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Has anyone mentioned that "nut" is slang for the head, and Kinbote is "off
his nut" or "nuts"?
I've already said what I have to say about the idea that Kinbote and Shade
are the same person. What interests me most in your post is the brain
motif, which I hadn't noticed, and how it relates to the theme of the
afterlife. The central materialist objection to survival after death is
that we know that when the brain temporarily stops working from a blow or
a stroke or a hit of some drug, the mind and soul and whatever stop too.
So why should the mind or soul continue when the brain stops permanently?
That argument, which Kinbote might make, seems implied by his (presumed)
brain damage, but Shade's possible counter-argument is also implied: it's
just at the moment when his brain stops working that he sees his vision
"not of our atoms". Maud's aphasia continues after she's not using a
brain any more, which seems extremely strange (or witty?) but relevant to
this question, as of course her survival is.
To answer one of Jansy's comments, we don't know whether Aunt Maud saw a
white fountain or not. She could never say.
If Zembla is supposed to resemble a brain, though, why is the western half
so much narrower than the eastern? And why is the country so phallic?
(Unless to say something slyly about Kinbote that's been said about many
men.)
If you'll forgive my talking about something that only I think is in the
book--I've argued that as even Shade knows that links and bobolinks in the
book were created by an author, we're supposed to conclude from similar
coincidences in reality that an Author created them. But I thought one
might object that we should be provided with examples from reality.
However, Kinbote's strictures on Eystein in the note to line 130 could be
Nabokov's answer; I have no idea what else they could have to do with.
(But then there /are/ a couple of real linguistic coincidences in the
book: that of crown-crow-cow, and another one that I thought of yesterday
but placed in an unreachable cell. So I don't know.)
Jerry Friedman