As I wrote earlier, we transformed the
"multiple personality disorder" into an axiom... If one thinks about all
the "matching" & hidden references and correspondences bt. poem and
commentary/index and when one accepts that:
(a) an American poet wrote Pale Fire and his
unpublished cards were taken over by someone else;
(b) the person who edited and wrote
commentaries and the index of the stolen poem invented everything
else.
we must suppose that the impostor must have had
intimate knowledge about the poet's circle of friends, biographical data, shared
his interest in Pope and English poetry and created those correspondences in
retrospect in a hidden form, not only as explicitly as present in the
commentary. This person might have been a male
homosexual psychotic, but probably could have been as sane as
Sybil...
If, Shade should he have been a psychotic
( one with Russian ascendants) he might still have been capable of
authoring "Pale Fire" ( before the final outcome of
their mental-illness - and also after it - T. Tasso,
Hölderlin, Artaud, Nietzsche were superior poets and writers. Even President Schreber (an Austrian judge who wrote
his "Memoirs") often retained his acumen on several occasions after his
last crisis, at 51 ( like Kinbote?) - but it was Freud himself who acted a
some kind of "commentator" for Schreber´s memoirs.
In this case, there would be no "external Kinbote"
exhibiting observable Kinbotean behavior or living at Judge
Goldsmith's house and taking part of academic life in New
Wye. It is totally unnecessary to imagine
that Shade appeared as Kinbote corporeally and next reverted back
to Shade before becoming Kinbote again. Shade's delusions might have only
gained expression in a written form, while organizing the
commentary and the index and he'd be careful to mix mirrorlike elements in
both poem and commentary.
Another conjecture would lead us to
imagine it was envious Sybil herself who became mad
( because of the grief she felt or didn't feel for her
daughter) . She took possession of her dead husband's poems ( who
could have been killed by Jack Grey since Shade resembled the Judge, a
"true factual element" ) and then added her own contributions,
now under Charles Kinbote. She might
even have created his name after inventing a Xavier to add to Shade' s
Francis and, having once met a Dr. Botkin, arrived at the name
Kinbote. Her husband's knowledge of
Alexander Pope filtered through her and inspired her version
of Zembla. The hitch, the most obvious
one in this improvisation, would be her lack of Russian and Russia's
cultural and geographical background. Still, what do we know about
Sybil? She even might have been a Russian "dormant" spy ( I ignore the
correct expression for that) who broke down after her daughter's
and husband's deaths. Or...
Jansy