The last few weeks on the list have greatly aided me to several, reasonably firm but perhaps temporary, conclusions about PF, and I feel deeply obligated to all the contributions from every list member on all sides of this myriad-facetted topic, which, after the following summary, I shall do my utmost to abandon.

 

Basic premise: Accept that both halves of PF emanate entirely from the inventive mind of Botkin, a mad Russian, who is extremely difficult to place within the organisational structure of Wordsmith College. (Jerry Friedman).  Botkin, like VN, is both Kinbote and his Shade. Botkin is also the mirror image of “nikto b”, which might be translated “he would be nobody”. (Carolyn Kunin). VN remarked that when looking for his own name, he would often stumble upon Nobody. Botkin, the Nobody, is thus not a million millimetres away from VN himself. Cf Keats, my, your and VN’s favourite.

 

Accept, ergo, that Botkin is a reversed image of Nabokov. Nabokov also remarked that PF is “jolly”: ie the book’s ultimate and only begetter, VN not Botkin,  is a sane man with a highly developed sense of un-American humour, laughing at himself, as well as at oozily plodding ploughman poets and pedantic mediocre academics. He is having fun at the expense of all the Kinbotes who follow his train, and swallow his bait. I include myself.

 

The work of Pope that is distantly echoed in PF is not to be found in the manner  of  Shade’s “poetry”, with its frequent forced rhymes and clumsy enjambments (quite absent from Pope’s verse), but, rather, in Pope’s Dunciad.  VN’s pointer to Pope, expressed through Mary McCarthy’s apparently ghosted encomium, refers in this respect to PF, the book, as a whole.

 

Quote, from the Literary Encyclopedia website: The Dunciad Variorum (1729) is an expanded version of the first Dunciad (1728), with the mock-critical apparatus of “The Publisher's Advertisement”, “A  Letter to the Publisher”, “The Prolegomena of Martinus Scriblerus”  (including “Testimonies of Authors concerning our Poet and his Works” and “A Dissertation of the Poem”), “Notes Variorum”, seven (!) appendices and two (!) indexes.

 

Also Pope had remarked that “the life of a Wit is a warfare upon earth”; and he seized on what he considered to be pedantic fault-finding of the dullest kind as the final provocation.

 

Also: Pope's concern in his later poetry with what he saw as the impoverishment of contemporary British culture and society is nowhere more evident than in [his] final version of the poem. It expresses his deep dismay concerning the feared loss of Britain's literary, cultural and ethical inheritance. VN is less worried about contemporary culture, American, British or European, though he laments the loss of his own Russian language. Who can offer me an informed critical appraisal of the quality of VN’s Russian-language poetry?

 

Intermingled with the intermittent bathos of Shade’s poem, and the many startlingly obtuse observations in Kinbote’s commentary, are several of VN’s own, fairly sincerely held  views about life, death, immortality, scholarship and literary art. The deviousness, and creatively misleading pointers to a “solution” of the puzzles contained within the narrative are consistently sustained from  beginning to end. To take one simple instance, in the index, a “bodkin or botkin” can be many things but one thing it certainly is not, is a “Danish stiletto”.

 

Other titbits

 

VN must have known Carroll’s Poeta Fit Non Nascitur. A few lines leap out:

 

How shall I be a poet?

How shall I write in rhyme?

 

……… epithets, like pepper,

Give zest to what you write

 

First fix upon the limit

To which it shall extend:

Then fill it up with 'Padding' ………

 

Verse fit, poetry nascitur.

 

I also recollect that VN was quite a film fan. Besides the image of Tauret, which the description of Hazel’s swampy death brought to mind, I also thought of Hitchcock’s Psycho, 1960, which VN would most probably have recently seen, and how …. the swamp, a hideous black bog, swallows up Marion’s white car as efficiently as a toilet disposes of a load of crap. Out of sight, out of mind.  (Alan Vanneman http://www.brightlightsfilm.com/28/psycho1.html). Though Marion was out of sight, her car was distinctly unblurry, however.

 

Last night I happened to watch Bergman’s Persona, 1966, and ruminated on its thematic parallels with PF, ie the transference of identity from one person to another. The vast, unbridgeable  difference is that Bergman’s picture is utterly humourless. Talk about gloomy Scandinavians!

 

 

Envoi, coda, or more explicitly, tailpiece:

Having at last bagged a brace of Partridges (1955 & 1968), and spiced them with an exhaustingly exhaustive Booth (1977), it is clearer to me than ever that the OED is right, and that “Will” was no more standard Elizabethan slang not only for penis but also for vagina than, say, “Harry” is in 2006. Royal names. Ingram & Redpath refer to the apparently “common cant sense” (Booth p.466), but where are their examples? Quote, VN, 1962: "Criticism is valid only when illustrated with examples.”

Bill Shake, in his sonnets 135 and 136, is letting go the reins, and ballooning his propensity to quibble (that habit of his that so annoyed Johnson, but which he shares, to some extent, with VN) on his own name, à l’outrance, to encompass everything imaginable in the physical domain of human sexuality. Quote:  Shakespeare set about remaking the Elizabethan mind. … Nabokov, in praising the novel [form], speaks of the room its large form allows to the gratuitous, to "lovely irrelevancy". [Malouf].  

Bill did not, however, in this case succeed in remaking the standard meaning of “will” in the Elizabethan, or any later minds (except for the wilful scholars and Besserwisser of the 20^th century, headed by Alan Brien, 1964).  Given 48 hours, I might take “Harry” and, patterning a sonnet  on Sonnet 135, achieve something not unlike the effect produced by Shakespeare. I’d want to be paid, though. Harry, harry (molest), harrow, hairy, harass, hairy-ass and so forth. It would be easier with Tom and Dick, since Dick, at least, actually is current standard slang. D.H.Lawrence (not one of VN’s favourites?) also failed to create “standard slang” with his play on Lady Jane. Produce a minimum of  two or three other Elizabethan writers who demonstrate a standard slang meaning for “will” that is more specifically penile or vaginal  than “carnal desire”, and I’ll willingly concede.

Professor E.G.Stanley: In one view ... the history of scholarship is a history of error …..