Dear Matthew Roth,
Since I am one of the staunch doubters of the MPD
theory, I'll butt in your discussion with those whose arguments you commented in
the present message.
Despite all my arguments trying to describe Shade
and Kinbote as different people, I'm still open to the supposition that CK
and JS are all parts of one individual - but not to the relevance
of MPD theory to understand their split ( as I too often remarked
already). We are not forgetting that
the novel itself was written by one individual. A genius,
but should we also consider Shade or Kinbote as geniuses
from what we gather of their writing as characters by the "real"
genius' novel?
Nabokov was a dedicated scientist and I don't
suppose he would not have chosen the MPD theory simply because it
provided a basis for the development of the plot of Pale Fire ( as someone
once suggested several messages ago). I wish you could provide us with more
information about the MPD theorists and the confirmed cases of multiple
personality studied and described in psychiatric texts ( I've only
seen reference made to one, by CK - perhaps I missed all the
others).
Even if Nabokov is correctly described by the
"anti-polyphonic" Bakthinian metaphor, I think his achievement with
the creation of both Shade and Kinbote, with their convincing
differences and syntax, should come as a proof that he was able to deal
with any kind of "overriding tendency to make explicit the presence of
a creative consciousness behind every fictive construction" ( unless, of
course, there were two of them ( I mean, two creative consciousnesses ) - but,
as I said before, I may have misunderstood the point entirely, as I
know nothing about Bakthin and linguistics...
You made a side note: "just before his
passage about the childhood fit, he mentions seeing a "lemniscate" on
the sand. It so happens that a lemniscus can mean either the
infinity sign or a fiber connecting the brain to the central nervous
system. Probably just a coincidence, but I thought I'd throw it out
there.". A very interesting link that is quite new to me. Could you
explain a bit more about this "fiber connecting the brain to the
CNS"?
In item two, about "Just half a shade" and the
quote "not only did Shade retain in his trance half of his identity but that
he was also half a ghost.", I think it would be important to approach more
explicitly this description to Shade's dream, where he saw his
"dream/ghostly" self divided in two and his awakening with the "brown
shoe" I'm
always harping about (actually, was it only one
shoe?).
When Shade writes of a "conflagration" he is
probably referring to one of his fits, but I cannot remember now where I wrote
it in confirmation of CK's ideas, some time ago and among so many
many postings. The doctor who saw him
was Dr.Colt - and "a colt" has a specific meaning in English, doesn't
it?
(By the way, I'm sorry now that I didn't mark,
while reading, one very interesting remark ( I think it was Tiffany's)
about the "insertion of a grain of factual evidence among fictive
documentation", which reminded me of "Ada" ( the real rose among the artificial
flowers Van Veen encounters in a shop) and the "brown shoe" and Coleridge's
rose. What would the "real" brown shoe in the lawn indicate if it became "a
grain of fact" in Shade's poem? )
In item 3 you wrote: "Most of the
correspondences between Shade's poem (and life) and Kinbote's commentary
have been laid out... the correspondences must be accounted for somehow.
The MPD theory, for me, is a much simpler way of making those
connections.". Would it, indeed?
Jansy Mello