JM: Andrea's words render
with precison what I'd tried, unsuccessfully, to express
about Shade (the poem "written by the man Nabokov imagined Shade to be:
admirable, flawed..."). What complicates
matters, though, is that Shade himself repeats and mirrors, in his poem, what
some of us consider to be VN's intention for the novel as a whole.
For example, when he pompously announces,
with Eliot's intonnation (as J.Twiggs underlined): "There was a time in...Now I shall spy on
beauty... Now I shall do what none has done[...] Now I shall speak of evil as none
has/ Spoken before",
before he matter-of-factedly proceeds to methods of composition,
puny matters, various loathings ( jazz, Freud,etc). Or the
ludicrous "mountain/fountain" discoveries, his conjectures about
IPH...
I also forgot to consider that the
Jekyl&Hyde transformation is not clean-cut but it has "shady regions"
that blend one into the other...
Fran Assa describes cannibalism
as a "form of prolonging the love experience". In Psychoanalysis (Klein,
Abraham) babies pass through an "oral cannibalistic stage," with fantasies of
that kind in relation to the mother. In Freud, the
cannibalistic "incorporation" of the Father is that
which establishes the "internalized law" against incest and its rules
and rituals. We
tend to forget that blood-relationships are not the only "facts"
to characterize incest ( symbolic relationships are included, such
as adopted children and step-kids in our culture, totem determinants and
economic interests in totemic cultures,aso), or that parent-children
incest entails in pedophilia.
Suellen's reference to Captain Scott, historical
facts, fiction and myth made me remember other lines (759/62) in Pale
Fire:
"If on some nameless island
Captain Schmidt/ Sees a new animal and captures it,/ And if, a little
later, Captain Smith/ Brings back a skin, that island is no myth."
Shade's equivocal lines play with "Schmidt" and "Smith" to mock the
"proof" brought about by a hunted animal skin.
The frontiers bt. dream and waking life
will again be shaken in other lines about "the Shade impress."
line 881-2/884/5: "I awoke/
Safe in my bed .../ and on the damp / Gemmed turf a brown shoe lay! My secret
stamp,/The Shade impress, the mystery inborn."
..............................................................................................
Excerpts from the
postings:
Lolita&Artic exploration in
Ada,Pale Fire...
Alexey Skylarlenko [to JM:
the Pole Star as the center of his novel (or something in its "compass", but
I have not his afterword to quote it now).]: "pale,
pregnant, beloved, irretrievable Dolly Schiller dying in Grey Star (the capital
town of the book)"
Pale Fire and M.Roth's
quote:
Fran Assa: Why would cannibalism be an alimentary
form of incest in particular, as unique from other kinds of "love"
experiences? Lately we have the example of Jeffrey Dahmer who killed and
cannibalized his lovers (all unrelated to him) only after they decided to
leave him. It was his form of prolonging the love experience.
Pale Fire (J.Friedman, Aisenberg, JM,
J.Twiggs)
A.Pitzer: I have often wondered if the poem is
not supposed to be deliberately good or bad as much as both: a piece composed in
character to be the poem written by the man that (I think) Nabokov imagined
Shade to be: admirable, flawed, and striving as an artist to transcend the
limits that mortality and his experience have placed on him.
Artic exploration, "The Pole",
Melville
Suellen Stringer-Hye: "Nabokov too had
family ties to arctic exploration and in an early play entitled “The Pole” he
depicts the heroic Captain Scott and the expedition of explorers to Antarctica
who perished in 1919. Humbert’s expedition to the north magnetic pole was doomed
from the start; the magnetic pole is not stable [...] In both Nabokov and
Melville the theme of polar exploration and its associations with the
exploration in literature for inner truth is portrayed as a noble quest. For
both authors this quest is doomed to fail",from “The Weed Exiles the
Flower, Melville and Nabokov”.