NPPF Aunt Maud

[jbor]

>> I agree that the evidence is thin, but there is something in the buildup
>> of imagery which Keith catalogued.<<<

on 5/9/03 9:29 AM, s~Z at keithsz at concentric.net wrote:

> Now add to the buildup of imagery Nabokov's own words about the poem sans
> commentary. He characterizes the poem as "racy and tricky, and unpleasant,
> and bizarre."

It's all of these things without necessarily being about Maud abusing Shade
*or* Hazel, of course, and there doesn't seem to be anything in Nabokov's
subsequent comments about the poem or the novel which indicates that he
intended to intimate an incestuous relationship between Shade and Aunt Maud.
Apart from the fact that Maud does seem to have been homosexual, as David
pointed out, and so maps on to Kinbote (and, possibly, mirrors those
"secondary homosexual complications" he talks about in relation to Fleur)
there is the question of *why* Shade would insert all these hints about his
incestuous relationship with Maud into the poem, if indeed he had
experienced them and they were as terrible as you've suggested the poem
implies. If Maud *had* abused Shade I doubt very much that his recollection
of the experience would manifest in the poem in the way you're suggesting,
and his representation of Maud would be less affectionate, and have more of
an edge to it, surely. If anything, the possibility that it was Hazel who
Maud fondled ("she lived to hear the next babe cry", thus making Hazel the
"flower" she "defiled"), and that Shade has suppressed his knowledge of what
went on, and that the imagery is emerging subsconsciously, deferred with so
much else in the poem onto apparent reminiscences from his own childhood and
adult years, an attempt to reorientate the poem away from his daughter's
suicide (which is the primary subject, "your" favourite Canto, the one he
and Sybil cry over etc), seems the more plausible of those two theories.

I also think that the "solution" that there is no solution is as elegant as
any. I can see why Kinbote's self-consciousness about the existence of
"Botkin" would throw a spanner in the works of a lot of the critics who
argue for this or that "ultimate" reading of who wrote who, and why they
would thus try and dismiss these details about Botkin which Kinbote drops
into his notes as excessive or irrelevant. But I think it might also pay to
keep in mind the fact that most chess games end up unresolved, often
elegantly so.

best