EDNote: Since R. Rosenbaum's challenge here is to B. Boyd, I am not
going to post any responses to this gauntlet until B.Boyd has had a
chance to make his own reply, at which point I'll open the forum for
others' observations. Normally I would have asked an author to edit out
such phrases as "sadly ill advised" and "untethered critical
virtuosity", and I point to them here as reminders to all to keep
discourse respectful and free of
ad hominem comments. It's a
tricky boundary, and these clearly straddle it, or at least tickle it.
Let's please stick to the facts. ~SB
-------- Original Message --------
There's an old saying that when you find you're in a hole best stop
digging. I couldn't help but think of it--and of Occams's razor
(entities should not be multiplied beypnd necessity") when reading
Brian Boyd's latest attempt to force the text of
Pale Fire to
offer evidence in favor of his assertion that Hazel Shade is the real
auithor of "Pale Fire" and <Pale Fire>.
And make no mistake about it, although he seems to be now backing away
from it, thankfully, to register instead all sorts of Hazel Shade
"presences" in the book, I have some first hand evidence for what he
originally professed, because I happened to interview Profesor Boyd in
1999 in New York when he first announced that he had renounced his
revious "shadean "Shadean" position (that the poet John Shade made up
the madman's commentary on his own poem. And that Boyd had had an
epiphany that it was <really> Shade's dead daughter Hazel whod
done it and that Boyd had turned that theory into a book into a (sadly
ill advised) six week frenzy of misreading and writing.
You can read my interview with Boyd about his second conversion to a
new narrator theory here:
<http://www.observer.com/node/41393>
Here we have in Boyd's own words his Hazel Shade theory.
But in re reading the interview I was struck by something I had
forgotten. That VN himself explicitly tells us who <he> believed
was the real madman narrator: V. Botkin. Not Mary Mccarthy who was the
first reviewer to suggest it, but VN himself.
I'm surprised that I haven't seen this name mentioned by the many
discussants of the question on the list of late--it's only the author's
own words after all. But here is how I introduced those words in the
article on Boyd above.although
"The controversy over the commentary began almost as soon as the
1962 publication of Pale Fire , with a now-famous New Republic essay by
Mary McCarthy about the novel (an essay entitled "A Bolt From the
Blue") which called it "one of the very great works of art of the 20th
century," and which advanced a strikingly ingenious conjecture about
the identity of the mad commentator, Charles Kinbote: "The real, real
story" of Pale Fire , she argued, is that Kinbote and his Zemblan
Kingdom are both the invention of a barely mentioned figure in the
novel, a fellow faculty member of Kinbote and Shade, a fellow
identified in the commentary only as "V. Botkin." Although V. Botkin is
referred to only briefly, he occupies a disproportionate amount of
space in the index "Kinbote" has appended to his commentary. And from
clues in the index and elsewhere, Mary McCarthy argued that Kinbote was
a fictive persona created anagrammatically by V. Botkin (a name
enclasped,
I've just noticed, by the initials V.N.).
It was a brilliant conjecture which was adopted by most readers and
critics for nearly three decades until Brian Boyd sought to overturn
it. [Actually Andrew Field was the first Shadean, Boyd a later
disciple]. It [the Botkin theory] was a conjecture which Mr. Boyd's
own research in the Nabokov archives seemed to confirm. According to a
footnote in Mr. Boyd's second volume of his Nabokov biography, "At the
end of his 1962 diary, Nabokov drafted some phrases for possible
interviews: 'I wonder if any reader will notice the following details:
1) that the nasty commentator is not an ex-King and not even Dr.
Kinbote but Prof. Vseslav Botkin, a Russian and a madman …'"
Sure I suppose the novel is so linguistically complex, one could
spend the rest of one's career, as Boyd seems willing to do, defending
or backing off slowly from his Hazel Shade conjecture.
But it would be sad if this brilliant biographer decides that he
wants as part of his legacy to be identified with what William of Occam
would have called an unnecessary entity. (Hazel as author). it would
be sad if readers of <Pale Fire> were to take this tortured
interpretation as a key to unlock the novel's magic.
Isn't it time we gave VN's own words about the narrator and their
implications the attention they deserve rather than inventing
distractions in order to demonstrate an untethered critical virtuosity?
Come back to V. Botkin, Brian Boyd.