Dear List, Victor, Carolyn, A.Stadlen:

 

The question about Shade's shagbark, like many other similar doubts -- such as Kinbote's various misprints, false misprints  and misguided cross-references--  reminded me of a particular strategy that entranced the "Viennese quack".

Freud, in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, retells the joke about two Jews who meet on a train:
"Where are you going?" one asks. "I'm going to Pinsk," the other replies. To which the first answers, "You say you are going to Pinsk, because you want me to think you are going to Minsk. But I know you are going to Pinsk. So why are you lying to me?"

 

Someone asked me if Kinbote's "gilt key" would lead me to "guilt key". Like the reference to "primal scene" and "lockless doors" it may indicate an erotic, traumatic subtext lurking in Shade's poem.If we remember that Nabokov not only reviled Freud but insistently so, returning to him over and over, I now ask

Would that old Jew  be really travelling to Pinsk? 

Jansy