John Morris: Recalling some of the recent posts about the possible “real” location of New Wye, it’s interesting to note that VN, by choosing not to set the book in the recognizable 50 states, lays the ground for this being a world in which “Zembla,” too, may exist. If the world of Pale Fire contains the states of Appalachia and Utana, the towns of New Wye and Cedarn, why not Zembla and Onhava? [...] I do think it was a masterstroke on VN’s part to unsettle the entire geography of the novel.

I wonder, though, what could VN have planned when he "unsettled the geography of the novel". The slightly unfocused and discrepant "Terra and Antiterra" also carry superpositions of phantasmatic shadows of dreams, butlers and Blanches. VN wrote in "ADA": if, in Terrestrial spatial terms, the Amerussia of Abraham Milton was split into its components, with tangible water and ice separating the political, rather than poetical, notions of ‘America’ and ‘Russia,’ a more complicated and even more preposterous discrepancy arose in regard to time — not only because the history of each part of the amalgam did not quite match the history of each counterpart in its discrete condition, but because a gap of up to a hundred years one way or another existed between the two earths; a gap marked by a bizarre confusion of directional signs at the crossroads of passing time with not all the no-longers of one world corresponding to the not-yets of the other. It was owing, among other things, to this ‘scientifically ungraspable’ concourse of divergences that minds bien rangés (not apt to unhobble hobgoblins) rejected Terra as a fad or a fantom, and deranged minds (ready to plunge into any abyss) accepted it in support and token of their own irrationality [...] Sick minds identified the notion of a Terra planet with that of another world and this ‘Other World’ got confused not only with the ‘Next World’ but with the Real World in us and beyond us.

In the same way in which De Quincey observed: "And if, in the vellum palimpsest[...]there is anything fantastic or which moves to laughter, as oftentimes there is in the grotesque collisions of those successive themes, having no natural connection, which by pure accident have consecutively occupied the roll, yet, in our own heaven-created palimpsest, the deep memorial palimpsest of the brain, there are not and cannot be such incoherencies." Freud, when writing above the different layers of The Eternal City (SE XXI,page 69) conceded: "If we want to represent historical sequence in spatial terms we can only do it by juxtaposition in space: the same space cannot have two different contents. Our attempt... shows us how far we are from mastering the characteristics of mental life by representing them in pictorial terms...The fact remains that only in the mind is such a preservation of all the earlier stages alongside of the final form possible, and that we are not in a position to represent this phenomenon in pictorial terms.

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