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Re: THOUGHTS on some recent postings
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Because I share Sergei Soloviev’s view of Pale Fire, I think it’s important to note that in focusing on his use, or misuse, of Freud’s name, Jansy Mello is passing over the main point of his message of March 9--which was, surely, offered in the same spirit as Mary McCarthy’s claim that the book is, among other wonderful things, “an infernal machine, a trap to catch reviewers, a cat-and-mouse game, a do-it-yourself novel.” A similar point, less kindly in tone than Sergei’s message, was made by John Leonard when he spoke of “Nabokov’s ice-blue disdain for the academic ninnyhammers who went snorting after his truffles.”
As for Carolyn Kunin’s theory, I find her basic idea more appealing by far than either of Boyd’s well-known interpretations or, for that matter, any of the so-called Shadean or Kinbotean single-narrator interpretations that are so well summarized in Boyd’s book. Here’s the relevant definition of “fugue” from my computer’s dictionary:
“2 Psychiatry a state or period of loss of awareness of one's identity, often coupled with flight from one's usual environment, associated with certain forms of hysteria and epilepsy.”
An example of a work of art supposedly inspired by this sense of “fugue” is David Lynch’s movie Lost Highway. For those interested in the fugue state, I would recommend, in addition to the books mentioned previously on the List, Ian Hackings’ Mad Travelers: Reflections on the Reality of Transient Mental Illness.
Although Shade may not be in physical flight, he is most certainly, even in his pre-breakdown days, in psychological flight from--what? Grief and guilt surely, not only for his daughter’s death but also his wife’s coldness (as shown in her treatment of Hazel), and of his own neglect of Hazel when she was alive (this even comes out in the formof his account of Hazel’s last hours). Rather than a physical ailment, his break might have been (for example) precipitated by a panic attack (think of Tony Soprano). And then, upon regaining consciousness, rather than finding himself tending bar in Needles, California (say), he finds himself stranded in the mind of a Kinbote, quite possibly living in an asylum, madly annotating a poem rather than writing one. This means, obviously, that the suicide that seems to be looming at the end of the book is Shade’s own. As he comes back to himself, if only in gleanings here and there, he will kill himself, etc. . . .
In whatever way she might work out the details--and I’ve no doubt she could improve immensely on my small sketch--I can easily imagine Carolyn writing a fascinating paper along these lines.
Having said all that, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t buy the theory. This is because, being on the side of Sergei in this matter, I stubbornly resist all totalizing, only-I-have-the-key interpretations of Pale Fire. The very idea that it would take FORTY-ODD YEARS for somebody to snort out The One True Truffle strikes me as absurd. If Allied Intelligence had been as incompetent as we readers of Pale Fire have supposedly been, we would all be marching to the tune of a Gradus right this minute. I would also like to think that Nabokov’s response to such an idea would be the same as his response to the idea of “the moment of truth” in the YouTube video recently featured in The New Yorker Online:
THE NEW YORKER
DECEMBER 2, 2008
LOST AND FOUND: NABOKOV’S MOMENT OF TRUTH
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2008/12/lost-and-found-1.html
One thing I’ve always agreed with Carolyn about (and Matt Roth too, I believe) is that Shade is not nearly as sane, as saintly, or as reliable as some readers seem, rather desperately in my opinion, to insist that he is. So perhaps, a little farther along on the video, when Nabokov speaks on the subject of humility, we might take this as a clue that he is not so admiring of his poet after all. For isn’t Shade, finally, just too damned humble and too damned sincere to be the authentic (another word that VN would be suspicious of) voice of the book’s author. Furthermore (at this point I’m not sure Carolyn would agree with me), is he really as good a poet as Boyd and Kinbote make him out to be, oozing as he does all that sincerity and sentimentality, and falling (as I contend) into lapses of taste, tone, rhythm, and puredy old triteness passing itself as wisdom? The genius of the poem is Nabokov’s, not Shade’s. And when Shade slips, it’s for a
purpose. This general question, about the poem’s intrinsic merits, has been hotly debated on the List a couple of times, so I won’t pursue it here. Mainly I want to say that in addition to agreeing with Sergei and admiring Carolyn’s insights, I’ve also benefited from Joseph Aisenberg’s postings about the larger meanings of the book. Like him, I believe the two-narrator view, besides being the most natural one to take, provides by far the strongest story, the strongest novel, the strongest work of art. Read this way, with two fullblooded characters, both mad for meaning and driven by wishful thinking on a grand scale, reflecting and bouncing back and forth off each other, Pale Fireis a great novel about reading and writing and trying thereby to find and make sense of ourselves and the world we live in. I take it that this is what Joseph is getting at when he speaks of “the urge to find that magical proof through a correspondence of visions”
arising from “a need in mankind both ridiculous and divine.”
Pale Fire is also, of course, a great book about loneliness and the failure to connect and a great book about--well, a good many other seemingly diverse and important matters. Like most great novels, it is psychologically sound without being based on theory. We scholars might need to refer to psychological texts to help us with our work (to pad it out, if nothing else), but most great novelists, and not a few minor ones, have no need of Freud or Charcot to describe, in a convincing way, bizarre states of mind and character.
If I’ve misunderstood anybody I’ve tried to agree with, I apologize.
Jim Twiggs
P.S. to Carolyn. I for one am more impressed by the idea of a fugue state than by the Jekyll-Hyde parallels, at least as you’ve so far tried to make them stick. As Joseph has pointed out, the Dr./Mr. thing seems actually to backfire on you. If it has any significance at all (and does everything in the book have to have significance, to be nail-downable to some precise big meaning?), it may well be along the following lines. When I entered the Cornell Philosophy Department as a grad student in 1960 (I’m even older than you and Stan, I’d wager), we newcomers were told to address or refer to our faculty members either as Mr. or Professor but never as Dr., regardless of the degrees any of them might hold. There was a kind of reverse snobbishness to this convention, the idea being that only the hicks on the state campus and the pretentious asses in the sciences (both hard and “human”) made a big deal of being called Dr. the instant they achieved
PhD-dom. So perhaps when Kinbote introduces himself as Dr. Kinbote, this is part of his indeed being the pretentious ass we quickly learn him to be. By the way, I have not tried to count or sort out all the different occurrences of the titles Prof. and Dr. that appear in the book and am not planning to do so anytime soon. By the way again, does Shade even have a PhD? I can’t remember. If he doesn’t, he would definitely not be called Dr.
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