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THOUGHTS: NYHT Interview (three options for coincidences in PF)
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Matt Roth writes:
Thanks to Jerry Friedman for once again making clear that there isn't
any evidence of Kinbote's Zemblan fantasy appearing before May or June
1959. That doesn't mean it wasn't there, just that we can't prove it.
As for the note to line 894, I agree that it is not evidence of an
actual Zembla. I do think, though, that it is a crucial note because it
casts doubt not only on the events described in the note but on
Kinbote's whole New Wye narrative. If Kinbote can make up the exchanges
in this note--and these events are impossible--then we should question
the veracity of all Kinbote's supposed interactions with residents of
New Wye, including John and Sybil. Nabokov must have realized that 894
complicates things in a way that goes beyond anything else in the New
Wye narrative. I suggest that there is method to that madness.
The Botkin conundrum is of course an important question, but its
solution doesn't solve the larger structural puzzle of the
novel--namely, how do we explain all of the correspondences between the
poem and commentary? As Brian Boyd has rightly pointed out, there are
simply too many coincidences. Here is Brian's excellent summation from
December 1997:
-----------------------
Can I just remind readers of a very few of the problems, the suspicious
particulars, that no one seems to want to recall?
The dates (Shade, Kinbote and Gradus all share the same birthday, surely
a strikingly gratuitous coincidence if it leads nowhere; the Shadow
Gradus is assigned the killing of Kinbote--which will lead to his
slaying Shade--on the very day Shade writes "I was the shadow of the
waxwing slain," on the very day according to the Shadean hypothesis when
Shade begins to write a poem right at the end of which he will feign his
own death).
The names (Kinbote, who has written a book on surnames--a clear
Nabokovian hint that we should look closely at and think about his
name--has a name that means the bote or compensation "given by a
murderer to the family of the victim").
The echoes (the waxwing-like bird in Charles II’s coat of arms; the
reflection of his red outfit and the deep-blue sky in a pool as he
escapes from Zembla, in a striking echo of the red-streaked waxwing and
the azure reflected sky of the poem’s opening lines; the clockwork Negro
gardener and barrow at the end of Canto 1, just before Shade is first
"Tugged at by playful death," and the clock, the Negro gardener and
barrow at the end of Canto 4, just before he apparently steps off to his
death; Shade says he is "ready to become a floweret or a fat fly, but
never to forget," and Kinbote and Botkin are each equated with fat flies
[Kinbote: "an elephantine tick; a king-sized botfly; a macaco worm
[Webster’s Second: "the larva of a botfly (_Dermatobia hominis_),
parasitic on man and monkeys in South America"]; the monstrous parasite
of genius, "171-72; Botkin, "king- bot, maggot of extinct fly that once
bred in mammoths and is thought to have hastened their phylogenetic
end,!
" 306; a connection first noticed by Shadean Chris Ackerley of Dunedin,
New Zealand, and again pointed out to me privately by another Shadean,
John Morris of Washington, D.C.]); the name of the man who kills Shade,
if reversed as in a mirror, yields "Sudarg of Bokay," "a mirror-maker of
genius," and Shade, in a mirror image of genius, says he imagines
projecting himself beyond death, and living on in a reflected sky—a
realm that has striking similarities with "blue inenubilable Zembla,"
the "land of reflections").
--------------------------------
Add to these the coincidence of Kinbote's Zembla and its appearance in
Pope (Shade's favorite poet) and "Pale Fire," along with the sot a hero,
lunatic a king storyline. And several more. How do we respond to all of
these coincidences? It seems to me that we have three options:
1. We can ignore them.
2. We can say that they simply reveal VN's role as pattern-maker. In
effect, all these coincidences are an analogy: Nabokov is to his
fictipawns / and ebon fauns) are to us.
3. We must account for them some other way.
*I have not included here the notion that Kinbote, inspired by the poem,
intentionally adds all these connections. Brian Boyd has convincingly
debunked this idea in both his works on PF.
While I respect those who go for Option 2, it is unsatisfying to me
because it essentially removes the significance of the connections from
the fictive plane in which they appear. There are multiple fictive
planes within Pale Fire, but VN doesn't actively involve himself in any
of them--certainly not to a Pninian degree. To say that these
connections should not be accounted for via the characters and their
actions devalues the very world VN has created. At the very least,
Option 2 should be a last resort, only employed if Option 3 is
untenable. Brian Boyd points us to what VN wrote in Ada: "Some law of
logic should fix the number of coincidences in a given domain, after
which they cease to be coincidences, and form, instead, the living
organism of a new truth."
Fortunately, we have at least two other possibilities for Option 3. (I
am not counting the pure Shadean theory, which I think has been debunked
for good.) The first, of course, is Boyd's notion that the ghosts of
Hazel and John Shade are involved in writing the commentary. The other,
still hatching, is the idea that Kinbote is a secondary personality of a
broken John Shade. In this theory, John Shade has indeed become that
"violet" (pansy, homosexual) and "fat fly" (botfly). Both theories have
their difficulties. I have said before that I have a hard time
believing that John Shade would assist Kinbote, given that Kinbote is so
hateful towards Sybil, and while I am convinced that Hazel does become
the Red Admirable, I still don't see enough evidence of her hand
(brushfoot?) guiding the commentary. On the other hand, as I try to
piece together the MPD theory, I still am troubled as to how V. Botkin
can be wedged into scenario. Despite all these difficulties, both
Brian's t!
heory and the MPD theory at least attempt to explain MORE of the novel,
not less.
Best,
Matt Roth
Search the archive: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/archives/nabokv-l.html
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Thanks to Jerry Friedman for once again making clear that there isn't
any evidence of Kinbote's Zemblan fantasy appearing before May or June
1959. That doesn't mean it wasn't there, just that we can't prove it.
As for the note to line 894, I agree that it is not evidence of an
actual Zembla. I do think, though, that it is a crucial note because it
casts doubt not only on the events described in the note but on
Kinbote's whole New Wye narrative. If Kinbote can make up the exchanges
in this note--and these events are impossible--then we should question
the veracity of all Kinbote's supposed interactions with residents of
New Wye, including John and Sybil. Nabokov must have realized that 894
complicates things in a way that goes beyond anything else in the New
Wye narrative. I suggest that there is method to that madness.
The Botkin conundrum is of course an important question, but its
solution doesn't solve the larger structural puzzle of the
novel--namely, how do we explain all of the correspondences between the
poem and commentary? As Brian Boyd has rightly pointed out, there are
simply too many coincidences. Here is Brian's excellent summation from
December 1997:
-----------------------
Can I just remind readers of a very few of the problems, the suspicious
particulars, that no one seems to want to recall?
The dates (Shade, Kinbote and Gradus all share the same birthday, surely
a strikingly gratuitous coincidence if it leads nowhere; the Shadow
Gradus is assigned the killing of Kinbote--which will lead to his
slaying Shade--on the very day Shade writes "I was the shadow of the
waxwing slain," on the very day according to the Shadean hypothesis when
Shade begins to write a poem right at the end of which he will feign his
own death).
The names (Kinbote, who has written a book on surnames--a clear
Nabokovian hint that we should look closely at and think about his
name--has a name that means the bote or compensation "given by a
murderer to the family of the victim").
The echoes (the waxwing-like bird in Charles II’s coat of arms; the
reflection of his red outfit and the deep-blue sky in a pool as he
escapes from Zembla, in a striking echo of the red-streaked waxwing and
the azure reflected sky of the poem’s opening lines; the clockwork Negro
gardener and barrow at the end of Canto 1, just before Shade is first
"Tugged at by playful death," and the clock, the Negro gardener and
barrow at the end of Canto 4, just before he apparently steps off to his
death; Shade says he is "ready to become a floweret or a fat fly, but
never to forget," and Kinbote and Botkin are each equated with fat flies
[Kinbote: "an elephantine tick; a king-sized botfly; a macaco worm
[Webster’s Second: "the larva of a botfly (_Dermatobia hominis_),
parasitic on man and monkeys in South America"]; the monstrous parasite
of genius, "171-72; Botkin, "king- bot, maggot of extinct fly that once
bred in mammoths and is thought to have hastened their phylogenetic
end,!
" 306; a connection first noticed by Shadean Chris Ackerley of Dunedin,
New Zealand, and again pointed out to me privately by another Shadean,
John Morris of Washington, D.C.]); the name of the man who kills Shade,
if reversed as in a mirror, yields "Sudarg of Bokay," "a mirror-maker of
genius," and Shade, in a mirror image of genius, says he imagines
projecting himself beyond death, and living on in a reflected sky—a
realm that has striking similarities with "blue inenubilable Zembla,"
the "land of reflections").
--------------------------------
Add to these the coincidence of Kinbote's Zembla and its appearance in
Pope (Shade's favorite poet) and "Pale Fire," along with the sot a hero,
lunatic a king storyline. And several more. How do we respond to all of
these coincidences? It seems to me that we have three options:
1. We can ignore them.
2. We can say that they simply reveal VN's role as pattern-maker. In
effect, all these coincidences are an analogy: Nabokov is to his
fictipawns / and ebon fauns) are to us.
3. We must account for them some other way.
*I have not included here the notion that Kinbote, inspired by the poem,
intentionally adds all these connections. Brian Boyd has convincingly
debunked this idea in both his works on PF.
While I respect those who go for Option 2, it is unsatisfying to me
because it essentially removes the significance of the connections from
the fictive plane in which they appear. There are multiple fictive
planes within Pale Fire, but VN doesn't actively involve himself in any
of them--certainly not to a Pninian degree. To say that these
connections should not be accounted for via the characters and their
actions devalues the very world VN has created. At the very least,
Option 2 should be a last resort, only employed if Option 3 is
untenable. Brian Boyd points us to what VN wrote in Ada: "Some law of
logic should fix the number of coincidences in a given domain, after
which they cease to be coincidences, and form, instead, the living
organism of a new truth."
Fortunately, we have at least two other possibilities for Option 3. (I
am not counting the pure Shadean theory, which I think has been debunked
for good.) The first, of course, is Boyd's notion that the ghosts of
Hazel and John Shade are involved in writing the commentary. The other,
still hatching, is the idea that Kinbote is a secondary personality of a
broken John Shade. In this theory, John Shade has indeed become that
"violet" (pansy, homosexual) and "fat fly" (botfly). Both theories have
their difficulties. I have said before that I have a hard time
believing that John Shade would assist Kinbote, given that Kinbote is so
hateful towards Sybil, and while I am convinced that Hazel does become
the Red Admirable, I still don't see enough evidence of her hand
(brushfoot?) guiding the commentary. On the other hand, as I try to
piece together the MPD theory, I still am troubled as to how V. Botkin
can be wedged into scenario. Despite all these difficulties, both
Brian's t!
heory and the MPD theory at least attempt to explain MORE of the novel,
not less.
Best,
Matt Roth
Search the archive: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/archives/nabokv-l.html
Search archive with Google:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm