Jim Twiggs:One thing I’m
especially curious about is how TK, and also JF and anyone else who cares to
comment, might connect Shade’s “text not texture” insight with his stated belief
at the end of the poem that Hazel “somewhere is alive.” ...And anyhow, what
started off as thoughts about “life everlasting” has turned into thoughts about
design (and the possibility of poetry). Unless I’ve missed or forgotten
something, it’s not till the end of the poem that immortality re-enters the
picture. Once again, what’s the connection? As for Yeats and VN, the
question of VN’s own beliefs is of some importance because Brian Boyd has made
it so:.
JM: I have the impression that Jim
Twiggs ( following Boyd and Don Johnson) considers it necessary
that a good writer be a good, even wise, individual,
one who doesn't entertain preposterous beliefs or adhere to extremist
political views. Dante's Divine Comedy was construed around a Copernican
(Catholic Church) vision of the Earth as the center of the universe. Conan
Doyle was convinced that fairies roamed the English countryside. Why
spiritualism or a belief in metempsychosis should be anathema in a
writer?
Besides, Nabokov seldom states his beliefs
unambiguously ( "tatata...tata"). He mocks things he takes seriously and he is
serious about derisory matters. The assertion that "Hazel somewhere is alive"
has a very ironical coloring (he pairs it with his certainty that he, Shade,
will wake up the next day...) whereas Kinbote, for all his madness, shows a
reasonable knowledge about St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, including
a respectful attitude towards other pepople's epiphanies ( he might
not be as enemical to T.S.Eliot religious choices as Shade might
be). .