I'm glad to see unreliability, uncertainty, and Botkin making a comeback on the List recently. As for Botkin's delusion, anyone who has lived in academia as long as I have, or who has had to deal with friends, colleagues, and family members who are serious drunks, bipolars, schizophrenics, or undiagnosed but deeply and obviously troubled souls should have no problem (1) accepting Botkin/Kinbote as a believable character and (2) accepting that his behavior would be tolerated, for a time at least, on a college campus. (I'm appending a few paragraphs from Robert M. Adams's description of Cornell during the Nabokov era. This is the Cornell that was still in place when I arrived there, as a grad student, in 1960. It was a campus where a misfit like Kinbote would fit right in.)
The homosexuality is important not because it may or may not agree with
something Freud
or Sartre said but because it explains the shape of the fantasy-world Botkin creates and inhabits. For my part, I tend to think that Zembla is as real as Appalachia and Utana. Perhaps a real king of that nation was deposed and has disappeared. Botkin has fixated on this and turned the country into a homosexual paradise with himself as the ruler in exile. This fantasy allows him to come out of the closet in the most florid and (in his own eyes, the most stylish and gratifying) way imaginable. I think Sam Gwynn is right that there is a wife somewhere in the background. Perhaps her discovery of Botkin's homosexuality has precipitated the current crisis. This, in turn, would explain why he is moving into the Goldsworth house during the semester break . . . Who knows and who can say? This is, after all, as Mary McCarthy pointed out a long time ago, a do-it-yourself novel.
My main purpose in writing is to support, with two
passages from near the end of the Commentary, the claims of Laurence Hochard and Anthony Stadlen that a person living out a delusion might well be aware, at least part of the time (and regardless of how one might conceptualize the matter) of his "real" identity. The first passage, being a quick slip of the mask, is easy to overlook; the second, at the very end of the Commentary, is as close to being a key to the book as we are likely to find. Here they are:
I would certainly have [my gardener] attired according to the old romanticist notion of a Moorish prince, had I been a northern king--or rather had I still been a king (exile becomes a bad habit). --l. 998
I may assume other disguises, other forms, but I shall try to exist. I may turn up yet, on another campus, as an old, happy, healthy heterosexual Russian, a writer in exile, sans fame, sans future, sans audience, sans anything but his art. I may join forces with Odon in a new motion picture: Escape from Zembla (ball in the palace, bomb in the palace square). I may pander to the simple tastes of theatrical critics and cook up a stage play, an old-fashioned melodrama with three principles: a lunatic who intends to kill an imaginary king, another lunatic who imagines himself to be that king, and a distinguished old poet who stumbles by chance into the line of fire, and perishes in the clash between the two figments. Oh, I may do many things! History permitting, I may sail back to my recovered kingdom, and with a great sob greet the gray
coastline and the gleam of a roof in the rain. I may huddle
and groan in a madhouse. --l. 1000
In the second passage Kinbote goes in and out of his two identities. In describing a possible play, he gives away the plot of the novel (as he sees it) and shows a clear awareness that he is a deranged figment of his (as it turns out, Botkin's) own imagination. In the final possibility (and I believe the one that has come true)-- "I may huddle and groan in a madhouse" --I find the anguish that Laurence believes is missing from the novel. Botkin's role in the book is not, on my reading, a mere Nabokovian whim; it is essential, in establishing the full anguish of Kinbote's predicament, that he in fact be somebody else, somebody more or less insignificant. That somebody is Botkin.
At the same time I agree with Laurence in his appraisal of Lynch's movies. I admire Mulholland Drive so much that if I were forced to choose between it and
Pale Fire, I would have to go with the movie. It is broader and deeper than the novel; it is far more intense; its stakes are vastly higher. As a theme, the obsessive craving for an "otherworld" is childish and tacky in comparison. Metafiction, when it strives to open doors into the Beyond, is, like the ontological argument, either a clever trick or a futile battering against the limits of language. Or both.
Finally, I agree with Laurence that "intentionality" is too weak a concept to do justice to Botkin's delusions. I am reminded of a saying in Alcoholics Anonymous: "A man takes a drink. Then the drink takes a drink. Then the drink takes the man." In other words, we are dealing with degrees--of responsibility, of choice, of lucidity--and not with black and white absolutes. Botkin is a man playing a part to the point that the part plays
him.
Jim Twiggs
P.S. Here are the paragraphs from Adams' review-essay, "The Wizard of Lake Cayuga," describing Cornell as it was during Nabokov's time there.
THE WIZARD OF LAKE CAYUGA
Whatever it may have been when the Erie Canal was being dug, upstate New York during the Nabokov years included a lot of scrawny and marginal countryside. A few big dairy farms flourished, there were vineyards yielding white wine that I thought pale and bitter; but many of the little homestead farms were being overgrown with brush or abandoned outright.
One crop, though, continued to flourish—a rich harvest of spiritual seers and religious visionaries. That had been true for a long time. Cornell itself was nonsectarian to the point of having once enjoyed the name of "the godless university." But the green slopes and valleys around it were alive with spiritual influences. Just down Highway 20 stands the Hill of Cumorah, where the angel Moroni revealed to Joseph Smith the golden tablets (sorry, no sampling allowed) on which were inscribed the teachings of Mormonism. From the machicolated battlements of their watchtower in North Lansing, a band of Jehovah's Witnesses kept vigilant watch for the approach of Armageddon. On at least one occasion the Millerites of Syracuse had turned out in their night-gowns amid the snowdrifts to await the Second Coming. And less than fifty years before, the university itself had been visited by a spectral
figure from Russia—none other than H.P.B. herself, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, who spent some four years on and around the campus.
Her mission was double, to do the research for Isis Unveiled, which bears many marks of having been composed in the Cornell Library, and to bring solace to the life of Hiram Corson, the professor of English, who was grieving the loss of a cherished daughter. How Madame Blavatsky put the professor in touch with the pneuma of his adored lost child we should not ask too closely; but for the years in which she made up part of his family, she cannot have failed to leave a mark. That Nabokov knew this story, hardly less colorful than that of Pale Fire, is only a guess; but his best friend in Ithaca was the poet Morris Bishop, who knew so much about the university that in his last years he was named official Cornell historian.
Because it was relatively small and very remote from any big cities, Cornell in Nabokov's day had many administrative hideaways and cubbyholes, where people could cultivate private gifts or special interests in almost complete isolation. The main medical school was, of course, in New York City; the Ithaca campus devoted itself very largely to premedical training of undergraduates. But the professor of anatomy nurtured a private passion for Marcello Malpighi (1628–1694), and after decades of study published in four immense volumes a Life narrated in connection with a history of the University of Padua and the general history of embryology. (Among other things, the biography reports the results of reduplicating every single experimental observation made by Malpighi in the course of his life. One single footnote in this gigantic opus—so similar to Nabokov's outsize annotations of
Eugene Onegin—covered a thousand pages.)
Not all these private ventures ended triumphantly. The professor of astronomy—another one-man department in those distant days—developed reclusive habits, to the point that all the astronomical journals had to be kept under lock and key in his private office. Perhaps he was sheltering the slowly developing line of calculation which led him gradually and then explicitly to reaffirm a geocentric design for the universe. A professor of architecture developed, half seriously, the model of an imaginary civilization, Vulcania; out of broken farm machinery, sculch from junk shops, and miscellaneous familiar objects, he assembled a mock-archaeological excavation in which (as I know) it was all too easy to get lost.
From: laurence hochard <laurence.hochard@HOTMAIL.FR>
To: NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU
Sent: Sun, September 5, 2010 3:22:01 PM
Subject: Re: [NABOKV-L] Botkin
I agree with Anthony; this kind of acting on one's own consciousness is precisely what David Lynch's films are about, especially Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive; but unlike VN, he also shows the fragility of these delusions as 'reality' slowly comes back, always threatening to wreck the delusion, which accounts (at least partly) for the deluded person's anguish when he/she loses faith in his/her delusion and is sort of hunted down by the inescapable reality (it's Mulholland Drive's whole story) . But what seems to me questionable is the intentionality of the
game."Intentionality" is not appropriate, neither is Sartre's "bad
faith" for the game is much too compulsive and inescapable.