RSGwynn: In reading
these recent posts, I was reminded of The Prisoner of Zenda as a possible
source of Kinbote's fantasies. Checking on this, I came across this
exchange from five years ago: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/hornboyd.htm.
JM: How would the pair, Kinbote
and Shade, appear in silhouette against the horizon when they went out
on a stroll? Kinbote was tall, thin and agile, whereas chubby Shade
was ponderous and maladroit. I don't recollect any description
about how tall he was, otherwise I might imagine the pair as Don
Quixote and Sancho Pança.
It seems to me that the word "baroque," in
America, is mainly applied, depreciatively, as an adjective (it's been
even used against Nabokov, by a few critics!). Such a pity because an
entire world of volupty and carnivalesque contrasts
disappears with its envelopping madcap irony. In Puritan
England, as well, an attempt has been made to censor and subdue baroque
excesses, when Alexander Pope's elegance is brought to the fore.*
A little search in the internet revealed
an angry article about Nabokov's lectures on Don Quixote, emphasizing what the
author considered as a couple of glaring similarities between Cervantes'
work and Nabokov's novel, "Lolita.."
I selected two paragraphs to
indicate, rashly and superficially, a line of investigation that might
serve as a link between "Dom Quixote" and "Pale Fire." A ghostly
influence which arises by some of the roles that were attributed to Charles
Kinbote as the editor and commentator of Shade's poems. Kinbote's
dellusional Zembla might have a dash of parody in connection to Nabokov's vision
of Quixotesque ideals.
The author, Carolyn Kunce (such
interesting initials) writes that Nabokov "laments Cervantes' failure to take advantage of this
counterfeit Don Quixote: "How splendid it would have been if instead of that
hasty and vague last encounter with the disguised Carrasco, who tumbles our
knight in a jiffy, the real Don Quixote had fought his crucial battle with the
false Don Quixote!" ( I couldn't help imagining CK,Shade and
Gradus at their final meeting). Further on she adds:
"Nabokov discusses the distancing effect of the
"discovered manuscript"; he notes that "Cervantes invents from toe to turban,
Cid Hamete Benengeli, Arab Historian . . . . Through this silk mask
Cervantes will speak. A Spanish-speaking Moor, he says, translated the whole
manuscript for him into Castilian in little more than a month and a half".
Nabokov suggests that this narrative device of using a discovered and then
translated manuscript supposedly "protects" Cervantes: "If any objection can be
raised as to [the manuscript's] truth, it can only be because its author was an
Arab, since lying is very common among those of that nation . . . it is the
business and duty of historians to be exact, truthful, and wholly free from
passion." **
Although the subject being examined
then was not "Pale Fire," but "Lolita" and its foreword by John Ray Jr. and
the afterword by Nabokov, Nabokov's employ of a "distancing effect" through
Kinbote is roughly similar. In "Pale Fire" it might have come in handy to
doubly disguise Nabokov's ambitions concerning the poem he's attributed to John
Shade, for example. Kinbote's life in Zembla, in addition, is a complete
reversal of the chivalrous deeds and ideals of courtly-love defended by
Quixote.
...........................................................................................................................
* - A.Pope, An Essay on
Criticism: lines 267/288: "Once on a time, La Mancha's knight, they
say,/ A certain bard encount'ring on the way,/ Discours'd in terms as
just, with looks as sage,/ As e'er could Dennis of the Grecian
stage;/ Concluding all were desp'rate sots and fools,/ Who durst
depart from Aristotle's rules./Our author, happy in a judge so nice,/Produc'd
his play, and begg'd the knight's advice,/ Made him observe the subject and
the plot,/ The manners, passions, unities, what not?/ All which, exact
to rule, were brought about,/Were but a combat in the lists left out./"What!
leave the combat out?" exclaims the knight;/"Yes, or we must renounce the
Stagirite."/"Not so by Heav'n" (he answers in a rage)/"Knights, squires, and
steeds, must enter on the stage."/ So vast a throng the stage can ne'er
contain./"Then build a new, or act it in a plain." [...] Thus critics, of
less judgment than caprice,/Curious not knowing, not exact but nice,/Form short
ideas; and offend in arts/ (As most in manners) by a love to
parts."
** - Excerpts from "Cruel and Crude": Nabokov Reading Cervantes
Catherine Kunce /Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America 13.2
(1993): 93-104. Copyright © 1993, The Cervantes Society of America (the quotes
must be evaluated in the context of the complete article, btw) ..
."
Nabokov's posthumously published Lectures on Don Quixote divulges Nabokov's
disregard of Cervantes' irony -the same trope Nabokov employs in Lolita. This
essay* will explore Nabokov's idiosyncratic apprehension of Cervantes'
style...While Nabokov criticizes Don Quixote, he simultaneously imitates
Cervantes...The late Stephen Gilman...reminds us that Cervantes' "two supremely
naive protagonists are used in order to illuminate ironically a society, swollen
with self-importance, that refused to make a place for him despite his past
heroism". Gilman places Cervantes in the larger tradition of the novel,
concluding that "it was Fielding's conscious adaptation of Cervantine irony that
opened the way to the future of the novel" . To the degree, then, that Nabokov
refuses Cervantes his irony, he impugns the tenor of his own novels [...]In
light of Lolita's frequent and sometimes graphic brutality, Nabokov's
sanctimonious denunciation of violence in Don Quixote seems, at the very least,
remarkable... Davenport speculates that "as [Nabokov] delivered these . . .
lectures, part of his mind . . . must have been on a project concerning Courtly
Love, its madness and follies, which would mature three years hence as Lolita"
... Although Davenport finds a number of parallels between the two novels -the
"picaresque journey as the 'harmonizing intuition' of the two works" , the
madness of both "heroes"- he dismisses any notion of direct influence: "Lolita
is too logically a progression of Nabokovian themes (the other as self, the
generative power of delusions, the interplay of sense and obsession) to have
been influenced by a close and tedious reading of the Quixote". Davenport's
conclusion is complex...[O]ne might ask, are not "the other as self," "the
generative power of delusions," and "the interplay of sense and obsession,"
visibly Cervantine themes, too? Critics might fail to apprehend the writers'
common thematic interests... Nabokov misses the fine irony that Don Quixote is
"confessing" to a compoundedly "mad" mission that sustains some of
Christianity's loftiest, presumably antiquated, ideals. By having Don Quixote
"confess," Cervantes unmasks both a virtue behind insanity, and an insanity
behind a "virtuous" society's exacting of such "confessions." ... Nabokov
inadvertently discloses the effectiveness of the ending when he states that Don
Quixote's recantation is the book's "saddest scene ...Just as Nabokov discredits
the ending of Don Quixote, he deprecates Cervantes' attack upon the ruinous
influence of the books of chivalry. Nabokov suspects, probably correctly, that
"by 1605, the time of Don Quixote, the chivalry [sic] romances fad had almost
faded away, and their decline had been noticeable for the last twenty or thirty
years" ...Nabokov appears to believe Cervantes' main purpose was to warn the
Spanish against the dangers of reading too many books of chivalry. The marvelous
irony of the advice of Cervantes' "friend" in the prologue to Don Quixote is
lost on Nabokov [...] Nabokov also laments Cervantes' failure to take advantage
of this counterfeit Don Quixote: "How splendid it would have been if instead of
that hasty and vague last encounter with the disguised Carrasco, who tumbles our
knight in a jiffy, the real Don Quixote had fought his crucial battle with the
false Don Quixote!" . Nabokov forgets that the "real" Don Quixote meets a
character (Don Alvaro Tarfe) from the false novel and makes him visit a notary
public to swear to his creator's ineptness. This metafictional encounter is far
superior to a mere brawl... [ By HH's and Quilty's final confrontation, in
"Lolita, he] pays an oblique homage to his predecessor, even as he complains of
his lack of opportunism [...] Marilyn Joan Edelstein, who discusses the
self-consciously rhetorical devices Cervantes employs in the prologues to both
parts of Don Quixote, observes a functional similarity in Nabokov's fictional
preface to Lolita and in Nabokov's own afterword, "On a Book Entitled Lolita."
While Cervantes' ire about Avellaneda sparked the amusing but pointed "Prologue
to the Reader" in Book II, Nabokov's irritation about charges of pornography in
relation to Lolita instigated his own defense of his work. Nabokov's brilliantly
ironic idea of a "defense" is as Cervantine as Cervantes' defense... The
narrative structures of the two works also share a decided affinity. Nabokov
discusses the distancing effect of the "discovered manuscript"; he notes that
"Cervantes invents from toe to turban, Cid Hamete Benengeli, Arab Historian . .
. . Through this silk mask Cervantes will speak. A Spanish-speaking Moor,
he says, translated the whole manuscript for him into Castilian in little more
than a month and a half". Nabokov suggests that this narrative device of using a
discovered and then translated manuscript supposedly "protects" Cervantes: "If
any objection can be raised as to [the manuscript's] truth, it can only be
because its author was an Arab, since lying is very common among those of that
nation . . . it is the business and duty of historians to be exact, truthful,
and wholly free from passion" ... Out of Nabokov's legendary hatred of
psychoanalysis and of Freud, Humbert becomes the Nabokovian counterpart to
Cervantes' Cid Hamete Benengeli (all madmen are "liars," like Arabs);
"Psychologist" Clarence Choate Clark, Esq. becomes the "hasty" translator of
Humbert's text; and John Ray, Jr., Ph.D., custodian of the text, becomes the
"real" author, Nabokov himself... Nabokov's ironic
condemnation of Cervantes ultimately extends beyond the framework of fiction and
into the purview of criticism. Nabokov's scathing indictment of Don Quixote is
echoed in critics' analyses of Lolita shortly after publication. .. the final
words in Alfred Appel, Jr.'s comments on The Annotated Lolita could, with
surprisingly little revision, apply to Don Quixote: "[This 're-nonsense'] sounds
from the depths of Vladimir Nabokov's profoundly human comic vision, and the
gusto of Humbert's narration, his punning language, his abundant delight in
digressions, parodies, and games all attest to a comic vision that overrides the
circumscribing sadness, absurdity, and terror of everyday life." The very nature
of this essay is quixotic...The most we can hope for is that an index will
rightfully link the servant with the master. One can, indeed, speculate about
the implications of such a
linkage...