Anthony Stadlen: "...am I alone in finding this business of
committees of ghosts attending to the destinies of the quick so idiosyncratic
and trivial as to be a real turn-off? I enjoyed the bit about Tolstoy and the
acrostic in The Vane Sisters, but if it becomes the underlying
metaphysics of his oeuvre, so to speak, it just seems silly..."
Jansy
Mello:T.Ponomareva wrote about "ghost-related riddles," before she
quoted Pnin's "He did not believe in an autocratic God. He
did believe, dimly, in a democracy of ghosts. The souls of the dead, perhaps,
formed committees, and these, in continuous session, attended to the
destinies of the quick." I got the
impression that
she wasn't considering our author's personal beliefs in ghosts, nor
any underlying metaphysics affecting his writing.
The acrostic in The Vane Sisters is an almost
amusing trick, it's not really revelatory of an unknown piece
of wisdom. Hazel's
ghost-cum-butterfly crossing over to the land of the quick, in
order to inspire Shade & Kinbote, could be an hyberbolic rendering
of the meaning of the Greek word "psyche".
If Aunt Maud's ghost sends blurred messages due to her
speech impairment, how could poor muddled (dislexic?) Hazel function as a
muse?
.