Vladimir Nabokov

NABOKV-L post 0024108, Tue, 30 Apr 2013 18:02:36 -0300

Subject
Re: Minor points: Surnames and name days
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Carolyn Kunin [ to JM's You wrote: Why do you suppose that "the little parricide" was John Shade? There are other clues, right? What are they?] The other clues are in Jekyll and Hyde.... if you accept my hypothesis that there is a relationship between Pale Fire and Jekyll and Hyde, then you will find it interesting to note that Shade doesn't know what his parents look like... like Hyde, Shade destroyed -- must have destroyed -- his parents portraits... couldn't bear to have any reminders - or perhaps, good old Doctor Colt told Aunt Maude to hyde them (pun intended).

JM: No, I cannot follow your train of thought, too many empty little vagons with an engine that's far too potent. .There's probably a relationship bt. PF and J&H, but it's not so close that it will embrace the plot of PF, even of deserving the honor as the key to PF.. I'm more ready to accept the other part of your theory related to John Shade's mental breakdown that had him split and turned into Botkin/Kinbote
Why "Shade destroyed - must have destroyed - his parent's portraits" ends as certainty a few lines afterwards? Besides, in PF we are told that Charles, the Beloved, also couldn't remember his father, although "Her he remembered — more or less: a horsewoman, tall, broad, stout, ruddy-faced." And there were photographs of his father's fatal accident, found when he was aged 8 (the "bright little parricide" was 7)*
Jerry Friedman's arguments convinced me about the time discrepancy related to Shade being the murderer.



* -"The glossy prints of the enlarged photographs depicting the entire catastrophe were discovered one day by eight-year-old Charles Xavier in the drawer of a secretary bookcase. In some of these ghastly pictures one could make out the shoulders and leathern casque of the strangely unconcerned aviator, and in the penultimate one of the series, just before the white-blurred shattering crash, one distinctly saw him raise one arm in triumph and reassurance. The boy had hideous dreams after that but his mother never found out that he had seen those infernal records." It was Kinbote who felt persecuted by family photographs..."Family photographs met me in the hallway and pursued me from room to room...I must confess that their pert pictures irritated me to such an extent that finally I gathered them one by one and dumped them all in a closet under the gallows row of their cellophane-shrouded winter clothes." (the word "gallows" is most aplty used and, who knows, with a double meaning - at least in places where hanging is/was a legal form of capital punishment)

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