S. Soloviev: ... VN was clever enough and knew well
enough american academic life to make future discussions around his own works
part of the plot. He knew that the subject of split personality and its Freudian
overtones enchant infinitely the university professors, researchers and ph.d.
students in humanities, and with perfect precision of chess composer put into
text well measured hints that never will be sufficient to give a definite
solution ...
J.Aisenberg:...the Double personality concept [...] means the book is
filled with so much cheating; there's no confrontation scene that would
pull everything together, since the whole idea is something you have to
entirely construct of clues, which in my opinion is pretty ineffective story
telling: a novel filled with arty intentions rather than dramatic structure[...
]one,why with all the clues did we become so emotionally involved with such
shiny artifice; and two, we laugh at how compelling the idea of seeing
correspondences all over the place is, yet in spite of ourselves continue to see
them proliferate...
JM: K's Foreword (i.e "in a
glass, darkly") and Shade's vision "through the dark
glass" of his study...
JM: Sergei, the subject of split personality has no
Freudian overtones ( he wrote about "The Splitting of the Ego") and I
don't think VN needed Freud at this point. J.Aisenberg, you raise a curious
issue concerning theories that demand "too much cheating" and bad
story telling.So, still as a self-appointed devil's advocate, I
suggest another correspondence. It may be flimsy or
whimsy but it provides another perspective on "cheating": use of
deliberate nonsense.
In Pale Fire there
are mirrors ("in a glass", Sudarg of Bokay and a tryptich suggestive
of Hazel's inversions and the Botkin/Kinbote symmetry). But there
is "through a glass" as well, operating as a reflecting mirror
and as a shiny transparent surface. It is when we find a
sudden change from summer into winter and this, right in the
opening lines of the Poem ( doesn't Kinbote mention something to this
effect, that Shade is writing in the summer but turns to wintery
recollections? )
I was reminded
of Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found
There [...] As Wiki briefly informs: "although it makes no
reference to the events in the earlier book, Alice's Adventures in
Wonderland , the themes and settings of Through the
Looking-Glass make it a kind of mirror image of Wonderland: the first book
begins outdoors [...] uses frequent changes in size as a plot device, and draws
on the imagery of playing cards; the second opens indoors on a snowy, wintry
night exactly six months later [...] uses frequent changes in time and spatial
directions as a plot device, and draws on the imagery of chess. In it, there are
many mirror themes, including opposites, time running
backwards... "
The correspondence is slight (and may have
been explored already by Nabokov-Carroll specialists, certainly not my case).
My intention here is to point out that there
is a choice bt. seeing VN's ploys as "cheating" in one
dimension, or as "nonsense" in the
other.
There is a "split" , although it
is not related to humpty-dumpty personalities, nor to different
novels, but through the confrontation bt Shade's life (in
the poem itself), and Kinbote's own (in Semberland.)
According to Kinbote Shade can shuffle his
index-cards to produce a poem, while he prefers
chess-moves himself ( Solux Rex).