But
you'll note in SO, in his interview, Nabokov doesn't ever give us any
specifics, because, as he says, implies, suggests, no afterlife can be
explained in living terms. Since I can't put my own faith in Nabokov's
inexpressable one, I can only look at his models for the possible
"otherworld" as an urge for the divine, and not a fact. Since we're
talking about fiction we can dismiss facts. And this leads me back to
Shade. Clearly, very clearly, Shade is saying that a provable factual
immortality does not matter. In Canto three, he discusses a near death
experience, during which, on the other side, he had a vision of a
fountain; later he reads a paper and thinks his vision was also
psychically seen by Mrs Z. Eventually he learns from the editor of the
newspaper who had printed her account, Jim Coates, that there was
a misprint: she had seen a "mountain", not a "fountain". This inspires
Shade to write, "But all at once it dawned on me that this
[italics his]/Was the real point, the contrapuntal theme;/Just this:
not text, but texture; not the dream/
But topsy turvical coincidence,/ Not flimsy nonsense, but a web of
sense./ Yes! It sufficed that I in life could find/ Some kind of
link-and-bobolink, some kind/ Of correlated pattern in the game,/Plexed
artistry, and something of the same/ Pleasure in it as they who played
it found." Canto four, lines 806-815. In other words (and here I leave
aside Shade's hint that perceiving rhymes and patterns is sort of
similiar to being their creator), it does not matter whether or not a
fountain or a mountain hovers beyond the veil, but the fact he was
nearly drawn to think so. That was my point. Whether or not these
contrapuntal themes, natural mimicry, and patterns, suggest as Shade
and Nabokov seem to think the existence of an intelligent
designer doesn't much matter as far as my life goes, since neither of
them can describe it, there, him, that, or do much than more
than poetically sense it through the grid of their own unerstanding. I
suppose, in my secular way, I take Shade's thoughts as just a way of
not having to be disappointed with the little he can actually know, as
was V in the Real Life of Sebastian Knight--and so I see all this
searching as more a noble urge than a proof of anything, which is I
think the only way his sketchy metaphysics can mean much to anyone but
himself. If the novel is meant to be a model of a specific "otherworld"
then the book would have to be considered a failure, since it has
inspired a cajillion different shades and variations on what exactly is
going on, other than the explicit story experimentally narrated, which,
in that light, means the book is really just a "mountain" to our
"fountain" and so significant, why? Because of the reader's urge,
which mirrors Kinbote's urge to find zembla in Shadowland, and Shade's
urge to discover an afterlife for he and sybil and his dead daughter.