p.s. Your prize? Next time you are in Pasadena I'll take you to the veddy veddy British Rose Tree Cottage for a proper English tea and I'll explain my thoughts on Pale Fire to you
.
On Mar 29, 2009, at 6:06 AM, Stan Kelly-Bootle wrote:
CK: here’s what you wrote en anglais, early March (well within living memory!)
---------- exhibit 1 -------
To the List,
This Sunday Turner Classic Movies will be broadcasting 'the Three Faces of Eve," with Joanne Woodward. I believe that along with Stevenson's Jekyll and Hyde and Wilde's Dorian Gray, this film and more importantly the nonfiction book on which it is based by authors Thigpen and Cleckley, are important sources used by Nabokov in Pale Fire. [my emphasis — skb]
I know I am in the decided minority on this, but the movie is a great one whether or no.
Carolyn
8:00 PM EST Three Faces of Eve, The (1957)
A psychiatrist tries to help a woman integrate her split personalities. Cast: Joanne Woodward, Lee J. Cobb, David Wayne. Dir: Nunnally Johnson. BW-91 mins, TV-PG, CC, Letterbox Format
------- exhibit 2 in reply to MR’s response to exhibit 1 -------
Dear Matthew,
Three Faces really is the sprinkling on top and is not necessary to my interpretation, whereas Dorian Gray, Jekyll & Hyde are really more important. It seems to have been a redundancy as is the Hogg work.
The way I got to Three Faces by the way was not through the word "ditch" but through my belief that Nabokov wanted PF to be solvable by anyone who had a tv and would have seen the films that were shown on tv in the fifties. I did myself remember seeing those three films on tv. I further concluded that VN wished his non-scholarly reader to go to the texts and read those three works. Which is what I did and which is when those word clues jumped out at me. In other words, the word clues act as confirmation to the reader that Nabokov intended him to read these particular works.
[Again, I’ve added bold emphasis to remind you what you wrote! Seems quite clear to me. How have I misinterpreted you?
Come on: don’t be ‘tahrsome.’ -- skb]
Hogg is different - - that was clearly a clue for the more scholarly reader. But the more sophisticated clue-words "cresset" and "parahelion" still work as confirmation in the same way. If any other puzzle was ever constructed like this, i.e. with pre--planned confirmations, I'm not aware of it.
Carolyn
On Mar 2, 2009, at 6:30 AM, Matthew Roth wrote:
The next issue of the Nabokov Online Journal will include an article by Tiffany DeRewal and me that lays out our version of a Shade-Kinbote multiple personality theory. We don't talk about TFoE, but I've always been interested in that possible link. At the very least, its popularity in the 50s makes clear that a lot of people were thinking about split personalities at that time. And we know, from notes in the Berg Archive, that Nabokov in the late 1950s was reading DJ West's Psychical Research Today and paid particular attention to several multiple personality case studies therein.
That said, I don't think Carolyn's idea of "word links," especially with a word as mundane as "ditch," gets us very far. There would have to be a whole host of stronger associations between PF and TFoE before I'd be willing to sprinkle that one on top.
Matt Roth
------------
I posted a long response on March 3 which failed to elicit your expected rebuttal.
CTaH
On 27/03/2009 03:08, "Carolyn Kunin" <chaiselongue@EARTHLINK.NET> wrote:
On Mar 26, 2009, at 7:35 PM, CTaH wrote: Your earlier claim was simply that VN had planted _significant_ clues in Pale Fire
pointing at popular 1950s films & their TV showings which had various 'split-personality' themes.
Dear Scouse,
I'm afraid you didn't follow my arguments at all. I actually said something quite different. Depressing and too tahrsome to contemplate discussing further. Peut-etre je ne dois plus que parler en Francais?
your person in Pasadena
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