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Dear List,
In his biography of Gogol, Nabokov remarked that "The crudest curriculum vitae crows and flaps its wings in a style peculiar to the undersigner. I doubt whether you can even give your telephone number without giving something of yourself". This observation shows that he recognizes that a person is more than the total sum of traits and memories of which he/she is aware. Even a single word is more that all the extended meanings and derivations collected in all the world's dictionaries. If, as a writer, one needs to exert absolute control over one's character-types, one's enterprise is doomed to fail: there'll be always a peculiar flapping of an author's wings escaping from his conscious awareness.
As Chesterton's Father Brown notes "the best way to hide a leaf is in a forest." Nabokov's perverse and mad creatures constitute his artificial forest in which he can disguise his occasional idiosyncrasies. Fortunately, unlike his people, his other characters (now, his words) are allowed to wander and signifiy away in freedom.
Pale Fire is an excellent example of this sylvan procedure on Nabokov's part. Kinbote is his jack-of-all-trades, through whom he can exert his authorial ploys in safety. Kinbote realistically has to eavesdrop Shade's home and may be hindered by bushes and closed windows. However, this is not the case when Kinbote describes the movements and progress of Gradus. Once in a while Kinbote admits that his omniscient stance derives from his position on "an invented cloudlet" ( "We must assume, I think, that the forward projection of what imagination he had, stopped at the act, on the brink of all its possible consequences; ghost consequences, comparable to the ghost toes of an amputee or to the fanning out of additional squares which a chess knight (that skip-space piece), standing on a marginal file, "feels" in phantom extensions beyond the board, but which have no effect whatever on his real moves, on the real play." [...] "We can even make out (as, head-on but quite safely, phantom-like, we pass through him, through the shimmering propeller of his flying machine, through the delegates waving and grinning at us) his magenta and mulberry insides") or that the detailed information was obtained by a factual interview with an imprisoned murderer ("My reader will, I hope, appreciate all the minute particulars I have taken such trouble to present to him after a long talk I had with the killer...One can only hope that an impartial search will turn up the trilby forgotten in the Library — or in Mr. Emerald’s car.")
There's something pathetic in Botkin's or CK's delusions about Gradus and the Zemblan King Charles but, as long as CK remains unidentified to Shade everything is kept hidden in Nabokov's forest. This is why I think that the critics who sustain the Catholic "three in one" theory must break in front of an invisible wall, a wall that is related to Nabokov's authorial intentions. Inspite of all the shivering leaves, VN needs the reader to conclude that John Shade and C.Kinbote are two different people ( he may not have been successful in this project! Or, as Jim Twiggs notes: "If the N-LN's sole function is to be Nabokov's stand-in as creator of the novel, this is only slightly more interesting than Hitchcock strolling into one of his own movies...structurally it is trivial." )
I'm not familiar with Nabokov's pro/contra theories about determinism and randomness in nature* but I'm sure that he rejects all the Freudian views concerning determinism, as it operates in our unconscious to find expression through dreams, parapraxis, pathological symptoms. Perhaps Nabokov also tries to control, even reinvent, equivalents of Freud's description of unconscious mechanisms, besides all the parodies of "freudian symbolism" in his novels, such as the primal scene in "Pnin" or related to an "Oedipus complex."
In Pale Fire, for example, Gradus's automatic behavior and poor awareness of himself is unrelated to this kind of project ( Cf. He ...was endowed with a modicum of self-awareness, some duration consciousness...Spiritually he did not exist), but I think that Nabokov has something more sophisticated in store for the readers . There's something in the Freudian theories about the unconscious mind to which Nabokov keeps returning over and over again. Why wouldn't part of Nabokov's rejection of Freud gain expression by the way in which he dwells over his character's perversions or madness, and that he'd apply his "combinatorial talents" to invent automannikins, clockwork robots and demiurgical cosmic traps to give visibility, in the outside world, to what Freud found hidden in the unconscious mind?
When, in Pale Fire, John Shade states his "faint hope" concerning "a web of sense" (discrediting life as meaningless, disorderly and subject to random events) he is admitting to the influence of unknown cosmic forces over mankind, even when such powers seldom appear to be loving or protective entities. In a way, coincidences and mischievous ghosts mimic important aspects of the freudian theory about the influence of the unconscious over an individual's life. John Shade's belief that he'd wake up the next day, associated to his conviction that "his darling somewhere is alive," is amply demonstrated as false by having him die right after penning these verses. His white fountain or, as B. Boyd describes, his experiences with ghostly benevolent influences, or that his daughter is alive "somewhere," are obviously a product of Shade's wishful thinking. And yet, there is a deterministic pattern coursing through the entire novel that seems to escape Nabokov's eventual parody of mental illnes and which I think we can follow through Charles Kinbote's moments of omniscient narration and design. Would Nabokov, through Kinbote, be intent on demonstrating that no cosmic force determines life's recurrent patterns and coincidences, that everything is fictional, just like Gradus is Kinbote's figment? ["The fact that his weapon was a real one, and his quarry a highly developed human being, this fact belonged to our world of events; in his, it had no meaning." - this is is a statement made by Kinbote, of all people!]
Kinbote affirms that Shade's poem "was begun at the dead center of the year, a few minutes after midnight July 1...and I do not doubt that our poet would have understood his annotator’s temptation to synchronize a certain fateful fact, the departure from Zembla of the would-be regicide Gradus, with that date. Actually, Gradus left Onhava on the Copenhagen plane on July 5." This part of the text suggests that Gradus leads a life that is independent from Kinbote's invention! Kinbote demonstrates, at least in the beginning of his commentary, that he'd have loved to synchronize the motion of Shade's hand and the assassin's itinerary towards the Zemblan King and that only his adherence to facts hinders him in this project. However, he's already asserting the tight connections between the destinies that await Gradus, Shade and himself. Kinbote returns to the same idea soon afterwards, with an added information. Gradus's "departure for Western Europe...took place on the very day that an innocent poet in an innocent land was beginning Canto Two of Pale Fire." His regal omniscience ("We") is explicit: "We shall accompany Gradus in constant thought, as he makes his way ...following the road of its rhythm, riding past in a rhyme, skidding around the corner of a run-on, breathing with the caesura, swinging down to the foot of the page from line to line as from branch to branch, hiding between two words... reappearing on the horizon of a new canto, steadily marching nearer in iambic motion, crossing streets, moving up with his valise on the escalator of the pentameter, stepping off, boarding a new train of thought, entering the hall of a hotel, putting out the bedlight, while Shade blots out a word, and falling asleep as the poet lays down his pen for the night." Here we may begin to suspect that it's Kinbote who creates Gradus and he who makes him shadow Shade's written progress, derive from it ("the force propelling him is...Shade’s poem), or seal his fate (to write = to court death).
In his note to Lines 120-121 Kinbote interrupts his antecipatory inclusions and he sets down an actual date (July 4). He shows how "Gradus the Gunman was getting ready to leave Zembla for his steady blunderings through two hemispheres." However, when writing about line 132, he admits that Gradus serves as a metaphor, that he is not merely a figment of his imagination because he is endowed with a particular kind of "reality." (Cf. After a " 'feigned remoteness' has indeed performed its dreadful duty, and the poem we have is the only "shadow" that remains, we cannot help reading into these lines something more than mirrorplay and mirage shimmer. We feel doom, in the image of Gradus, eating away the miles and miles of 'feigned remoteness' between him and poor Shade. He, too, is to meet, in his urgent and blind flight, a reflection that will shatter him....The force propelling him is the magic action of Shade’s poem itself, the very mechanism and sweep of verse, the powerful iambic motor. Never before has the inexorable advance of fate received such a sensuous form..." ) The back and forth travellings in time, related to Shade's poetic activity, are soon resumed. Now we return to July 2, and we learn that Gradus "insisted later that when he found himself designated to track down and murder the King, the choice was decided by a show of cards — but let us not forget that it was Nodo who shuffled and dealt them out...the ace of spades lying on the tiled floor...We place this fatidic moment at 0:05, July 2, 1959 — which happens to be also the date upon which an innocent poet penned the first lines of his last poem." Apparently Kinbote has managed, at last, to set the dice rolling towards Shade's demise in such a way that it coincides with his picking up the pen in the early hours of July 2 (he doesn't mention it, but he must have calculated the time-differences between Europe and America?). The temporal discrepancy is now explained away.
Very often Kinbote describes Gradus as an automaton, a clockwork man( a product of deterministic forces): "Mere springs and coils produced the inward movements of our clockwork man. He might be termed a Puritan...He called unjust and deceitful everything that surpassed his understanding....All this is as it should be; the world needs Gradus" In the same manner that " Spacetime itself is decay; Gradus is flying west...He has sped through this verse and is gone — presently to darken our pages again." And the promise is fulfilled: " Who could have guessed that on the very day (July 7) Shade penned this lambent line Gradus... had flown...! Even in Arcady am I, says Death in the tombal scripture."
Kinbote establishes a list of items about which Gradus is totally unaware (unconscious?): "from the way Gradus displayed his empty palm before shaking hands or made a slight bow after every sip, and other tricks of demeanor (which Gradus himself did not notice in people but had acquired from them) that wherever he had been born he had certainly lived for a considerable time in a low-class Zemblan environment...Gradus was also unaware that the ombrioles Lavender collected combined exquisite beauty with highly indecent subject matter..." A passing premonitory reference, but to a different patterning, is now made: "Gradus as he stood there...wondered if he should not hang around for a bit to make sure he had not been bamboozled. From far below mounted the clink and tinkle of distant masonry work...and John Shade took a fresh card." (it echoes the events with gardener, butterfly, clinks related to the evening of Shade's murder and to a former apparition of this theme in KQKn). We also find his reference to "combinational fate" in: "Shade composed these lines on Tuesday, July 14th. What was Gradus doing that day? Nothing. Combinational fate rests on its laurels." Again Kinbote goes back to his synchronization: "As my dear friend was beginning with this line his July 20 batch of cards (card seventy-one to card seventy-six, ending with line 948), Gradus, at the Orly airport, was walking aboard a jetliner, fastening his seat belt, reading a newspaper, rising, soaring, desecrating the sky."
The puzzling commentary at the end of the novel mingles mad Kinbote and his creator, Vladimir Nabokov, as if reasserting the reader about Gradus's, and also now Kinbote's non-fictional, metaphorical, status: "God will help me, I trust, to rid myself of any desire to follow the example of two other characters in this work. I shall continue to exist. I may assume other disguises, other forms, but I shall try to exist. I may turn up yet, on another campus, as an old, happy, healthy, heterosexual Russian, a writer in exile ...sans fame, sans future, sans audience, sans anything but his art ....I may ... cook up a stage play, an old-fashioned melodrama with three principles: a lunatic who intends to kill an imaginary king, another lunatic who imagines himself to be that king, and a distinguished old poet who stumbles by chance into the line of fire, and perishes in the clash between the two figments...But whatever happens, wherever the scene is laid, somebody, somewhere, will quietly set out — somebody has already set out, somebody still rather far away is buying a ticket, is boarding a bus, a ship, a plane, has landed, is walking ...and presently he will ring at my door — a bigger, more respectable, more competent Gradus." For Jim Twiggs (Sept.2010 Nab-L) here "Kinbote goes in and out of his two identities. In describing a possible play, he gives away the plot of the novel (as he sees it) and shows a clear awareness that he is a deranged figment of his (as it turns out, Botkin's) own imagination. In the final possibility (and I believe the one that has come true)-- 'I may huddle and groan in a madhouse'."
If we change our perspective, and abandon our conjectures concerning Botkin/Kinbote's awareness of some mental infirmity, to focus solely on the nature of their creator's plans (unlike Kinbote, he is not one of the "two other characters in this work"...), we return to the self-referential quandary presented at the end of "Bend Sinister." (or to Shakespeare's lines in "As you like it," hinted at by Kinbote).
If, in the former chapters, it was possible to find clues about Nabokov's intention to present fate as mimicking of the freudian unconscious determinants, here something else is taking place and it relates solely to the author (nothing excludes the possibility of that Nabokov could surprise himself with what he set down in his apparently totally controlled novel. In this case, Kinbote's atypical paragraph (I mean, atypical in Kinbote and not in Nabokov) results from the author's sudden impulse to swerve away from what he discovered...
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* Jim Twiggs (off-list): With regard to the question of VN and determinism, no doubt you've read this 1993 essay by Vladimir E. Alexandrov "How Can Ethics Exist in Nabokov’s Fated Worlds?"(http://revel.unice.fr/cycnos/document.html?id=1282) At the end of his contribution to the same conference, Boyd says:"Since conferences need controversies, I’ll end my paper here, with Dreyer fighting the determinism of Dreiser, and with Boyd declaring against Alexandrov that Nabokov’s worlds, whatever part fate plays in them, are always free." Whether Boyd ever followed up on this statement or not, I don't know. For my part, I find Alexandrov's argument pretty convincing. If he's right, doesn't it follow that a "random" event in one world would not be random if seen from the viewpoint of the next world up? (Cf. VN's exercising complete control over his characters.) If this is so, the difference between Freudian and Nabokovian determinism is that the former is a bottom-up (naturalistic) view, while the latter is a top-down (transcendental) view. If VN was aware of the implications of his worlds-in-regression idea, he could hardly object to Freud simply on the grounds of being against determinism. He could only object to the kind of determinism espoused by Freud. And here, it seems to me, Freud has all the best of the argument.
JM:Abrupt excerpts from Alexandrov's paper:
I would like to suggest that there is an unresolvable paradox in Nabokov’s art and in his world view: although on a number of occasions he professed faith in freedom and contingency, he did not in fact dramatize or embody them in his fictions or his autobiography. By contrast, he demonstrates remarkably well how both he and his characters are trapped in fatidic webs that abut a transcendent realm.I would like to suggest in addition that this paradox is inevitable for two interrelated reasons: one is the world view that Nabokov had and that underlies all that he wrote; and the other, which is particularly interesting, is the kind of reading process that his works activate. Indeed, if one pays attention to the hermeneutic guides in his novels, which should serve as models for how to seek and construct the works’ meanings, it becomes impossible to find room in Nabokov’s world for freedom of any kind. The special interest of this topic lies in the theoretical questions it raises about the possible limits of representing freedom or contingency in narrative art. Thus there is a paradox in Nabokov’s ethics...without freedom the possibility of dramatizing moral choice becomes more than problematic...
[U]nderlying Nabokov’s entire oeuvre is a sui generis, albeit tentative faith in a transcendent otherworld...a mysterious, hidden, potent, and ordering force or dimension that appears to affect all that exists... Speaking of himself in a well-known passage (SM-p.25), he concludes that neither environment nor heredity fashioned him, and implies that whatever may have formed him transcends the material world... It is especially noteworthy that the discovery of patterning in his life does not depress Nabokov. On the contrary, his ability to identify evidence for fatidic determinism is something that he finds bracing and inspiring...Nabokov’s conception of life as filled with patterning extends to his view of the world of nature as “made.” The most famous example of this in Speak, Memory is his discussion of mimicry among butterflies,...resolutely anti-Darwinian, ... a variant of the venerable “argument from design” ...If we turn now to “man-wrought things” themselves, it must be stressed that Nabokov’s conception of artistic creation also hinges on the necessary involvement of the transcendent....[and] the artist’s dependence on a mysterious otherworld...the “world” is “good”, and that “‘goodness’ is something that is irrationally concrete”; conversely, “badness” is “the lack of something rather than a noxious presence,” and stems from inattention, blindness, and lack of imagination ...[However] he did insist on a number of occasions that he believed in free will... An... example of Nabokov’s views appears in an unpublished document in which he refers to what he calls “the miserable idea of determinism, the prison regulation of cause and effect.” But then he adds: “We know from real life that however obediently we may follow the paths of causation, some queer and beautiful force, which we call free will from want of a better expression, allows or at least appears to allow us to escape again and again from the laws of cause and effect.” To my mind, this quotation suggests that Nabokov’s view of free will may well have been ambivalent, since he is willing to entertain the possibility that it is illusory (“at least appears to allow us to escape”). Another well-known aspect of Nabokov’s rejection of determinism is his disbelief in the existence of a predictable future: for if it were fixed then one’s sense of freedom would necessarily be a delusion...A striking exception to this view... is Nabokov’s insistence that some very select individuals — namely, writers of genius — could glimpse at least a part of their future... The resulting sense of obligation “to get it right” that the author has with regard to the future work necessarily has a coercive effect on his behavior; in short, the work determines the author’s behavior...But what do we find when we turn to Nabokov’s fiction? Perhaps its most striking feature is the extent to which it flaunts its “madeness.” We are everywhere given to feel the presence of a manipulative and crafty author or narrator writing a story...for the most part interpreted it in “metaliterary” terms — as evidence for his preoccupation with the process of literary creation, which, moreover, is understood in strictly secular narrative terms — as the manipulation of the constituents of narrative for its own sake. But the same kinds of “coincidences” of meaning and detail in a work that seem to support a metaliterary reading (the patterns, puzzles, deceptions, alliterations, and tricks of various kinds that are some of Nabokov’s stylistic signatures) can also be interpreted in a completely different way — as a literary model of fate, where the author stands in relation to the text in the way that God can be said to stand in relation to the “real” world. And it is precisely in connection with this issue that Nabokov’s discursive writings are particularly illuminating because they show that he saw life and nature outside of literature as characterized by the same kinds of features that also dominate the representation of life and nature within his fictional works....Not only are Nabokov’s novels and stories filled with myriad patterns that subtly link details which at first glance appear to be unrelated, but his works are also filled with characters who strive to read the worlds in which they exist as if these worlds are encoded scripts...John Shade in Pale Fire thinks that his ability to write poetry and recognize parodic coincidence in life may be evidence for cosmic order. Indeed, one wonders what an instance of freely chosen action or a chance event would look like. The reader who believes that both exist in Nabokov’s works would have to be able to prove that there are no links — be they semantic, thematic, acoustic, rhythmic, or structural — between any chosen textual detail and anything else in the given text. For if there were even one such link, then the free or contingent nature of the detail would be put into question by the textual association it has. ...To insist, for example, that moments of “consciousness” or “self-awareness” are examples of “freedom” in Nabokov’s works is in effect to claim to know definitively what “consciousness” or “self-awareness” actually are....[I]n Nabokov’s discursive and fictional works that non-quotidian states of being impinge on what is conveniently labeled “consciousness,” and thus undermine its seeming freedom
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In his biography of Gogol, Nabokov remarked that "The crudest curriculum vitae crows and flaps its wings in a style peculiar to the undersigner. I doubt whether you can even give your telephone number without giving something of yourself". This observation shows that he recognizes that a person is more than the total sum of traits and memories of which he/she is aware. Even a single word is more that all the extended meanings and derivations collected in all the world's dictionaries. If, as a writer, one needs to exert absolute control over one's character-types, one's enterprise is doomed to fail: there'll be always a peculiar flapping of an author's wings escaping from his conscious awareness.
As Chesterton's Father Brown notes "the best way to hide a leaf is in a forest." Nabokov's perverse and mad creatures constitute his artificial forest in which he can disguise his occasional idiosyncrasies. Fortunately, unlike his people, his other characters (now, his words) are allowed to wander and signifiy away in freedom.
Pale Fire is an excellent example of this sylvan procedure on Nabokov's part. Kinbote is his jack-of-all-trades, through whom he can exert his authorial ploys in safety. Kinbote realistically has to eavesdrop Shade's home and may be hindered by bushes and closed windows. However, this is not the case when Kinbote describes the movements and progress of Gradus. Once in a while Kinbote admits that his omniscient stance derives from his position on "an invented cloudlet" ( "We must assume, I think, that the forward projection of what imagination he had, stopped at the act, on the brink of all its possible consequences; ghost consequences, comparable to the ghost toes of an amputee or to the fanning out of additional squares which a chess knight (that skip-space piece), standing on a marginal file, "feels" in phantom extensions beyond the board, but which have no effect whatever on his real moves, on the real play." [...] "We can even make out (as, head-on but quite safely, phantom-like, we pass through him, through the shimmering propeller of his flying machine, through the delegates waving and grinning at us) his magenta and mulberry insides") or that the detailed information was obtained by a factual interview with an imprisoned murderer ("My reader will, I hope, appreciate all the minute particulars I have taken such trouble to present to him after a long talk I had with the killer...One can only hope that an impartial search will turn up the trilby forgotten in the Library — or in Mr. Emerald’s car.")
There's something pathetic in Botkin's or CK's delusions about Gradus and the Zemblan King Charles but, as long as CK remains unidentified to Shade everything is kept hidden in Nabokov's forest. This is why I think that the critics who sustain the Catholic "three in one" theory must break in front of an invisible wall, a wall that is related to Nabokov's authorial intentions. Inspite of all the shivering leaves, VN needs the reader to conclude that John Shade and C.Kinbote are two different people ( he may not have been successful in this project! Or, as Jim Twiggs notes: "If the N-LN's sole function is to be Nabokov's stand-in as creator of the novel, this is only slightly more interesting than Hitchcock strolling into one of his own movies...structurally it is trivial." )
I'm not familiar with Nabokov's pro/contra theories about determinism and randomness in nature* but I'm sure that he rejects all the Freudian views concerning determinism, as it operates in our unconscious to find expression through dreams, parapraxis, pathological symptoms. Perhaps Nabokov also tries to control, even reinvent, equivalents of Freud's description of unconscious mechanisms, besides all the parodies of "freudian symbolism" in his novels, such as the primal scene in "Pnin" or related to an "Oedipus complex."
In Pale Fire, for example, Gradus's automatic behavior and poor awareness of himself is unrelated to this kind of project ( Cf. He ...was endowed with a modicum of self-awareness, some duration consciousness...Spiritually he did not exist), but I think that Nabokov has something more sophisticated in store for the readers . There's something in the Freudian theories about the unconscious mind to which Nabokov keeps returning over and over again. Why wouldn't part of Nabokov's rejection of Freud gain expression by the way in which he dwells over his character's perversions or madness, and that he'd apply his "combinatorial talents" to invent automannikins, clockwork robots and demiurgical cosmic traps to give visibility, in the outside world, to what Freud found hidden in the unconscious mind?
When, in Pale Fire, John Shade states his "faint hope" concerning "a web of sense" (discrediting life as meaningless, disorderly and subject to random events) he is admitting to the influence of unknown cosmic forces over mankind, even when such powers seldom appear to be loving or protective entities. In a way, coincidences and mischievous ghosts mimic important aspects of the freudian theory about the influence of the unconscious over an individual's life. John Shade's belief that he'd wake up the next day, associated to his conviction that "his darling somewhere is alive," is amply demonstrated as false by having him die right after penning these verses. His white fountain or, as B. Boyd describes, his experiences with ghostly benevolent influences, or that his daughter is alive "somewhere," are obviously a product of Shade's wishful thinking. And yet, there is a deterministic pattern coursing through the entire novel that seems to escape Nabokov's eventual parody of mental illnes and which I think we can follow through Charles Kinbote's moments of omniscient narration and design. Would Nabokov, through Kinbote, be intent on demonstrating that no cosmic force determines life's recurrent patterns and coincidences, that everything is fictional, just like Gradus is Kinbote's figment? ["The fact that his weapon was a real one, and his quarry a highly developed human being, this fact belonged to our world of events; in his, it had no meaning." - this is is a statement made by Kinbote, of all people!]
Kinbote affirms that Shade's poem "was begun at the dead center of the year, a few minutes after midnight July 1...and I do not doubt that our poet would have understood his annotator’s temptation to synchronize a certain fateful fact, the departure from Zembla of the would-be regicide Gradus, with that date. Actually, Gradus left Onhava on the Copenhagen plane on July 5." This part of the text suggests that Gradus leads a life that is independent from Kinbote's invention! Kinbote demonstrates, at least in the beginning of his commentary, that he'd have loved to synchronize the motion of Shade's hand and the assassin's itinerary towards the Zemblan King and that only his adherence to facts hinders him in this project. However, he's already asserting the tight connections between the destinies that await Gradus, Shade and himself. Kinbote returns to the same idea soon afterwards, with an added information. Gradus's "departure for Western Europe...took place on the very day that an innocent poet in an innocent land was beginning Canto Two of Pale Fire." His regal omniscience ("We") is explicit: "We shall accompany Gradus in constant thought, as he makes his way ...following the road of its rhythm, riding past in a rhyme, skidding around the corner of a run-on, breathing with the caesura, swinging down to the foot of the page from line to line as from branch to branch, hiding between two words... reappearing on the horizon of a new canto, steadily marching nearer in iambic motion, crossing streets, moving up with his valise on the escalator of the pentameter, stepping off, boarding a new train of thought, entering the hall of a hotel, putting out the bedlight, while Shade blots out a word, and falling asleep as the poet lays down his pen for the night." Here we may begin to suspect that it's Kinbote who creates Gradus and he who makes him shadow Shade's written progress, derive from it ("the force propelling him is...Shade’s poem), or seal his fate (to write = to court death).
In his note to Lines 120-121 Kinbote interrupts his antecipatory inclusions and he sets down an actual date (July 4). He shows how "Gradus the Gunman was getting ready to leave Zembla for his steady blunderings through two hemispheres." However, when writing about line 132, he admits that Gradus serves as a metaphor, that he is not merely a figment of his imagination because he is endowed with a particular kind of "reality." (Cf. After a " 'feigned remoteness' has indeed performed its dreadful duty, and the poem we have is the only "shadow" that remains, we cannot help reading into these lines something more than mirrorplay and mirage shimmer. We feel doom, in the image of Gradus, eating away the miles and miles of 'feigned remoteness' between him and poor Shade. He, too, is to meet, in his urgent and blind flight, a reflection that will shatter him....The force propelling him is the magic action of Shade’s poem itself, the very mechanism and sweep of verse, the powerful iambic motor. Never before has the inexorable advance of fate received such a sensuous form..." ) The back and forth travellings in time, related to Shade's poetic activity, are soon resumed. Now we return to July 2, and we learn that Gradus "insisted later that when he found himself designated to track down and murder the King, the choice was decided by a show of cards — but let us not forget that it was Nodo who shuffled and dealt them out...the ace of spades lying on the tiled floor...We place this fatidic moment at 0:05, July 2, 1959 — which happens to be also the date upon which an innocent poet penned the first lines of his last poem." Apparently Kinbote has managed, at last, to set the dice rolling towards Shade's demise in such a way that it coincides with his picking up the pen in the early hours of July 2 (he doesn't mention it, but he must have calculated the time-differences between Europe and America?). The temporal discrepancy is now explained away.
Very often Kinbote describes Gradus as an automaton, a clockwork man( a product of deterministic forces): "Mere springs and coils produced the inward movements of our clockwork man. He might be termed a Puritan...He called unjust and deceitful everything that surpassed his understanding....All this is as it should be; the world needs Gradus" In the same manner that " Spacetime itself is decay; Gradus is flying west...He has sped through this verse and is gone — presently to darken our pages again." And the promise is fulfilled: " Who could have guessed that on the very day (July 7) Shade penned this lambent line Gradus... had flown...! Even in Arcady am I, says Death in the tombal scripture."
Kinbote establishes a list of items about which Gradus is totally unaware (unconscious?): "from the way Gradus displayed his empty palm before shaking hands or made a slight bow after every sip, and other tricks of demeanor (which Gradus himself did not notice in people but had acquired from them) that wherever he had been born he had certainly lived for a considerable time in a low-class Zemblan environment...Gradus was also unaware that the ombrioles Lavender collected combined exquisite beauty with highly indecent subject matter..." A passing premonitory reference, but to a different patterning, is now made: "Gradus as he stood there...wondered if he should not hang around for a bit to make sure he had not been bamboozled. From far below mounted the clink and tinkle of distant masonry work...and John Shade took a fresh card." (it echoes the events with gardener, butterfly, clinks related to the evening of Shade's murder and to a former apparition of this theme in KQKn). We also find his reference to "combinational fate" in: "Shade composed these lines on Tuesday, July 14th. What was Gradus doing that day? Nothing. Combinational fate rests on its laurels." Again Kinbote goes back to his synchronization: "As my dear friend was beginning with this line his July 20 batch of cards (card seventy-one to card seventy-six, ending with line 948), Gradus, at the Orly airport, was walking aboard a jetliner, fastening his seat belt, reading a newspaper, rising, soaring, desecrating the sky."
The puzzling commentary at the end of the novel mingles mad Kinbote and his creator, Vladimir Nabokov, as if reasserting the reader about Gradus's, and also now Kinbote's non-fictional, metaphorical, status: "God will help me, I trust, to rid myself of any desire to follow the example of two other characters in this work. I shall continue to exist. I may assume other disguises, other forms, but I shall try to exist. I may turn up yet, on another campus, as an old, happy, healthy, heterosexual Russian, a writer in exile ...sans fame, sans future, sans audience, sans anything but his art ....I may ... cook up a stage play, an old-fashioned melodrama with three principles: a lunatic who intends to kill an imaginary king, another lunatic who imagines himself to be that king, and a distinguished old poet who stumbles by chance into the line of fire, and perishes in the clash between the two figments...But whatever happens, wherever the scene is laid, somebody, somewhere, will quietly set out — somebody has already set out, somebody still rather far away is buying a ticket, is boarding a bus, a ship, a plane, has landed, is walking ...and presently he will ring at my door — a bigger, more respectable, more competent Gradus." For Jim Twiggs (Sept.2010 Nab-L) here "Kinbote goes in and out of his two identities. In describing a possible play, he gives away the plot of the novel (as he sees it) and shows a clear awareness that he is a deranged figment of his (as it turns out, Botkin's) own imagination. In the final possibility (and I believe the one that has come true)-- 'I may huddle and groan in a madhouse'."
If we change our perspective, and abandon our conjectures concerning Botkin/Kinbote's awareness of some mental infirmity, to focus solely on the nature of their creator's plans (unlike Kinbote, he is not one of the "two other characters in this work"...), we return to the self-referential quandary presented at the end of "Bend Sinister." (or to Shakespeare's lines in "As you like it," hinted at by Kinbote).
If, in the former chapters, it was possible to find clues about Nabokov's intention to present fate as mimicking of the freudian unconscious determinants, here something else is taking place and it relates solely to the author (nothing excludes the possibility of that Nabokov could surprise himself with what he set down in his apparently totally controlled novel. In this case, Kinbote's atypical paragraph (I mean, atypical in Kinbote and not in Nabokov) results from the author's sudden impulse to swerve away from what he discovered...
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* Jim Twiggs (off-list): With regard to the question of VN and determinism, no doubt you've read this 1993 essay by Vladimir E. Alexandrov "How Can Ethics Exist in Nabokov’s Fated Worlds?"(http://revel.unice.fr/cycnos/document.html?id=1282) At the end of his contribution to the same conference, Boyd says:"Since conferences need controversies, I’ll end my paper here, with Dreyer fighting the determinism of Dreiser, and with Boyd declaring against Alexandrov that Nabokov’s worlds, whatever part fate plays in them, are always free." Whether Boyd ever followed up on this statement or not, I don't know. For my part, I find Alexandrov's argument pretty convincing. If he's right, doesn't it follow that a "random" event in one world would not be random if seen from the viewpoint of the next world up? (Cf. VN's exercising complete control over his characters.) If this is so, the difference between Freudian and Nabokovian determinism is that the former is a bottom-up (naturalistic) view, while the latter is a top-down (transcendental) view. If VN was aware of the implications of his worlds-in-regression idea, he could hardly object to Freud simply on the grounds of being against determinism. He could only object to the kind of determinism espoused by Freud. And here, it seems to me, Freud has all the best of the argument.
JM:Abrupt excerpts from Alexandrov's paper:
I would like to suggest that there is an unresolvable paradox in Nabokov’s art and in his world view: although on a number of occasions he professed faith in freedom and contingency, he did not in fact dramatize or embody them in his fictions or his autobiography. By contrast, he demonstrates remarkably well how both he and his characters are trapped in fatidic webs that abut a transcendent realm.I would like to suggest in addition that this paradox is inevitable for two interrelated reasons: one is the world view that Nabokov had and that underlies all that he wrote; and the other, which is particularly interesting, is the kind of reading process that his works activate. Indeed, if one pays attention to the hermeneutic guides in his novels, which should serve as models for how to seek and construct the works’ meanings, it becomes impossible to find room in Nabokov’s world for freedom of any kind. The special interest of this topic lies in the theoretical questions it raises about the possible limits of representing freedom or contingency in narrative art. Thus there is a paradox in Nabokov’s ethics...without freedom the possibility of dramatizing moral choice becomes more than problematic...
[U]nderlying Nabokov’s entire oeuvre is a sui generis, albeit tentative faith in a transcendent otherworld...a mysterious, hidden, potent, and ordering force or dimension that appears to affect all that exists... Speaking of himself in a well-known passage (SM-p.25), he concludes that neither environment nor heredity fashioned him, and implies that whatever may have formed him transcends the material world... It is especially noteworthy that the discovery of patterning in his life does not depress Nabokov. On the contrary, his ability to identify evidence for fatidic determinism is something that he finds bracing and inspiring...Nabokov’s conception of life as filled with patterning extends to his view of the world of nature as “made.” The most famous example of this in Speak, Memory is his discussion of mimicry among butterflies,...resolutely anti-Darwinian, ... a variant of the venerable “argument from design” ...If we turn now to “man-wrought things” themselves, it must be stressed that Nabokov’s conception of artistic creation also hinges on the necessary involvement of the transcendent....[and] the artist’s dependence on a mysterious otherworld...the “world” is “good”, and that “‘goodness’ is something that is irrationally concrete”; conversely, “badness” is “the lack of something rather than a noxious presence,” and stems from inattention, blindness, and lack of imagination ...[However] he did insist on a number of occasions that he believed in free will... An... example of Nabokov’s views appears in an unpublished document in which he refers to what he calls “the miserable idea of determinism, the prison regulation of cause and effect.” But then he adds: “We know from real life that however obediently we may follow the paths of causation, some queer and beautiful force, which we call free will from want of a better expression, allows or at least appears to allow us to escape again and again from the laws of cause and effect.” To my mind, this quotation suggests that Nabokov’s view of free will may well have been ambivalent, since he is willing to entertain the possibility that it is illusory (“at least appears to allow us to escape”). Another well-known aspect of Nabokov’s rejection of determinism is his disbelief in the existence of a predictable future: for if it were fixed then one’s sense of freedom would necessarily be a delusion...A striking exception to this view... is Nabokov’s insistence that some very select individuals — namely, writers of genius — could glimpse at least a part of their future... The resulting sense of obligation “to get it right” that the author has with regard to the future work necessarily has a coercive effect on his behavior; in short, the work determines the author’s behavior...But what do we find when we turn to Nabokov’s fiction? Perhaps its most striking feature is the extent to which it flaunts its “madeness.” We are everywhere given to feel the presence of a manipulative and crafty author or narrator writing a story...for the most part interpreted it in “metaliterary” terms — as evidence for his preoccupation with the process of literary creation, which, moreover, is understood in strictly secular narrative terms — as the manipulation of the constituents of narrative for its own sake. But the same kinds of “coincidences” of meaning and detail in a work that seem to support a metaliterary reading (the patterns, puzzles, deceptions, alliterations, and tricks of various kinds that are some of Nabokov’s stylistic signatures) can also be interpreted in a completely different way — as a literary model of fate, where the author stands in relation to the text in the way that God can be said to stand in relation to the “real” world. And it is precisely in connection with this issue that Nabokov’s discursive writings are particularly illuminating because they show that he saw life and nature outside of literature as characterized by the same kinds of features that also dominate the representation of life and nature within his fictional works....Not only are Nabokov’s novels and stories filled with myriad patterns that subtly link details which at first glance appear to be unrelated, but his works are also filled with characters who strive to read the worlds in which they exist as if these worlds are encoded scripts...John Shade in Pale Fire thinks that his ability to write poetry and recognize parodic coincidence in life may be evidence for cosmic order. Indeed, one wonders what an instance of freely chosen action or a chance event would look like. The reader who believes that both exist in Nabokov’s works would have to be able to prove that there are no links — be they semantic, thematic, acoustic, rhythmic, or structural — between any chosen textual detail and anything else in the given text. For if there were even one such link, then the free or contingent nature of the detail would be put into question by the textual association it has. ...To insist, for example, that moments of “consciousness” or “self-awareness” are examples of “freedom” in Nabokov’s works is in effect to claim to know definitively what “consciousness” or “self-awareness” actually are....[I]n Nabokov’s discursive and fictional works that non-quotidian states of being impinge on what is conveniently labeled “consciousness,” and thus undermine its seeming freedom
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