Dear List,
 
I came too late to yesterday's debate. I sent in two quick replies to the postings that had been directly addressed to me but when I sat down to read the lot I felt stimulated enough to write more comments. After hesitating about the process of posting a queue of mails to our now over-burdened Editor, I opted for a kind of "omnibus". I must appologize in advance for the pretentiousness that seems to be hiding in such a project.  Please, read me as if I'd been the the husband who announces that, at home, he is always the one to have the last word.
He then adds: "I always say 'Yes, dear' ..."
 
C. Kunin answered to the objection about "two personalities calmly discussing the afterlife" as "I can think of at least one other literary example of this - - isn't Dodgson's Alice forever arguing with herself when there are no animals about to talk to?"  Charles H. Wallace added: 'Alice  "generally gave herself very good advice ... this curious child was very fond of pretending to be two people". S.Blackwell reminded us that "It is perhaps worth mentioning that in the one (?) other VN novel where an alternate personality is a definite trait of the narrator, The Eye...the narrator never converses with Smurov, his erstwhile self."  Alexey noted that there is another instance in The Gift "when the protagonist, Fyodor Konstantinovich Godunov-Cherdyntsev 'is reciting a fictitious dialogue with himself as supplied by a self-teaching handbook of literary inspiration.' Both times Fyodor's imaginary interlocutor is the poet Koncheev, who is, however, a separate character, not part of Fyodor's personality."
Samuel Beckett's "Texts for Nothing" ( particularly number 6) make me think about how would Kinbote's unwritten Cedarn stream of consciousness be -  and if they would also be pouring out from the various parts of his body and self, as shown in Beckett's very horizontal text. 
Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa wrote as Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis (etc). His "heteronym" Álvaro de Campos wrote: "Fernando Pessoa, strictly speaking, doesn't exist" so he, perhaps, might also have achieved "his own cancellation" ( Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, Penguin Books, 2002). In fact, the outcome was the opposite to Shade's "cancellation"....

Andrew Brown observed that, for him, the versipel is not "the conclusion.It sums up the series - the object in Shade's hand appears to change, so he calls it a versipel."  I agree with that, but I don't consider Jerry Friedman's comment as intentionally "conclusive" nor do I find any blatant contradiction with AB's words at this point. The image of "being groomed,shod and fed" (lying behind shoehorn,comb,spoon) was apparently created by AB himself and, actually, I like his specifications very much.
How interesting, there is a link between "mawkish" and Middle English "mawke/ maggot"!   I'm not sure, insectwise, if maggots and botfly larvae apply to the same kind of "worm". The first, as in "Hamlet", prove the continuity of the life force in general; the second, as an analogy, seem to be more specifically inclined?
 
Jerry Friedman wrote: "A Freudian origin for Shade's MPD would be like the Freudian story Humbert tells about the origin of his pedophilia, usually said to be a parody..."  Once again, I agree with him. 
Or... do I, really ? He seems to admit Shade's MPD as necessary to the plot, and I don't.   Even if Shade is Kinbote and has invented Botkin and Gradus, MPD is not the only possible interpretation. Neither do I think we must rely on the RLS Dr.Jekyll& Hyde story as VN's chief source of inspiration. 
 
Carolyn wrote about "her arsenal". Who shall be our sans-serifical Jack Grey, then ? ( here I bring up S.K-B's joke some postings ago). 
She mentioned that the 'OED confirmed my suspicion. "Jesuitical" means deceitful and cunning. In the program Father Fischer was vin-dicated, but I had another bit of evidence in my arsenal...'  How amazing.  I think this item must have been a Shadean contribution (not Kinbote's!), quite like the true story in Simon Winchester's book "The Professor and the Madman: A tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary". She considers that " Sybil, Hazel and Shade are the three main characters" and not Gradus, Kinbote and Shade. And yet, if PF bears any similarity with RLS' J&H, there would be no feminine "main characters" at all, would there?
 
Tiffany DeRewall calls our attention that "Shade is a Pope scholar, and Kinbote is a king from Zembla, a romanticized Utopia derived from Pope's "Essay on Man." Zembla's existence relies upon Shade's creation of it, as Kinbote notes(...) When Kinbote grasps the poem at Shade's "assassination,"  he quotes Matthew Arnold's The Scholar Gypsy,"  a poem about a scholar traveling through the mountains..."  A very elegant demonstration and wonderful interconnections, but I don't see them proving that Shade is Kinbote. Rather they might serve to show that Kinbote loved Shade to the point of identifying with him and shaping his infantile experiences as his adventures in Pope's Zembla. To this came the other poets, like Matthew Arnold, who added a special color to the creation. A queenly "blend", like the place name "Utana"?
 
Sergei Soloviev's contribution was quite precious to me, a very frank testimony about the hardships of itinerant immigrant life. When he wrote: "The difference between Shade and Kinbote lies not in the dimension of psychology and personality but in the style and cultural references" his conclusion seemed to be similar to my own ( which led me to abandon C.K's theory, at long last)  but, unlike my vague intuition, S.Soloviev's is grounded on his experience. 
He concluded with:  "essentially my argument is that the conjecture of the unique split personality doesn't fit with the process of artistic discovery of America by Nabokov, which, to my opinion, can be seen in the sequence of his novels, and if that conjecture would be true, most of the colours and shades that make so beautiful this novel would annihilate each other."  I don't see Shade as being as spiritual as S.S does ( and Andrew Brown, R.Rorty, B.Boyd...), nor do I place Shade among the most representative American poets, though ( Still, I don't side with Kinbote's rather contradictory, delusional and snobbish assessment of Shade as  "Appalachian"...  But I get SS's point and I admire him for it. 
 
Matthew Roth's contributions and the issues he raised are quite difficult.
In my opinion we have been arguing round and round because we transformed the "multiple personality disorder" into an axiom, without trying to see the matter from other different angles. For example, if (if) we followed plain common-sense and accepted that Shade and Kinbote are different people, we might then consider his poem in "isolation", ie: read it for the poem it is. Consequently all the other information concerning Kinbote's New Wye, Shade's or Sybil's words, the Zemblan department, maps and language would become part of another character's invention, someone who stole Shade's manuscript and created an entire novel around it. Since we would know nothing about Shade's life, except what he wrote down in his poem ( and he might also have invented bit and pieces in it about Sibil, Hazel and Aunt Maud) we would have to mistrust the commentator's ( Kinbote or Botkin...) information all the time. Just as Shade might have invented part of his biography, the commentator could have described "true facts" interspersed with his delusional constructions. If he were a psychotic  his homosexuality would either be explained using Freud's theories on "paranoia and homosexuality", or they would be part of our Author's parody of Freud's book about the case of President Schreber, even with bits of clinical material on child-abuse. 
 
Jansy

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