Dear Laurence,

I very much agree with your objections to the attempts to"solve"
the novel. I seldom post nowadays on this list, though I usually follow the discussions.
As I noticed long ago, one of stricking examples of the dimensions that are
lost when people try to rationalize, is the experience of emigration and
exile manifested by Kinbote. It was well known to Nabokov, and he hinted
at an explanation, telling that Kinbote is in fact crazy russian emigree Botkin.
Notice that it is not really a solution of the puzzle, it adds one more plane
(surface where shadows may be projected, or a mirror plane). The inventors
of various "split-personality" explanations do not feel how unimaginable
this experience (reflected with very precise details in PF) is for anybody
who did not really experience it. The idea that any personage, split personality
or not, Shade, Sybil, Hazel, "imagined", invented these details, completely kills
this esthetically important plane (and I am sure it was important for Nabokov).

Best regards,

Sergei Soloviev


On Thursday, May 23, 2013 20:53 CEST, laurence hochard <laurence.hochard@HOTMAIL.FR> wrote:

>
> Dear Carolyn and List,
>
> I've
> been a list member for a few years now and I know about the different
> readings of PF (the single-author theories -shadeans versus
> kinboteans- , the "ghosts" theory as well as alternate
> readings like yours and Matt Roth's and even the latest one
> [René Alladaye's] involving 2 authors collaborating to write both
> poem and commentary..
>
> I've always been slightly surprised that
> readers tried to "solve" the novel by looking for a hidden
> author for poem and commentary. I'm well aware of the echoes
> between the two, of course, but for me , we err if we try to line up
> all the elements of the story on one rational plane. It is first an
> aesthetic error because it deprives the novel of one of its dimension
> and best achievements: its irresolvable tension and reduces it
> to a banal (if ultra sophisticated) hide-and-seek detective story. It
> is secondly a hermeneutic error which blocks the way to a full
> understanding of the novel.
> The novel must not be "solved";
> it must be read on two different planes at the same time, so
> that the two sources of light that are Shade and Kinbote produce the
> holographic image which is the ultimate goal of PF. (a variation on
> the "nonnon" metaphor of my previous post)
>
> Now,
> here's how I see the general structure of the novel, the lines along
> which the novel is built:
> Shade and Kinbote are two separate
> characters on one plane, with all the comedy and poignancy.
> They
> are one and the same entity on a parallel plane, but Kinbote is not
> Shade's "secondary repressed personality",
> Shade is not
> a hypocrit , whose real personality is revealed by Kinbote as your
> comment seems to imply.
> Kinbote is a fictionalized projection of
> some aspects of Shade's personality, more precisely former
> aspects which he more or less managed to overcome -this explains why
> Kinbote is younger than Shade- ; Kinbote's tribulations are a
> fictionalization of how Shade overcame his personal difficulties
>
>
> Now, I'll give an example of how I
> support my hypothesis:
> That Shade and Kinbote are one entity
> is hinted at from the first, in the foreword, when Kinbote recounts
> his first tête-à-tête with Shade; it takes place outside
> Parthenossicus Hall; now, the name of these creepers derives
> from the Greek parthenos, "virgin" because of their
> ability to form seeds without pollination. Parthenogenesis is
> a clonal mode of reproduction; the offspring are therefore clones. A
> few lines before and after the mention of Parthenocissus
> Hall, several doublings
> occur: first at the end of the previous paragraph when Kinbote is
> asked why he has installed two
> ping-pong tables in his basement, a question he strangely evades;
> then, while he stands on the porch with the poet, a snowflake settles
> on Shade's wrist watch. "Crystal to crystal" says Shade,
> twinning his watch
> glass and the snowflake and giving birth in the reader's mind to the
> image of the falling snowflake fusing
> with its reflection on the wrist glass, two
> becoming one; and
> finally they observe two
> lads similarly dressed
> in colourful winter clothes -retrospectively evoking Charles Xavier
> escape in a red winter outfit.
> Aside
> from these arresting clonal images, the reader feels that this scene
> has a strange charge to it -I think every PF reader remembers it even
> after a first reading- : the stillness (they stand on the porch), the
> deliberate slowness (Kinbote pulls his gloves on, finger by finger)
> the suspended time (Shade is waiting for his wife who is apparently
> late) ... something strange is taking place: a parthénogenetic split
> giving birth to Kinbote and Shade.
>
>
> This
> is the place in the novel where the second, parallel plane takes off,
> while the "straight story" -as David Lynch would say-, or
> the first plane proceeds its way. When the two planes come into
> contact, this is when the reader feels the teasing mystery.
> Laurence