I only realized today that the murder of Shade by Gradus/Gray had been announced in the very first lines of his poem when the poet, posthumously ( "I was the shadow... slain" ), notes, that he also was "ashen fluff" ( an ash gray powdery bundle)...
Quite surprising to discover how slow a reader I am.

I followed an old exchange in one of the internet discussion groups where the participants were chatting about "the overt and almost startling appearance of the Joycean artist paring his finger nails at the end of Bend Sinister".

The discussants also pointed out how, in VN's novels, "our perceptions of reality are being carefully limited and directed by an overseeing stage manager. We are not to believe that the characters have any reality beyond the mind of their creator."

"I stand before the window and I pare / My fingernails and vaguely am aware" - or, "And so I pare my nails, and muse, and hear" ( line 245). And yet, when asked by Alfred Appel about this apparent allusion to Joyce, VN replied: "Neither Kinbote nor Shade, nor their maker, is answering Joyce in "Pale Fire". Actually, I never liked "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man". I find it a feeble and garrulous book. The phrase you quote is an unpleasant coincidence." ("Strong Opinions", 70-71).

( NB: Joyce's words were: " The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails." In A Portrait of the Artist as a Youn Man, chap. V, page 245, Penguin Books, 1996)

Despite the comings and goings what I wanted to discuss was the idea about the omniscient author in his ivory (or ivy) tower, here taken in the controling sense of the "model-author" as described by Umberto Eco in relation to a "model-reader" (following his slightly difference with Wolfgand Iser. Cf. "Six Walks in the Fictional Woods",Norton Lectures, 1994: Chapter One) - as suggesting not G.M Hopkins, not Eliot, not even Joyce - but arising as a consequence of the marvelous blend of voices and unreliable narrators misleading the readers.

Following Bentham's architectural plans for a "Panopticon" I'm actually suggesting that both characters and readers in "Pale Fire" are isolated in their private cells. They only interact thorugh the discrete commands that issue from the central tower in the "Grim Pen prison" where the eternal Author remains invisible. They may sink and die in Grimpenmire, but some of them survive to discuss one thing or another in a VN List...

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