NPPF Comm2: Parents, part 2

[Don Corathers]

> It's also possible that the two incidents (bird into window, plane into
> scaffolding) actually happened (in terms of the fiction), that the
> similarities between them are superficial and coincidental, and that the
> account of each was independent of the other, or that the detailed
> recollection/significance of the one was jogged by the oral/written
recount
> of the other.
>
> Call this the Nabokovian authorship theory.

Certainly. But if that is true of all of the consonances between Shade's
life and Kinbote's, and Shade's poem and Kinbote's Commentary--and I realize
that you didn't suggest that it was--then the intricacy and complexity of
the coincidence and happenstance is pretty spectaclar, isn't it? But not
terribly interesting.

I believe the book invites the reader to make connections and to indulge the
human impulse to create order and sense. It's impossible to resist trying to
unravel the strands. It's probably also impossible to achieve a Unified
Theory that everybody is going to find satisfactory, but it's fun trying.

Don



>
> best
>
>
>
> on 30/8/03 3:59 PM, Don Corathers at gumbo at fuse.net wrote:
>
> >> One that practically leaps off the page is the story of Alfin's death
by
> >> crashing an airplane into a building. It's a perfect reflection (excuse
> > me)
> >> of the action described in the first two lines of "Pale Fire," and we
know
> >> that Kinbote read the poem before he wrote about the death of Alfin.
> > (Since
> >> Kinbote didn't read "Pale Fire" until after the murder, this particular
> > item
> >> should probably go into a sub-pile: embellishments of the Charles II
story
> >> that Kinbote made after Shade's death. We know that Kinbote told at
least
> >> part of Alfin's biography to Shade because he relates, with a whiff of
a
> >> sense of betrayal, that Shade retold in the faculty lounge the story of
> >> Alfin losing an emperor.)
> >>
> >> Of course, if as some believe John Shade had a hand in Kinbote's work,
the
> >> account of Alfin's death resonates with the poem in a different way.
> >>
> >> In either case, it is significant that within three pages we are given
a
> >> connection between John Shade's father and the waxwing (Bombycilla
> > shadei),
> >> and reminded of the bird's fatal smack into the glass, and then shown
> >> Charles Kinbote's father crashing an airplane into the scaffolding
around
> > a
> >> new hotel, his fist raised in triumph.
> >
> > There is (at least) one more way of reading this. It is conceivable that
> > Kinbote *did* relate the story of Alfin crashing into the building to
Shade
> > before July, and that Shade transmuted the incident into the opening
image
> > of the poem. This might be some of what Kinbote means when he says on
the
> > second reading of "Pale Fire" he detected "that dim distant music, those
> > vestiges of color in the air" that convinced him that the poem actually
did
> > contain his story, and "all the many subliminal debts to me." (297)
>
>