NPPF Comm 2: My bedroom, part 1

[Jasper Fidget]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-pynchon-l at waste.org [mailto:owner-pynchon-l at waste.org] On
> Behalf Of Don Corathers
> Sent: Monday, September 01, 2003 12:46 AM
> To: pynchon-l at waste.org
> Subject: NPPF Comm 2: My bedroom, part 1

> 
> As part of her campaign to employ her daughter to assure her a continued
> position in the court, the countess hires a medium to contact Blenda's
> spirit, who urges Charles through a seance to "take take cherish love
> flower
> flower flower.' And a psychiatrist who applies a Freudian analysis to
> Charles's affection for sodomy.
> 

> p 109
> 
> "He had had no love for his mother, and the hopeless and helpless remorse
> he
> now felt degenerated into a sickly physical fear of her phantom."
> Kinbote/Charles believes in ghosts. Cf. Hazel in the haunted barn, pp
> 185-193.
> 

Charles becomes a Zemblan Hamlet (things tend to be reversed there). 

It may be noteworthy that this particular message from beyond the grave is a
manipulative hoax, helping to question the ontology of the later barn scene
(sort of the lynchpin for Boyd's ghost theory, which depends entirely on the
barn scene NOT being a hoax).

Also interesting is how the mirror of the two sides of _Pale Fire_ has now
begun to cast reflections back out.  Prior to this, details in Zembla could
be traced back to origins in New Wye (the ABCD names, Alfin's monoplane,
etc), but this séance scene will be mirrored in New Wye.  (Obviously this is
debatable and depends on a linear reading -- the barn scene could have
inspired this scene for Kinbote -- but should we be convinced that the
"reality" of the New Wye narrative has primacy over the Zemblan "reality"?)

The séance stuff also reminds me of GR, characters seeking meaning through
mysticism (and religion), manipulated by others through the same means,
which process is its own sort of mirror.

Jasper Fidget