Matt Roth: Nice catch, Jansy. Your observation (that Kinbote describes the cards, not VN) foregrounds a particularly thorny problem: how to discern the relative reliability of Kinbote's narrative details. Is his New Wye (and Cedarn) narrative reliable, while the Zemblan narrative is a fantasy? Is there a test we can use to discern the reliability of CK's statements?

 

JM: Actually there’s a loud amusement park of wheeling lights and noises all over the article in question.  Shade is recognizably a Nabokov creature (“the index cards that John Shade (like his maker, Nabokov) used for composing his poem”), whereas Kinbote is seen ambivalently, as a shameless commandant and impostor on the one hand, and as an equal or even identical to Nabokov on the other, as in “ printed exactly as Nabokov described them” (if his foreword in fact has furnished the necessary elements to construct the note-cards). My mind spins along and no fine thread is forthcoming.  The Shadeans versus Kinboteans debate now favors Kinbote, after all, in a moebius-strip twirl when what’s inside is also outside!

 

Related to Shade’s scissors, I’m equally confounded (this word sounds angrier than merely saying that I feel confused!). I cannot forget that the sun is a star. \Nor that metallic scissors reflect any source of light, irrespectively.  Alexey’s idea about a popular saying is good: I wonder what it is.