Laurence Hochard: I
wonder if anybody has ever noticed a slight inconsistency in Kinbote's account
of his spying on the Shades.in his note to line 181:"On another trip to the
bathroom one hour and a half later, at sunrise, I found the light transferred to
the bedroom, and smiled indulgently, for, according to my deductions, only two
nights had passed since the three-thousand-nine-hundred-ninety-ninth time - but
no matter." He alludes to "At least / four thousand times your pillow has
been creased / by our two heads (l 275/6)" of course, but at the time of his
spying, he couldn't know since he hadn't read the poem and therefore, he
can't have smiled indulgently; he can only do so in retrospect, when writing his
commentary. Could the inconsistecy be deliberate, here as well as about
Kinbote's birthdate? Did VN want to discreetly blur the time landmarks so as to
maintain ambiguity as to the identity of the characters? Or are they simply
mistakes?
Jansy Mello: I agree, Kinbote
would've been able to smile indulgently only in retrospect. Poetic
licence? As when Shade, in his poem, inserts details about a Red admiral
which he could not have discerned at the time of his writing (he was
murdered while this butterfly was hovering about him), but he was
familiar enough with it to know these small dots, colorings and
textures there and then.
In my opinion, the inconsistencies in the
novel are deliberate distractions on Nabokov's part Also, it's too
easy to blame the "unreliable narrator" and abandon a fixed point of
reference to jump into the heracliean fire
of ghostly interpretations. And yet, Nabokov seemed to fear that his
cues would pass unnoticed (he often gave us a clue to get to his "plums").*
Besides, even an "open novel" must have a point of departure, a navel
that may serve as a guide. A living (or a dead) center towards which,
like Ulysses, we return after an adventurous and delightful
voyage.
Kinbote is extremely consistent when
he gives us times and hours. You can compare various isolated
informations and notice that, as complicated as they appear to be, they are
correct. Some lead us to what must be an important year in the novel, 1915,
here: "CX was 18 and Disa 5 in 1933"; " He saw nineteen-year-old Disa for the first time on the festive night
of July the 5th,
1947." "Disa, Duchess of Payn... b. 1928..married
1949" (there are lots more). We still know nothing about Kinbote (only
about Gradus and CX), but
why not believe in him when he
insists that he is CX, or when he states John
Francis Shade (born July 5, 1898, died July 21, 1959)? *
From your
comments about R.Alladaye's book, I got the impression that you were in
favor of an approach to PF that would be different from the one
suggested by R.A and by B.Boyd. It's as if you were
stressing the point that anamorphosis has to be reflected back, with a
minimum of distortion, to enable the spectator to access the original
image or message - it's not simply an unstructured reversal.
However, in both cases, it's also true that: "... even if the
solution seems to me to be unsatisfactory, what findings along the way! how
pleasurable the discovery of all the correspondences between text ad
poem!"
Holbein's "skull" was an allegory, would VN have expanded so
much on that?
I'm ready to agree with you that the "dead
center of the book" may not be around line 500, but "if one looks for
textual evidence, then the place to look for references to anamorphosis couldn't
fail to be in K's note to lines 1-4 where he declares "The poem was begun at the dead
center of the year, a few minutes after midnight July 1." because, by coincidence, I'd just
realized its importance by setting it close to ""We place this fatidic moment at
0:05, July 2, 1959 — which happens to be also the date upon which an
innocent poet penned the first lines of his last poem" (note to line
171)." Events conducive to
Shade's death have been set in motion just then, at least in Kinbote's mind.
And, I think, that's what "Pale Fire" is about i.e, what results from
the author-reader relationship (not that we
should neglect Nabokov's heroic feat that can stand alone by itself,
inspite of all the dangers that I writer has to endure by the simple act of
initiating a poem) - Heavens! I just realized that Nabokov died in July
2.(awesome)
........................................................................................................................................................
* - Perhaps the apparent
discrepancy, related to the 16-year difference bt. CK and JS, will show us
that, when the matter is "birthdays," a year refers to, for
instance, "from July to July," or that there are different calendric
or astronomic measures of time separating fictional New Wye from Onhava. Or
else, indicate another mystery: why would Kinbote inform that he was born in
1914 and consistently indicate that his inventions date from 1915? Would
he have been so precise and then make a slip right at the "clinching"
moment, leaving no other clue?
.