J.A. Mr. Aisenberg was not
trying to shut down interpretion of the novel Pale Fire, he wouldn't know how if
he tried; after all, the author himself dismissed Mary Mccarthy's intricate
reading of the book and it didn't matter. I was merrely throwing in my two cents
about what I took to be the book's essentially comic themes. Other than the
minor poltergeist incident and a slight "shade" of meaning in Hazel's empty
swing, I never undterstood how a reader was supposed to "see" the
influential pattern of the ghosts. Another thing, it seems that Nabokov in
this book, relates, tongue in cheek, the idea of "immortality" to literary
immortality.
S.D: I doubt
that VN would have written puzzles for which the answer is NO ANSWER. The rigor
of mathematics poses propositions, both obviously true and dubious, which have
yet to be proven decisively, or to be decisively proven to be unprovable. VN, a
rigorous thinker, would have found the unprovable NO ANSWER solution too easy
and entirely unacceptable.
J.F: Matt Roth commented that
interpretations such as yours close off the reason to study the book closely. In
principle, that shouldn't be true. The good solver of chess problems (not me!)
enjoys not just the key, but also the "play", including the failed attempts to
mate and the failed defenses against the key. But sychologically it may be true
of people like me. I've learned a lot from solutions to PF that I don't agree
with completely.
JM:
I wrote that "I'd like to avoid the
rigmarole of "taking sides", at this point"
because JA is the one to answer MR, as in fact he did
("Mr.Aisenberg was not trying to shut down interpretion of the
novel...").
And yet,
it seems
that MR's interpretation struck various chords as if "no
answer" was applicable to the novel itself, not to Shade's, and perhaps
VN's own, questionings - or that it "closes off the reason to
study the book closely"? I saw Mr.Aisenberg's "I thought the sense of an answer always eluding our
passionate readerly search was the point" as an invitation to go
on playing VN's games, to explore his devices even further -
but without the compeling need to reach a definite answer. Or
without having to make explicit what has always been left
"implicit" nor rendered in words: answers and explanations are only capable
to invent "domestic ghosts" ( "for the most/ We can think up is a
domestic ghost" ).
LH: ...Shade's
difficulties in getting rid of his "gray stubble", about his hopeless struggle
against "patch(es) of prickliness"[...] we must conclude -at least I do- that
some sort of parellel, some sort of identity between Shade and Kinbote is
showing through, however hard Shade tries to erase it...[...] it is indeed
a very painful process to scrape every morning the stubborn stubble that keeps
growing = the stubborn Kinbote that keeps showing through...[...] I don't mean
that Shade and Kinbote are one and the same character on the plane of the
novel...A king trying to mask/ hide / destroy / sink his identity by growing a
beard, conversely, as if in a mirror a poet trying to mask/... his identity by
shaving off his stubble...
JM: New conjectures about PF
are alive and well, as we can verify by Laurence Hochard's argumentation
enriched by links to RLSK ( I only left a few of
his stepping stones because anyone can read them from his posting,
directly).
Btw. remembering Quilty's Assyrian beard (
if it was Q's) - what do we make of Humbert Humbert's sentence, in
"Lolita"?
"Alas, I was unable to transcend the simple human fact that
whatever spiritual solace I might find[...] Unless it can be proven to me — to
me as I am now, today, with my heart and by beard, and my putrefaction — that
[...] unless this can be proven (and if it can, then life is a
joke)."