Jansy Mello writes:
Welcome Beth, cheers and thanks to SB!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Jerry Friedman [ to Jansy on (VN,SO, p.84): "incidentally, the boy at St.Mark's [Victor?/St.Bart?] and Pnin both dream... of a passage from my drafts of - that's telepathy for you!" lets us witness Nabokov's intention to stimulate, in his readers, the impulse towards a literary kind of "apophenia".]
JM believes that "Nabokov is satirizing a doomed quest for meaning and inveigling the reader into the same quest. And as I've said, I disagree. I think /Pale Fire/ is a riddle with an elegant solution."
[ Jansy: It is ironical - because Nabokov's satire demands the reader's acceptance of a fictionally "real" ghostly message. He is justified in his disdain towards poor demented Kinbote, who can find in it no warning clues and cannot accept the guidance of a well-intentioned spirit.]
I don't see it that way [...].Maybe Nabokov was imagining readers who would decode the message, but I think the point is at least as much that there is survival after death in the world of /Pale Fire/.
[Jansy: and yet, who is playing ...a game of worlds, promoting pawns?. Kinbote, like the author, promotes pawns...]
I understand that the author is promoting pawns, but why Kinbote?
[Jansy: what is expected from the "real" reader? To discern that he, as reader, is a pawn, as are Shade and Kinbote?]
Do you mean Nabokov's pawn? I think readers are supposed to consider the idea that they and Nabokov are pawns of some "aloof and mute" being(s).[Jansy: Must the reader accept that, for Shade, "a web of sense" is only to be found through art?]
Why not? That's what Shade says, and there's no particular reason to doubt him.
JM: Jerry Friedman argues that:
(a) "Pale Fire is a riddle with an elegant solution";
(b)"there is survival after death in the world of Pale Fire";
(c)"readers are supposed to consider that they and Nabokov are pawns of some "aloof and mute" being(s);
(d) that the web of sense, as Shade says, is only to be found through art.
Item (c) clashes with the other arguments. Unless we consider Don's image of worlds within worlds, because then there must be some kind of BEING, albeit aloof and mute, who exists in the ultimate layer, lying outside the book and external to the reader, like a metaphysical "The Great Scribe" ( or as in Khayyám " A Chess Player").
But how come is he mute and aloof if he is engaged in a game of pawns?
I think that Pale Fire is more than a riddle and, if there is a solution, it might very well be one that demonstrates that "there are no solutions, except an invented web of sense found through art", instead of Kunin's J&H cum multiple personality disorder, Matt Roth's (which I haven't yet read) as a definite answer.
Perhaps Pale Fire deals not with MPD but with MCQ ( Multiple-choice quizzes) and there are as many artistic or spiritualistic meanings concealed in it as there are readers.
If there is survival after death in the world of Pale Fire? As I see it, this issue remains controversial. Shade (in item d) didn't believe in any supernatural "meaning", only in our too human creations.
Pale Fire's author, though, might have, but it is equally paradoxical. There is another revelatory line by having Shade write down that he is as certain of meeting Hazel in afterlife as he is certain... about rising the next day ( he is killed before that, or is my calendar muddled now?) Cf: "I’m reasonably sure that we survive/ And that my darling somewhere is alive,/ As I am reasonably sure that I/ Shall wake at six tomorrow, on July/ The twenty-second, nineteen fifty-nine,/"