> Dear Jerry,
>
> So since we're all enjoying, let's continue:
>
> >Is it [Kinbote's noisy attempts to spy on Shade] a metaphor in the
> usual sense? If you say your love is a red, red rose, you're
> consciously thinking about the similarities.
>
> I think it is a sort of metaphor, or maybe a kind of pun? in the sense
> that Kinbote's noisemaking indicates that as his presence is impinging
> more on the Shades he becomes more of a nuisance.

My feeling is that, to have a complete theory, you need to say
more on this "indicating". Is Kinbote indicating such impacts
purposely or by accident?

> >Are you envisioning that Kinbote remembers verging towards Shade's
> consciousness inside him and deliberately decides to portray that as
> spying on the Shades and banging garbage cans? Or that he unconsciously
> distorts his memory of one into the other? Either one breaks my WSOD
> (as the science-fiction fans call it on Usenet).
>
> Sorry - - WSOD?

> No, I don't envision it this way. Perhaps the best
> response is to direct you to VN's lecture on J&H, in which he goes into
> the relationship of the two personalities - - each separate from the
> other, but also sharing some characteristics of the other. Unfortunately
> the question of shared memory doesn't arise in J&H, so it will be less
> helpful there.

> >Quite different, in my view, from a sufferer from MPD having an
> internal conversation. The former happens a lot in reality as well as
> fiction (smacking oneself on the forehead, "Idiot!"); the latter is
> unprecedented
>
>...so you can't hold VN to precedents, can you?
> He's allowed to invent.

Yes, but I think he has to pile on too many inventions. It's one
thing to expect readers to infer what a delusional character's
real name is, and another thing to expect us to infer something
with one unprecedented feature after another. The latter would
need much stronger evidence, in my opinion.

> > But in general it seems to me that Kinbote is believable when he talks
> about Shade and his family (who was born when, what their names are,
> what they were like, who had an affair with whom)
>
> (WIth the exception of Carolyn Shade's nationality.)
>
> >Yes, but that is because of his own relationship to her, which he is
> hiding from the reader. Doesn't Shade make some reference to a brother
> he has to protect? This "brother" would have to be Kinbote, who shares
> the same parents and probably got Shade into some trouble on occasion..

I don't remember anything like that from Shade. Protecting a
brother shows up in one of Kinbote's similes: "... he, my sweet
awkward old John, kept clawing at me and pulling me after him,
back to the protection of his laurels, with the solemn fussiness
of a poor lame boy trying to get his spastic brother out of the
range of the stones hurled at them by schoolchildren, once a
familiar sight in all countries." [n. 1000]

Someone has undoubtedly noticed the possible wishful implication
that poetic honors (laurels) can provide protection, when only
the poem is "the inviolable Shade", to tie in to comments by Jansy
(on /Ada/), Matthew, and Tiffany.

> >But you do absolutely believe some things that he claims he took part
> in, as that Shade looked like a tipsy witch.
>
> Well, I guess as anyone who has to determine what to believe and what to
> doubt you look for corroborating evidence.

> Shade looking like a tipsy
> witch following all those strokes in Canto IV (not my favorite) add up
> to something that makes sense to me. That doesn't mean that I can make
> it add up to something that makes sense to you, of course.

> >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.
>
> I've always thought the "indivisible monist" remark was probably a joke.
> I recall that Pnin has an attack during which, to his horror, he begins
> to dissolve into the wall paper. I don't think VN was particularly
> interested in finding Nirvana.
...

I was hoping someone who understands this would answer, but I
don't think VN was talking the "thou art that" kind of monism in
which all things are one. I think he meant monism the opposite
of matter-spirit dualism, that is, he made no division of the
universe into the two substances of matter and spirit.
...

> >The cerebral sclerotides I looked at often cause motor problems, but it
> seems hard to believe that if Shade's motor problems were caused by it,
> a doctor would have overlooked them.

Fortunately, they don't cause people to confuse the plural of
-itis (-itides) with the plural of -osis (-oses). So there's
some other reason that I misspelled "scleroses".

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