NPPF Comm4: Metadiscussion, anybody?

[Don Corathers]

Decided to go ahead and post this now, because it includes (just a little
way down) a structural question we might want to kick around a little bit.


Line 71: parents (p 100)

We learn a little more about Shade's parents: that his father Samuel, vice
president of a surgical instruments company and ornithologist, died in 1902,
when Shade was four. That his mother Caroline was a skilled artist who did
the drawings for Samuel's book about Mexican birds. Kinbote doesn't report
when Shade's mother died.

" 'a bird had been named for him: Bombycilla Shadei' (that should be
'shadei,' of course)." Bombycilla is the genus name for the waxwing. The
common North American waxwing is Bombycilla garrulus. The cedar waxwing,
Bombycilla cedorum, is a close relative. The one that hit the window was
Bombycilla shadei.

".Lukin comes from Luke, as also do Locock and Luxon and Lukashevich. It
represents one of the many instances when the amorphous-looking but live and
personal hereditary patronymic grows, sometimes in fantastic shapes, around
the common pebble of a Christian name." As Botkin, cited as an example
(rather out of context) two sentences later, might become Kinbote.

".used to call any old tumble-down building 'a hurley-house.'" Nice one,
Charlie.

And then abruptly we're in Zembla, meeting the king's parents. And here we
approach a kind of turn in this discussion.

Let me suggest some assumptions. I think we can assume that everybody who is
following this discussion seriously has read the book at least once. Thus we
're all aware that Charles Kinbote believes himself to be the deposed King
of Zembla, and that Kinbote is profoundly delusional. And that while Zembla
may or may not really exist in the fictional world of the novel, Kinbote is
probably not the king, and may not even be Kinbote. Gradus is probably not
Gradus, but a local boy named Jack Grey who was trying to shoot the judge
who committed him to an institution.

Beyond that there are many discoveries yet to be made.

Those of us who have read Boyd's *Nabokov's Pale Fire* know that the section
we're talking about now is central to an analysis that opens up the novel
like a dark Vanessa spreading its wings. This raises a question that goes
back to the spoilage discussions we had before the reading began, in a
somewhat different way, and to David Morris's post suggesting that the
reading is in the doldrums because everybody's sitting around waiting for
the synthesis to begin. I realize now that this circumstance was what what
Terrence must have had in mind when he said, early on, that our schedule was
fucked.

If the point of this discussion, which is I think essentially recreational,
is to share the pleasures of unlocking a difficult work of art together, it
seems to me it is much too early in the game to begin posting big slabs of
received wisdom. But I'm not sure just how we should proceed.

I'd appreciate hearing what the group thinks.

Don