Jerry Friedman responds to Jim Twiggs:
You may have another claim to originality--if I understand
correctly that you're saying Nabokov unconsciously sabotaged
his poem for comic and thematic purposes. I don't agree
with this view, but I find it interesting.
The rest of this is a response to your original post.
In general, I don't want to debate the quality of the
poem, but I'll say that I think Matt Roth has at least begun
an explanation of how the shaving episode is "speaking of
evil and despair as no one has". In brief, what has foam
and blood around its mouth, and hair instead of clothes?
A mad dog or wolf, specifically a werewolf. Shade has
already mentioned versipels, and Matt connects the shaving
to the description in Ovid's /Metamorphoses/ of Lycaon
turned into a wolf. Shade sees himself as a monster, a
beast trying to look human.
I don't need to mention the additional connections to
lycanthropy in Matt's recent paper.
Though I think Shade is an admirable person in some ways,
I also think he sees himself as a werewolf because he knows
his irrational attitude toward Hazel's looks was part of what
drove her to suicide.
On the irony of Shade's saying he expects to be alive the
next day, if you're going to draw conclusions from that
statement's turning out to be false, I think you can also
draw conclusions from some of Shade's other statements'
being true. I don't see any doubt that Shade is right to
say he has a creator who takes pleasure in the "game of
worlds", including all those bobolinks.
Jerry Friedman