Jerry
Friedman:"Like others, I've found a great deal of interest in Matt
Roth's and Tiffany DeRewal's close reading of /Pale Fire/...I agree with Jim
Twiggs that the multiple-personality theory solves the main objection to the
Shadean theory...Matt and Tiffany point out that Hazel's ghostly influence
doesn't explain the coincidence of Shade's clockwork toy and Kinbote's
gardener...If the toy and the person are both "real", then the coincidence is
beyond any characters' control; if not, Kinbote could have made up the toy or
the gardener or both, or Shade could have made up at least the gardener's
wheelbarrow as a private reminiscence of his toy. (on somnambulism) When he
describes himself as dividing in two, in the sleepwalking episode and the way he
writes poetry, both halves are Shade, not some repressed self seeking
release."
M.Roth (off-list to JM, on Webster's
wolf): "wolves digging up graves is an essential element of the werewolf
myth, as when, in Webster's The Duchess of Malfi, we see Prince Ferdinand (the
lycanthrope) emerge from the graveyard holding a human leg. Also, there is one
more fox in PF, at least tangentially. That would the be fox in Edsel Ford's
poem "The Image of Desire," from which Kinbote quotes."
JM: Not being a
"plot-person" I was particularly interested in Edmund White's criticism in The
New Republic (nov.20,1995):"Very Pale Fire," when he writes: "Details, of course, are at the heart of Nabokov's fiction. If he
often relies on clumsy, too-paraphrasable and punchy plots, he does so because
they function as the strong frame on which are cantilevered notations of color,
sound, smell and touch, notations that are evocative but often static,
especially when dwelled on at great length. In the earliest stories, we see his
love of shimmering detail in its purest, least narrative
form."
I find it hard to remember what are the "Shadeans" and
therefore I miss out on most of the fun. For me there is Vladimir Nabokov
all the time, his plays,plexes,plights, ploys and pluck...
Of course, White wrote about VN's short-stories, not
his novels - but even so there is an exageration in summing them up
as: "clumsy, too-paraphrasable and punchy plots." Even so, his
suggestion that plots are a "strong frame" on which synesthetic notations ( and
VN as a non-poliphonic "Wally", I must add) are
cantilevered, makes sense to
me.
Jerry Friedman, quite
often in Pale Fire it is suggested that Gradus is Kinbote's
automaton, his clock-work toy, his (and our) death drive. You might remember that in
Nabokov's earlier novel, King, Queen, Knave, there are automatons, a
gardener trundling a barrow, a Red Vanessa...
You seem to be warming up
to my opposition to the "multiple personality disorder" when you state
"both halves are Shade, not some repressed self seeking release." Soon
you'll admit Freud's theory of the unconscious (our repressed experiences
and memories are not another self, merely the aspects one doesn't
want to include in the selfimage we've built.) It is often
difficult to discern hysteric fits and epileptic attacks (there is even an
old diagnostic category for "hystero-epilepsy"). Freud considered
Dostoevsky's epilepsy, in part, as a manifestation of
hysteria.
Matt, thank you for the information about one more
fox in PF. I ignore almost everything concerning folkloric werewolves
but, like Jerry, I enjoy their aptness as a metaphor of our "beast
inside."