-------- Original Message --------
--- On Mon, 3/16/09, Nabokv-L <nabokv-l@UTK.EDU> wrote:
> But you'll note in SO, in his interview, Nabokov
> doesn't ever give us any
> specifics, because, as he says, implies, suggests, no
> afterlife can be
> explained in living terms. Since I can't put my own
> faith in Nabokov's
> inexpressable one, I can only look at his models for the
> possible "otherworld" as an urge for the divine, and not a
> fact.
Does it depend on whether you're trying to understand what
Nabokov meant, or trying to apply it to your life? Those
two seem totally separate to me--I think I understand what
Nabokov meant, but I don't even try to apply it to my life.
But I realize that in even bringing up the possibility of
what he meant, I'm denying a large part of the twentieth
century.
> Since we're
> talking about fiction we can dismiss facts.
Unless the author has supplied some facts in non-fiction.
I'm not thinking Nabokov was planning /Pale Fire/ when he
wrote /Speak, Memory/, but I speculate he thought that
he didn't need to present factual coincidences in the novel
because he had already presented some.
> And this leads me back to
> Shade. Clearly, very clearly, Shade is saying that a
> provable factual
> immortality does not matter. In Canto three, he discusses a
> near death
> experience, during which, on the other side, he had a
> vision of a
> fountain; later he reads a paper and thinks his vision was
> also
> psychically seen by Mrs Z. Eventually he learns from the
> editor of the
> newspaper who had printed her account, Jim Coates, that
> there was
> a misprint: she had seen a "mountain", not a
> "fountain". This inspires
> Shade to write, "But all at once it dawned on me that
> this [italics his]/Was the real point, the contrapuntal
> theme;/Just this:
> not text, but texture; not the dream/
> But topsy turvical coincidence,/ Not flimsy nonsense, but a
> web of
> sense./ Yes! It sufficed that I in life could find/ Some
> kind of
> link-and-bobolink, some kind/ Of correlated pattern in the
> game,/Plexed
> artistry, and something of the same/ Pleasure in it as they
> who played
> it found." Canto four,
"Three, sir."
> lines 806-815. In other words (and here I leave
> aside Shade's hint that perceiving rhymes and patterns
> is sort of
> similiar to being their creator), it does not matter
> whether or not a
> fountain or a mountain hovers beyond the veil, but the fact
> he was
> nearly drawn to think so. That was my point.
I think you're laying much more stress on provability than I
would. The way I read that passage you quoted, Shade decides
that he doesn't need a knock-down Smith-Schmidt proof
/because/ he can feel "reasonably sure" (line 977) that
there are higher beings and immortality, based on his
being "nearly drawn" to think so". That is, Someone nearly
drew him to think so, playing a game of misprint and rhyme
with him.
And one fact--about the book, not our reality--is that Shade
is right. Nabokov is the higher being, and Aunt Maud at
least has a life after death.
> Whether or not these
> contrapuntal themes, natural mimicry, and patterns, suggest
> as Shade
> and Nabokov seem to think the existence of an intelligent
> designer doesn't much matter as far as my life goes,
> since neither of
> them can describe it, there, him, that, or do much than
> more
> than poetically sense it through the grid of their own
> unerstanding.
But here you seem to accept the likelihood that Shade and
Nabokov believe in an intelligent (and playful) designer.
Your position has striking similarities to the one Richard
Rorty imputes (quite wrongly, in my opinion) to Shade:
"Shade decides that the artist's recognition of
contingency, of the absence (or, what comes to the same
thing, the utter inscrutability) of any ordering power,
is preferable to religion's or moral philosophy's claim
to have discovered the true name and nature of such a
power.
/Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity/, p. 166 (footnote).
http://books.google.com/books?id=vpTxxYR7hPcC&pg=PA166
> I suppose, in my secular way, I take Shade's thoughts as
> just a way of
> not having to be disappointed with the little he can
> actually know, as
> was V in the Real Life of Sebastian Knight--and so I see
> all this
> searching as more a noble urge than a proof of anything,
> which is I
> think the only way his sketchy metaphysics can mean much to
> anyone but himself.
This strikes me as like reading /Macbeth/ as the record of
a hallucination because witches don't have prophetic powers
and ghosts don't exist. That is, I'd say you and I, not
believing in the supernatural, can see Nabokov's beliefs
as we like, but we have to see Shade's beliefs as true in
the fiction. Unless again you deny the author's meaning.
> If the novel is meant to be a model of a specific
> "otherworld"
I don't think it is at all.
> then the book would have to be considered a failure, since
> it has
> inspired a cajillion different shades and variations on
> what exactly is
> going on, other than the explicit story experimentally
> narrated, which,
> in that light, means the book is really just a
> "mountain" to our
> "fountain" and so significant, why? Because of
> the reader's urge,
> which mirrors Kinbote's urge to find zembla in
> Shadowland, and Shade's
> urge to discover an afterlife for he and sybil and his dead
> daughter.
And mirrors Nabokov's urge, which he like Shade believed had
led him to glimpse the truth.
Jerry Friedman