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Fwd: Re: Pale Fire
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> Dear List and Jerry Friedman,
> It would have been more precise if I said more than just "beautifully"
> since your message was long and rich.
Thanks again, Jansy. Unfortunately it might not have been as clear
as I thought.
> I hope more participants will take up
> one or two of the points you raised for further discussion.
I was hoping that too.
> Your description of the various steps while pursuing the misteries in
> Pale
> Fire was specially interesting, a kind of "mind-in-progress" ( if I may
> say
> so).
> You corrected my mistake:" I don't think the red admiral is
> "the" thing. I was just supporting my argument with Boyd's
> contention that the butterfly is Hazel's ghost, which convinced
> me.)". Thank you.
> At the end of the message you wrote : ..."the story of the reader's
> successive penetration of illusions, of which I think the second-last is
> meant to be the illusion of a real story, and the last, our illusion
> that
> there is no higher reality than ours." and I also agree with you (
> although
> I have not progressed as far as you did in this " successive penetration
> of
> illusions" ).
Maybe I should have added the illusion that one's interpretation
of _Pale Fire_ will convince others!
> And yet, concerning the "last step" you mentioned, I think it is where
> Chuang Tzu´s indecidability came in for me - because I think of VN´s
> novel
> as a literary work and that his "authority" is chiefly as an artist.
> Jansy
Well, I can't argue with that. And I now have a better idea of why
you mentioned Zhuangzi/Chuang Tzu--he (or his character) raised the
issue of what is real. Also, as I hinted in my previous post,
I go a lot less far than I think VN does in demoting "reality",
so I too am left with both possibilities.
Funny that in the same group of messages that included yours, Don
Johnson should have posted an article mentioning Philip K. Dick,
who I think was sometimes a great master of the kind of fiction
where you don't know what is "real".
Anyway, thanks for your thoughtful comments!
Jerry Friedman
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