Jansy,
Now that strikes me as an excellent point, and one that hadn’t occurred to me. I mean the idea of Shade as the versipel. The more I think of it, the better it sounds.
For one thing — reflections. Writers and poets only have one age and it is not always the one with gray hair and bags beneath the eyes. Seeing oneself in a chance reflection is always a wake up call and one not often greeted cheerily. Ask the cedar waxwing, confused by reflections in an azure tinted window pane. You could even ask Shade’s furniture, reflected in a wintry pane one day and on another day, joining the snow, thanks to a domestic ghost.
More later. Have to go out now.
AndrewB
On 10/10/06 9:30 PM, "jansymello" <jansy@AETERN.US> wrote:
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 )
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