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Re: Nabokov and Twelve-Year-Old Girls ...
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RSGwynn: [to JM's this is a very good line of argumentation, considering
Quilty "as an invention within the invention"...] So HH wrote the Foreword
under the pseudonym of John Ray, Jr., Ph. D., and then conveniently died in
prison a few days before his trial for the figurative murder of CQ? More
meta- than this fiction needs, I think.
JM: Is it always necessary to resort to meta-fiction while exploring the
possible worlds of a novel? How shall we consider the status of "Gradus" in
"Pale Fire," or Kinbote's reports about his actual delusions?
If Humbert Humbert had simply been transfered from the psychopathic ward
to an insane asylum after committing a crime, his notes and John Ray,Jr.'s
foreword would fit into the ordinary scheme of the novel. HH might even have
killed some other guy who he thought had been his nymphet's stalker and
abductor (like J.Shade's murder, instead of J.Goldsworth's, in PF, as another
reference to VN's father's assassination in Berlin?).
I'm sure thatVN continually returned to the "primal scene" of his father's
assassination, which could not have been less than the most significant
event of his whole life. I don't think that Humbert's murder of CQ is very
relevant here, but the accidental murder of JS probably is, at least in some
remote autobiographical way.
Did Humbert murder CQ? Yes, if we believe that he is being held in
solitary confinement (after being in a psychiatric ward) before his trial, where he
writes "Lolita, or "The Confession of a White, Widowed Male" in the time
leading up to its beginning. He is spared the trial by his "fortunate" death
(kind of like Krug's madness in BS). If you disagree with this, you must
(1) come up with an alternate crime that HH is being held and tried for
(driving on the wrong side of the road?); or (2) a belief that someone can be
tried for the crime of "figurative murder."
I won't even go into the whole Gradus thing except to ask one simple
question: Why did VN go to such pains to establish the Goldsworth/Grey connection
except as foreshadowing to give a "rational" explanation as to why JS (who
resembled the Judge and was just outside his house) was shot by an escaped
madman as a result of mistaken identity? Red herrings galore? I don't think
so. Gradus is Kinbote's fantasy (How does he know about the various movements
of Gradus in Europe, for example, except from reports from his equally
fantastical sources, which may be totally his own invention?).
Doesn't Kinbote say something like "Lord, make it stop"? There are plenty
of clues that he is V. Botkin, in thrall to a second, now stronger identity.
RSG
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