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Re: THOUGHTS: Shade's Mockingbird (corrections from JF)]]
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jansymello <jansy@AETERN.US> wrote: I want to thank Studdard for his comforting comments because, before JF's clarification arrived, I felt that I'd been too clumsy for words...
J.A.: I can be a comforter as well. As a dyed in the polymer fabric American, your English is awesome.
communication with the dead, & father-daughter incest were placed in Pale Fire (1962) either as a trap to discredit viennese quacks, an indication leading onto something else
J.A.: I agree with Jansy, in my own way, for a couple reasons. Nabokov's tone is always so blithely eloquent that it never reads as if Nabokov himself were really convinced of anything. (about the "otherworld", on subjects such as "nympholepsy" for instance Nabokov can make it seem deadly convincing). Like Jansy I always thought he was just making up models for the possible. Pale Fire, to me seems especially un-otherworldly. Here we have a novel about a man who writes a poem about looking for a way out of life, submerged in the notes of a crazy narrator who wants to see in a poem that has nothing whatsoever to do with him minute reflections of his own concerns so as to justify the loss in his life--for the brief span of the novel this reference mania is catching, reflections between poem, the commentator's life, and his colorful multi-faceted fantasy wink and sparkle at us through the prose like the hidden jewels, but an "answer" always eludes us, even whether or not
Zembla is "real" or not hasn't been definitively pinned down. I thought the sense of an answer always eluding our passionate readerly search was the point. Doesn't Shade's epiphany over the "mountain" "fountain" confusion point to this. What's imortant is that one feels there must be something more than this life, and that the complex skein of the phenomena existence reflects this. When we look too hard, become obsessed, the pattern his characters think they can find in life becomes a distorted mirror of their egos, hence Kinbote's attempt to assimilate the poem to his lost-kindom, which was probably only just a delusion anyway.
... more than a matter of religious faith, when we remember that only commonsense rules immortality out
J.A.: Jansy's finds good quotes to show the whimsical nature of Nabokov's none the less constant and consistent metaphysical thinking. The funny thing to me is that really its the other way around though. The common-sensical people are the ones who believe in an after-life.
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