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Re: VN and Freud--reply to Friedman
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JM: Jim Twiggs questions the meanings of Shade's words, "faint hope": "At the very least, as JF agrees, they represent a marked deflation of mood. But they could also mean something even more abrupt. They could mean the fainting away of hope. They could also be an expression of self-sarcasm on the level of 'yeah, right'.” He leaves aside the possibility that, although faint, hope may still grow in force.
JT also refers to "not text, but texture," at a time when Nabokov had not yet made Van Veen retroact to precog what will appear in his chapter on "the texture of time"*. Nevertheless, the word "texture", like "faint", opens the way for diverse interpretations (a sensorial quality registered by touch instead of by "vision"? the weave of a fabric and, perhaps, its wrinkle or crease? that which relates not to content but to a container?). Therefore, to get to its "contexture" one needs to establish what it is that Shade means. However, it's exactly "meaning" that which, for him, will have to be abandoned to reach "texture," thereby moving beyond a textual meaning**
Jim Twiggs's last point [One last point. Earlier I wrote that Pale Fire could be read either as a statement of skepticism or as a profession of faith. But of course there’s a third possibility, namely that the novel dramatizes the uncertainty between skepticism and faith (and a good many other things as well). This reading, which goes back a long way, is the one that in fact I endorse"] stimulated me to offer a fourth possibility: instead of skepticism and/or faith, an increase in self-awareness and consciousness (for that demands no logical certainty, nor faith).
In RLSK an "iniciatic" route seems to have been outlined ( there's "Le morte d'Arthur" in Sebastian's bookcase, there arecharacters named Perceval; Boyd mentions (RY) that Nabokov admired Chrétien de Troyes's legends about chivalry). A quest for a holy grail (graal,gradalis, gradale, gral, grallon, gasum,grasalo as receptacles, also related to gradatim and gratus according to Chrétien***), disguised as "who was Sebastian and his real life" - a literary quest (this is the only certainty I have, right now).
In a tortuous, mainly sonorous way, "graal" seems to carry a resonance with the name "Gradus," who steps forth from invisible Zembla. In PF we find a mediocre Gradus, who is constantly shadowing Shade's text and being created by him at the same time. Shade, in his turn, may be seen as a prosaic "hero" (like Sebastian), who moves from a description of his childhood up to the moment when he crosses America, in search of a "white fountain". Shade could find no material proof of his experience with "the other side of life" and yet, his "quest" seems to have led him towards "texture" (whatever that means) and "a faint hope"( ib.). If Gradus and death indicates a "containing vessel" ("texture"), it seems fitting that Shade's meeting Gradus stopped him from writing verse 1000 (that would, very probably, bring him back to the beginning).
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* - Excerpts: "Van agreed to use the means of transportation made available to him by a chance crease in the texture of time, and seated himself in the old calèche..." [...] "nothing seemed changed in one sense, all was lost in another. Such-contacts evolve their own texture; a tactile sensation is a blind spot; we touch in silhouette"[...]. But many years later, when working on his Texture of Time, Van found in that phenomenon additional proof of real time’s being connected with the interval between events, not with their ‘passage,’ not with their blending, not with their shading the gap wherein the pure and impenetrable texture of time transpires..." Long before Van, Shade mentions: "some quirk in space/Has caused a fold or furrow to displace/ The fragile vista" ( not time, here, but space)
** - Perhaps that's what JF indicates by "I care that Bach believed in the religion of his Passions but not that of his Masses."
*** - According to Michel Zink, in "The Graal, a salvation myth" ("O Olhar de Orfeu", "O Graal, um mito de salvação", Bernadette Bricout, Ed.Companhia das Letras)
Jim Twiggs: I always admire the thought and care that go into Jerry Friedman’s contributions to the List. This latest one does not disappoint.I agree with much of what JF says. The differences between us may finally come down mainly to matters of taste ...As for the connection between “not text, but texture” and Shade’s final embrace of personal immortality, I see a logical gap where JF sees a (logical?) development. At the end of the poem, Shade’s feeling is one of “all’s right with the world”--a feeling consistent with having just finished an intense and difficult labor which has involved in part his coming to terms with grief (or at least thinking he has). It is in this mood that he produces both the conceit--surely it is no more than a bit of poetic fancy--that the universe throbs to an iambic meter and also his conviction that Hazel “somewhere is alive.”
[JF: “I'd add that at the ends of both Invitation to a Beheading and Bend Sinister, the connection between the author's higher world and a character's afterlife is visible (‘a good night for mothing’).”] But the fact that one can do something in words (create metafictions, for example) is no evidence for the actual existence of a Great Writer in the Sky...death is a great deal more than a wrinkle in language. ...
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