I thank Jim for the reference to Karshan's book. I see, among other things, that I have to read more Swift and Pope!
As Jim notes, Karshan says Shade didn't believe his own theory at the end of Canto 3, but Karshan doesn't give the evidence for that. I'm not sure what it could be. Shade was an atheist from childhood on, but his story in Canto 3 suggests a change of mind. Karshan quotes his conversation with Kinbote, but Shade's side consists mostly of evasions (because he doesn't want to talk about the subject of the poem he'll start soon?). What he does imply is that he can accept an afterlife and a psychopompos though maybe not "the Big G", which seems entirely consistent with Canto 3. He also makes a comparison with chess, as in the poem, though with chess problems rather than over-the-board play. Another point might be that undermines his "firm conviction" with the anticlimax "faint hope". I'd read this, however, as his recognition that he has nothing like proof--I believe Jim when he says no reputable philosopher has put forward anything like Shade's ideas--and as disarming criticism but not as diminishing the value the ideas have for him and that he may thinks they'd have for his readers.
On the subject of reputable philosophers, I'm not going to add to my "onslaught" about what Nabokov believed, but I will say that I don't see why Shade should be closer to them than to Mme. Blavatsky. Yeats really did follow Blavatsky among others, and that did not keep him from being a far better poet than Shade.
I think Jansy Mello makes a very interesting point about Russia being the thing, or one thing, behind all of Pale Fire's mirrors. How often he presents the image of his connection to Russia or his childhood with the imagery of fantasy and mystery and denial of common sense, as he refused to return to the real Russia. Jansy mentions the handful of snow in "Mademoiselle O", still real forty-five years later, which I'd forgotten as I'm sure I've forgotten others.
She notes that Freud didn't invent phallic references to sticks, poles, and the like (and added that "sometimes a post is only a post," which I wish I'd said.) But Freud stated that "dreams of flying, so familiar and often so delightful, have to be interpreted as dreams of general sexual excitement, as erection-dreams". I think what Nabokov is talking about with those umbrellas and balloons is this simplistic "have to be", with its implication that everyone's mind is so similar that Freud knows every individual's (that is, Nabokov's) psyche better than the individual. Anthony Stadlen says that Freud stated more nuanced and plausible views both earlier and later, but if Nabokov knew about that, he doesn't seem to have seen it as mitigation.
I thank Jansy for her convincing argument that, if I may summarize, when Shade smiled as he suggested Freudians might call polls "political pollination," Nabokov (if not Shade too) smiled to think of the Russian word pol, meaning sex.
Jerry Friedman
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