was not cast as a fairy or an
elf ( now, for the first time, do I notice a
mysterious connection bt "elves", Mother Time and Shade's future
references to Goethe's Erlkönig in contrast to Eliot's
poem and Webster's "White Devil" ...) since he never seemed to
get over his disappointment that she looked like him, not Sybil.
Shade is presented as someone that is as blind to his family's
plights and to his fellow-men as Kinbote must have been, but
forced on himself a discourse on pity and grief.
Now what about
this for a "versipel": " His misshapen body, that gray mop of abundant hair, the
yellow nails of his pudgy fingers, the bags under his lustreless eyes, were only
intelligible if regarded as the waste products eliminated from his intrinsic
self by the same forces of perfection which purified and chiseled his verse. He
was his own cancellation." ?
Jansy ( sans serif
)