Dear Carolyn,
I really don’t have a low opinion of Stevenson’s J & H, and I can understand why the young Nabokov enjoyed it so much. I think I read it at about the same age that VN read it, but my reading was that of an American child in the 1960s. One of my other favorite authors at that age was Ian Fleming, and, along with watching the 007 movies (Sean Connery — the only real Bond), I had also seen on TV the J & H movie (1930s? Lon Chaney?) I read and enjoyed Stevenson’s story, but not with the mind of a brilliant and aristocratic young Russian in the early years of the last century.
So, I stick by the views I expressed in my last post — including my belief that, in his mature years, VN knew that he was the superior artist. VN’s serenely confidant conviction that he would eventually be acknowledged as one of the truly great writers of his time was freely expressed and well documented. For this reason, among others, I doubt that the 60-ish VN was still so impressed with Jekyll/Hyde as to make it the keystone of one of his greatest novels, rather than rely on his own potent imagination to fill that space.
As Boyd describes in “The American Years,” when VN chose Stevenson he also chose work from Washington Irving, Benjamin Constant, Maupassant, Austen, Pushkin, Dickens, Gogol, Flaubert, Kafka, Mann, Tolstoy, and Chekov. Although he didn’t consign RLS to the same severe category as the gravely flawed Mann, there’s nothing to show that, at the age at which he wrote PF, he was still under the influence of an old boyhood favorite.
As for versipels, again, I stick with my original view. It was the right word, the right image, for Shade to have his readers see -- this beast of a muse, like Sinbad’s Old Man of the Sea, or Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner with his albatross, or William Burroughs with a monkey on his back [warning: joke].
To plagiarize myself, yes, one’s muse can be angelic, and one’s muse can be demonic, and when your muse requires you to dissect the death of your daughter, and your own inevitable death, than your muse can certainly be an evil entity. As for the word versipel also meaning a changeling, I just don’t think VN required his readers to dig that deeply into this one image in this instance. It’s an interesting thought, in regard to a work in which a change -- from life to death -- is such a major theme. But I see no bold lycanthropy fascination running a race with lepidopteral imagery through VN’s work. I could be wrong.
Actually, the story that approaches the closest to the themes of Pale Fire is Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilich. Here we have one of the finest stories ever written, a story that moves with the impersonal and unstoppable pace of approaching night, as Tolstoy unveils scene after scene in the life of an ordinary man of worldly achievements and worldly concerns who one day is roughly pushed out of the path of worldly pleasure by an absurd accident. An accident that, incredibly, demands a detour onto the path of death. As steadily as the fall of water resounding in a cave, Ilich is forcibly marched into the final terrifying and degrading illness that will destroy all of life’s pleasure, all of one’s desperate hope, and, brutally, life itself. But then, in one of the greatest moments in fiction, just as worldly life ends, we find that it was merely a dream, and now that it has fled, the real and genuine life of the spirit, of the soul, can begin. In a shimmeringly brilliant way, VN tells a very similar tale. But where Tolstoy is guided by a stolid yet unorthodox faith, Nabokov champions a faith in the human spirit and the magic of the individual soul, which may very well be the same thing.
... and so to bed.
Andrew Brown
On 10/8/06 12:46 PM, "Carolyn Kunin" <chaiselongue@EARTHLINK.NET> wrote:
Dear Andrew,
For one thing, I think by the time he wrote PF, VN knew that he was an artist of an entirely higher order than RLS.
Do you have any evidence that he changed his mind? I don't think this has to do with who is the higher order of artist, but we know that VN was both fond of RLS and had a higher opinion of the story of J&H than you do.
One’s muse can be angelic, and one’s muse can be demonic.
The versipel is not just any demon, it is a changeling. Do you really think that VN chose this very odd word - - which doesn't even exist in most dictionaries - - because he needed a three syllable word meaning "demon"? He could have chosen from such words as Azazel, Ahriman, Mephisto, Apollyon, incubus, succubus, diablotin, poltergeist, devilkin, erlkönig, hobgoblin etc. Just a few from my Thesaurus. It seems to me that erlkönig would suit your interpretation very well and has the added value of having been referred to in the poem.
So why "versipel"? Why is Shade's muse a changeling?
Carolyn
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