JF [answering: Charles Kinbote
used the same emblem as did Sebastian Knight in VN's former novel. How do
you interpret this?] Chess was one of Nabokov's main interests,
and provides convenient "logos" ...I'm afraid I don't see any more than
that.
[answering: Do you think he was lying in the foreword and on
his commentaries?] Previously, I felt sure that large amounts of
the foreword and notes were his delusions. Zembla, for instance.
Given that, it's hard to tell whether he's lying too... I'd say that a
great deal of it--at least--is not supposed to be fictionally "real".[...]Does
this tell us something about Shade's mental health? I don't see it.
But then such parallels between scenes are the kind of thing I usually
don't see. All this assumes the events "really happen", which I've just been
arguing we can't rely on.
JM:I gather you don't find any
particular point in this setting side by side both TRLSK's
narrator (and quasi-'usurper') and PF's commentator ( and
'usurper') by their having chosen a black chess-piece as a "logos."
Indeed, it is a curiosity that seems to lead nowhere. Just as I suddenly realized that very few character-names
chosen by VN have initials with M or bear an "m" anywhere
else (Gerald Emerald, Maud, Marina, Mary and Humbert are
some of the few - not counting the anagrams of the Darkbloom
kind). This "m" rarity seems totally
unintentional and is probably insignificant.
When I asked about the lie I was wondering in relation
to Kinbote's various references to his trip to Cedarn, but not in general -
although delusional people can also lie, too. What really happened in
PF, for me, is the materiality of a 999-line poem.
PS: Another sentence that
suggests the Venerable Bede's parable about the swallow that irrupts from
darkness into a lighted warm room, crosses it and proceeds
into another cold darkness (connected by P.Meyer to Pale Fire, also
found in Ada, TRLSK and is archive-googable
elsewhere) to add to the collection, now from
VN's short-story Time and Ebb:
"they have vanished like that
flock of swans which passed with a mighty swish of multitudinous wings one
spring night about Knights Lake in Maine, from the unknown into the
unknown." (Knopf, p.582)