Jansy: In PF, following
C.Kunin's hypothesis, the two characters that share the same body either shrink,
hobble, fatten, love a woman, hate salads and fruit, shave off facial growths,
get old and grey...or, grow tall, lean, young, hairy, are vegetarian, play
ping-pong, love boys (the change must be induced by imbibing golden
burgundy.
C.Kunin: I protest -- I don't think any such
thing! [...] I'll repeat that: Shade has gone insane. He is therefore
incarcerated in a mental hospital [...] There is no beautiful dashing young
Kinbote - - this is who the insane Shade perceives himself to be, it is not who
he is. He is old, fat, etc. John Shade. There is no Zembla. There is no King
Charles. The simplest way I can think to put it is that the whole thing is a
great big fugue. It is also a pun on the word fugue: Escape/Chase/Insanity
(repeat).
JM: The word "Ricercare"
(Search!) for this "fugue" is equally fitting. It's an anagram and
puzzle created in J.S.Bach's dedication of his "Musical
Offering" to King Frederick II : it
starts with Regius Iustus...and you can find the
marvellous story in Douglas Hofstadter's "GEB, the eternal golden
braid."
Pale Fire, the poem,
contains believable loving lines addressed to
Sybil, among other items already long debated. Lines such as
these a Kinbote-cum-Shade personality could never have set down,
not even while writing as a still unsplit JohnShade. There are implicit and explicit rules about
writing fiction related to a minimal core of credibility or
consistence that the vague label "madness", even in fiction, cannot
suppress.
Besides, do you think the novel
could accomodate this Fanny story as being further proof of the debt PF
owes to RSLS? In the last paragraphs of his
lecture VN mentioned RLS' death, wife & last words, all the
while stressing the exceptional nature of adding such "real life"
information.
You could try to demonstrate (
in coherence with RLS and VN's J&H lecture) some Shadian "tweedy
remains" in Kinbote, or his distilled presence as a "horrified halo" hovering
around Kinbote.
I now remember the parallels you
traced between Sybil and Queen Disa ( right?) whom Kinbote, in a dream, finds
himself capable of loving. I'll be convinced by your interesting theory after you show Shadian bits and
pieces shining thru, or around K Like JF and Steve Arons, I still think the multiple
personalities may be Kinbote and Botkin ( as stated by VN himself) and that
they are distinct characters (and distinct bodies/minds) from Shade's.