To Matt (and others who might be interested)--

I did originally write a few more paragraphs, but, intimidated slightly by the presence of at least two practicing psychiatrists on the List, I deleted them from yesterday's post. And yes, my take-off point was "a similarity in hysterical symptoms." The wonderful quotations you provided sent me back to some old reviews of Ian Hacking's book on fugue states, Mad Travellers: Reflections on Transient Mental Illnesses (1999). Among the reviews I found the sentence I thought I remembered: "Hacking is certainly aware of the purposive and potentially self-serving nature of these states - which, he suggests, might be seen as 'the bodily expression of male powerlessness'" (TLS review, 7/16/99, by Louis Sass). Here are the paragraphs I deleted, which should be inserted between the two paragraphs of yesterday's post:

Mightn't the elements of conscious purpose and outright fraud that VN apparently wants us to see in Hazel's bizarre behavior apply equally well to Botkin's development of "a secondary personality"? If so, this would seem to support Anthony Stadlen's recent interpretations of Botkin's delusion-- and of course would also support Shade's own remark, which might otherwise seem offered merely out of kindness, about peeling off "a drab and unhappy past." 

Then again, maybe the resemblance runs the other way. Maybe Hazel and Botkin, despite flashes of lucidity and seeming control, are both helpless to master the inner demons that drive them toward self-destruction.

I’m of the opinion that VN leaves this an open question and that here, as in so many places in the novel, Ambiguity (and not Charles the Beloved) reigns supreme--flanked, it should go without saying, by Irony on the one hand and Pity on the other, with the court jester, Comedy, dancing wildly in the foreground.

Forgive me, please, the fancy metaphor. It’s worth adding that Nabokovian ambiguity, at least in Pale Fire, is both deeper and wider than the ambiguity of The Turn of the Screw, in which the possibilities are limited. In Pale Fire, thanks to the proliferation of clues, allusions, and apparent storylines, we can never be certain of anything--not even of whether our uncertainty is justified or not. I think I'm agreeing with Gary Lipon on this, but we need to remember that the uncertainty interpretation of Pale Fire goes back a long way. 

One thing that does now seem clear (to me, at least) is that Hazel’s experiments in the old barn represent a heroic effort at self-healing and that here too the parallel with Botkin/Kinbote is very striking.

Jim Twiggs