Dear Carolyn,

You encourage me. There may be too many merry cooks in this broth already, but I don’t need much encouragement, so here goes.

Carroll’s Wonderland and Looking-Glass are two of the greatest and most memorable literary works in English of the 19^th century, just as VN’s Lolita and Pale Fire are two of the ditto in the 20^th century.

Wonderland is an account of a child’s introduction to, or initiation into, the hideous and nastily coercive world of adulthood; Looking-Glass is a reflection on identity and reality. Wonderland is visceral; it is disturbing, uneasy and unpleasant. Looking-Glass is cerebral; light, hyper-rational and enjoyable.

These terms apply equally to Lolita and Pale Fire: the similarities are more striking than the differences. All four books use the English language in an exceptionally playful manner. Language is perceived as inherently misleading and ambiguous; in a word, inadequate, as a means of penetrating the mysteries of existence. Impenetrability, as Humpty Dumpty’s dismissal has it. I would suggest that Pale Fire is ultimately impenetrable. Metamorphosis is also a theme in all four books.

The structure of Wonderland, the enchanted, or more precisely distorted, place, is that of a deck of cards. The story ends in disintegration: society collapses like a house of cards, which reminds me, at least, of Lolita.

Looking-Glass, however, is structured on the game of chess. Bretwit might be a variation of the game. One of the features of chess is that the white and black (or in Carroll’s book, red, ie Zemblan) pieces begin by being set up as mirror-images of each other. In chess it is possible for each side exactly to replicate the initial three or four moves. Beyond a certain point, however, interference takes place and the entanglement of the pieces swiftly develops into infinite complexity, of an order exceeding the number of atoms in the universe.

Alice, in passing through the looking-glass, is the waxwing that flies on. Carroll once placed a little girl in front of a mirror, and told her to hold an apple in her left hand. He then asked her in which hand her image was holding the apple; and was delighted to be given the right answer.

Both the four-suited pack of cards and the chess-board are symmetrical constructs. Human language, and thought itself, I suggest, would be impossible without mankind’s propensity to classify, and arrange its sense-data in symmetrical form. Light is not conceivable without darkness. Words are simply classifications of perceptions. Chess would not be playable if all the pieces and all the squares were the same colour.

Dualism is therefore a necessary prerequisite for human communication. Monism, in my limited understanding, leads to a Nirvana-like state where everything is nothing, or vice versa; light and dark merge; there is no communication, and the ego melts into the infinite. The state is amusingly expressed in Andrew Lang’s parody of Emerson’s Brahma: “I am the batsman and the bat” etc.

Can the dualistic propensity and the monistic longing be reconciled? I seem to remember that someone on this thread mentioned the kaleidoscope. All four books, LC’s and VN’s are kaleidoscopic, while at the same time retaining the semblance of a linear narrative. The sequence of events, in a sense, are chopped up and deposited in a kaleidoscope. This satisfies the reader’s desire for pattern, while at the same time any slight disturbance of the cylinder will alter that pattern, which is never to be repeated --- provided there are a sufficient number of pieces. The miniimum number would either be 32 (chess pieces), 52 (cards) or 64 (chess squares). A kaleidoscope is an extremely pleasing toy.

Well, that’s enough of that. Now for something different. I think it is in his Eugen Onegin that VN refers to a “translator” who is so abominable that he can’t bring himself to mention the person by name. I have always wanted to believe that this person must be none other than Ezra Pound, whose productions, personality and politics would assuredly be abhorrent to Nabokov. Can anyone offer any support for this assumption?

Charles Harrison Wallace