In case I don't show this later

I just wanted to show you a painting, which represents the colors a woman sees in the alphabet.  Each color was carefully mixed and chosen so they would be the most accurate as possible. The synaesthete is Katinka Regtien and the artist is Beata Franso.

http://www.synesthesie.nl/pub/beatafranso.htm

I attached the link so you can look at the poem that goes with it.  I think it might be in French. . .

Presentation comments/questions Round 1

I thought everyone did a really nice job with their presentations--everything they were talking about was exciting and interesting, because it all just seems to fit together.  I think the themes I took away from the day were symphonies and definitions of reality.

Madeline--- I liked how you brought in the illusion at the beginning of class; because it was like a symphony of movement and noise and light.  It was all conducted by you to create a different kind of reality, which was fun.  The parallels you brought up between Prospero and Nabokov gave me a Shelby kind of aha moment, because it just seemed so obvious once you pointed them out, especially when the illusion is kind of dropped at the end of the books. I think most of my questions were already answered in class, but I thought you did really well.

Michael-- I loved your window visual with the magnetic chess pieces and the overlapping boards.  I don't actually have any questions for you either-- I'm really bad at this game, but I wanted to let you know that you made me think about Kinbote as a complete mistranslation, from who he is (Botkin, Kingbot, Kinbote) to how he perceives the world.  I thought the point you made about the book never truly ending and your point about stealing were fabulous.  You just made me think.  I really wish your paper was up, because I would have loved to pick your brain before finishing mine. 

Breanna-- I am looking forward to reading your paper, because it sounds so extensive and rich.  The only thing I have to say about your presentation (besides good job) is to slow down a little.  I realize you didn't have much time, but I had some difficulty keeping up.  I wrote down something in my notes like. . . "macrocosm, microcosm. . . /words weren't just arbitrary. . .what" and then ? because I didn't finish my thought.  I guess my question would be something about arbitrary nature of words and macrocosm and microcosm, because I think it must have sounded neat to me at the time, but I just didn't catch what you said.

Sarah-- I thought it was neat that you brought in a musician to help give us a visual (or I guess a sound) to understand your ideas.  I am also looking forward to reading more about your paper, because it sounds like you discovered so much and just couldn't share it all in 20 minutes.  Looking through my notes, I think I'd ask more about what a fugue is?  I am not really a music person; but I guess now I can just look it up online. 

The book really is a chess board

"In Nabokov's fiction, chess-playing prowess is inseparable from eidetic prowess. . . .The striking ability to animate eidetic images is part of the key to Luzhin's (character from Nabokov's book The Defense) chess technique; he can lay out a chessboard in his mind and then set it in motion in order to visualize the outcomes of various strategems. . .The boy is blind to the world around him, but in the 'celestial dimension' where his chess moves are calculated, he sees all" (Dann 139). 

I get it! It's a chess board!! The whole book! I know we talked about it before, but I just get it now. The way Nabokov makes the reader jump from note to note, note to poem, note to commentary etc.  We, readers, are chess pieces.  When we try to read the book cover to cover, we are basically trying to play the game without any strategy-- like we are just trying to get from our end of the board to the other, ignoring rules and moving without art.  Nabokov leaves notes to direct the pawns (us) back and forth and back and forth, because he can foresee the next moves; the end, which is not really the end, I think; because in a way, we only seem to be played on one side of the chess board, but because this is a mirror game and a mirror book and dyslexia seems to run rampant, our reflection is probably playing the game too.  . 

I hope you watch the clip of the old guy playing chess with himself.  It reminds me of Kinbote in a way or Shade or both, since they are kind of one in the same (though I still like Kinbote better). 

Protagonist struggle

I think I am beginning to love Charles Kinbote.

The more I read about synesthesia, eideticism and the book itself, the more I feel that Kinbote is either ignored or dismissed as just insane.  A chapter called, "The Gift," in one of my books talks on and on about how Nabokov endows his protagonist with his unique synesthesia/eidetic traits; and for Pale Fire, John Shade is seen as that protagonist.  His eideticism is especially evident in the poem: "All colors made me happy: even gray./My eyes were such that literally they/ Took photographs" (ln 29-31), "I've tried/ So often to evoke them that today/ I have a thousand parents. Sadly they/ Dissolve in their own virtues and recede,/ But certain words, chance words I hear or read" (ln 72-76), "I had a brain, five sense (one unique)" (ln 130), and so on.  Nabokov gives Shade his genius.  That's fair to say.  He can look at life from a variety of perspectives, but in a sense, he's still "normal" and for me, he's a bit pale.  His poem is excellent, but the man himself is like a pressed flower-- delicate, crumbly.  He's passive and nice, and people seem to like him, but he is like a playing piece.

Kinbote, on the other hand, is not likeable at all.  The lady at the store flat out tells him he is a pain in the ass.  He totally steals Shade's poem as the poet lies bleeding to death; and McCarthy says he basically kills that poem with his nonsense.   Kinbote's a Narcissistic lunatic, but at the same time, I find his seemingly narrow-minded world to be quite vibrant and intriguing.  He's just as eidetic as Shade in his descriptions: "All three shelves and the space beneath were stuffed with disparate objects: a palette with the dregs of many sunsets; a cupful of counters; an ivory backscratcher; a thirty-twomo edition of Timon of Athens translated into Zemblan by his uncle Conmal, the carat blue diamond accidentally added in his childhood, from his late father's knickknackatory, to the pebbles and shells in that pail; a finger of chalk; and a square board with a design of interlaced figures for some long-forgotten game" (p 125). Even though the world he fabricates is fantasy, it is just as vivid and detailed as Shade's world.  The latter is just more widely accepted, because it is more normal and considered genius.  But Shade is not the supposed creator of the "paper-chase."  He is not the guy, who shattered life as we know it and rearranged it in a frustrating construct.  Shade is the not the creator of parallel worlds.  Nabokov instead gave all that power to Kinbote.

Breanna remarked in her discoveries that "Kinbote created Shade…Shade functions as a reflection of Kinbote, not the other way around."  I think she's right in emphasizing Kinbote, but I'm not sure you could really say that Shade is a reflection of Kinbote or that Kinbote is a reflection of Shade, because it's difficult to say who is actually the real person.  I'm not too sure it even matters, but I still feel that Kinbote is just something more.  

Maybe we don't like to draw attention to him, because he demands it in his commentary.  He's the part of the moon we see every night, because we have to; and Shade, who sits on the other side, seems more mysterious and alluring, but Kinbote's a mystery staring us in the face.  He's a mystery of life, I think.  He's constantly alluding to the "Shadows" or "Shade" or "darkness" that looms down.  Shade is death.  "the reflection of the waxwings slain" is a kind of shadow, a mirage, that lured that bird to doom.  Shade is dead throughout the poem.  He's not real.  Kinbote gives both Shade's world and his own world life.  


And the more I keep comparing them, the more insane I will seem.  I just like Kinbote. He's a good protagonist. 

"learning disabilities," synaesthesia and my paper topic

As I flipped through all my notes from the semester, I noticed I had scrawled the word, "dyslexia," along the pages quite a few times.  For me, it keeps popping up: mirrored writing, inverted letters, de-coding meaning, word play.  (It doesn't hurt that my other class has been talking about the topic and my older brother is dyslexic) And as I read Pale Fire, hopping back and forth and all around, I remember thinking about how my brother Sam describes his "learning disability."  He says the letters don't necessarily move to different places each time he looks at the page and not all the letters seem inverted, but they just aren't "really" there.  He can see them on the page, but the meaning floats.  It takes effort for him to pin it down.

A few times (wild moments of mine), I imagined Nabokov as dyslexic.  I know he really couldn't be, because he was a novelist, but the way he plays with words and mirrors and images, it's like he has his own code, and rather than conforming to the "normal ways" of language, he's making readers conform to his. I have been lolling that idea in my head for awhile; and it turns out he does have his own code. 

Nabokov is both a synaesthete and an eidetic imager.  Synaesthesia is "an involuntary joining in which the real information of one sense is accompanied by a perception in an another sense" (Dann).  He "hears" colors, or rather sound stimulants induce visual sensations (color).  So, he can see music and words in color, and because visual cues, like color, are triggers for memory, Nabokov's was pretty fab.  With that in mind, his memoir, "Speak Memory," makes a lot of sense, because he can "hear it" (and because he is an eidetic imager). Eidetic is closely related to synaesthesia, in that the person can recall a memory in vivid detail.  Sight, and to a certain extent, sound, smell and taste, from a memory can be brought forward and experienced, felt.  We could probably have sent Nabokov to fulfill that "sea" experiment weeks back, because he could not only experience it there, but he could probably have brought it back to the class.  Though, I guess we still wouldn't have truly known what it was like, because it would have been all in his head.

There are some scientists (and the like), who attach terms like "dysfunctional," "imagined," and "distracting" to the synaesthesia and eidetic (Dann).  They don't see the value in it, because whatever a synaesthete perceives is not perceived by anyone else (even amongst synaesthetes, the colors and sensations felt differ from person to person-- one might hear "a" as a yellow, while another sees it as green), and the reality of the perception is questioned. The eidetic images, from what I've been reading, seem similar to hallucinations.  What is recalled is lived again in the moment, spilling into it and for some, lines can be blurred.  But I find all of it- the sensory absorption, the memories and the experience- to be quite a gift.  Whether or not I can truly understand or see the world from his viewpoint, Nabokov offers such a different perspective on the world we perceive to be true.  He takes what we see as normal (which isn't normal for him-- and might be incomprehensible to others, who de-code differently) and flips it-- now he is norm, the knower and we are the ones who don't understand.  It's an inverted world, cryptic and frustrating for us, but full of truths, we probably wouldn't have seen otherwise.

For my paper topic, I want to delve deeper into this realm of perception (de-coding) and reality; how what Nabokov experienced in his life is reflected in his main characters in Pale Fire and how his characters choose to project their perceptions, inverted shades and shadows, mirrors and glass, in or maybe as an "unreal" landscape. 

Or something to that effect.  


Dann, Kevin T.  Bright Colors Falsely Seen: Synaesthesia and the Search for Transcendental Knowledge

The Red Admira(b)le

I was following the thread of "My dark Vanessa" notes and I thought maybe Kinbote was trying to associate Shade's butterfly wife to something death related, because he didn't like her.  I googled some stuff, but while I didn't actually find much on the Red Admiral and death, I did stumble across other knowledge tidbits. 

The Red Admiral belongs to the genus Vanessa and the family Nymphalidae.  
Vanessa Atalanta
A butterfly website had a caption: "Red Admiral: Military Man Among the Ladies."  I wasn't exactly sure what was meant by that until I looked deeper into Kinbote's lines "Vanhomrigh and Esther!" Esther Vanhomrigh was a lover of Jonathan Swift, who fictionalized her as "Vanessa" in his poem "Cadenus and Vanessa."  The plot goes--- that nymphs and shepherds levy a complaint against Cupid, saying that he is not doing his job of spreading love everywhere.  Cupid retorts that no woman is worth loving, because all women are vain and stupid.  The nymphs were mad and the fighting went back and forth until Venus decides to experiment.  She creates a "near perfect woman" and names her Vanessa.  (Venus, Vanessa)  Vanessa is kind of raised like a dude-- she gets lessons on knowledge, judgment and wit.  It turns out Venus is more interested in creating a new, more masculine model for women in Vanessa, but the other women don't care for the new values and are mean to the manly woman.  Cupid tries shooting arrows at her, and she deflects most of them, because she has a book of poems in her hands.  At some point, a tip of an arrow pierces through her book into her, and she "falls in love" with Cadenus (Swift), her tutor.  But when Cadenus finally says, "okay, I like you" things get confused, because he starts using love language, which is kind of feminine and kind of what he has taught her to despise.  So she becomes the teacher, showing him how to love more rationally (more man-like).  And in the case Nymphs v. Cupid, the ruling is that the problem with little love lies in men rather than women. Which is true when you think about Kinbote and Disa. It sounds like Disa is a beautiful and less annoying (to him) version of Sibyl, but he doesn't go for her.  It's not her fault though.  It's totally all him. 

Moving on to the Atalanta part of the name- Atalanta is a female athlete in Greek mythology.  Like Vanessa, she exhibits masculine qualities.  She is a hunter, a foot racer. . .an all around Xena Warrior Princess type, I guess.  Strong and sexy.  And independent.  She was warned to never marry, so she came out with a decree-- no man would be able to marry her unless he could beat her in a foot race.  A guy named Melanion wanted to take her hand, but knew he couldn't win without help.  He went to Aprohodite (Venus) and received three golden apples from her.  He then challenged Atalanta to a race, and every time she darted ahead, he chucked an apple in her path.  I don't know why, but whenever he did that, she just had to slow down and check it out.  Because of her . . . curiosity? stupidity?  she lost the race.  There was some seducing action between the victor and Atalanta in Zeus' temple, which is also stupid; because Zeus came down and turned them into lions. . . . "magnificent, velvet-and-flame creature" (p 290).

So, I think Sybil, as a "Vanessa Atalanta," might have been trying to re-educate John Shade (Jonathan Swift! Lightbulb aka Cadenus) in a way.  He is really poetic and flowery and beautiful, and she seems to endorse that creativity, but she also weighs in a lot of influence (according to Kinbote).   


"Come and be worshiped, come and be caressed,/ My dear Vanessa, crimson-barred, my blest,/ My Admirable butterfly!" (ln 269-271).

Shadows and mirrors-- reaction part 1

Discovery: There are a ton of glass and mirror references in this book---

“the name Zembla is a corruption not of the Russian zemlya, but of Semblerland, a land of reflections, of “resemblers. . .”(p265)

“The newspaper reader’s face had been atrociously injured in the recently mentioned explosion (Glass Explosion), and all the art of plastic surgery had only resulted in a hideous tessellated texture with parts of pattern and parts of outline seeming to change, to fuse or to separate, like fluctuating cheeks and chins in a distortive mirror. . . a mosaic-faced man” (p 146).

“Glassman hospital” (p 253).

“Old Dr. Sutton’s last two windowpanes” (ln 986).

“The music stopped as Gradus, confused by the whimsical shape of the house, hesitated before a glassed-in porch” (p 199).

Botkin. . .Kinbote

---which takes me back to discussions we had on Don Quixote and Alice in Wonderland and Dorothy in Oz and actually. . .Hayao Miyazaki, because I am researching his movies for another class.  All of these characters or books or films contain unreal landscapes, which have the potential to reveal more about the “real” world than seen at first glance.   In an article on Cervantes, Peter Dunn says that while “we may be indifferent to the reality that surrounds us, we will respond actively to that same reality if it is reflected in a mirror. . . The experience of heightened awareness, I presume, is a consequence of two facts: first the fact that the looking-glass image is reversed; and second, the fact that this reversed image is concentrated within a frame” (Dunn 7).  Two realities (or more) live parallel in Nabokov’s book, all separated by glass.  Glass and shadows.  I started to dog-ear each page that had the words, “shad(e)ow” or “glass,” in them, and then stopped before the whole book started to look like an origami explosion.   I’m not exactly sure about the meaning of all this, but I speculate that Shade and Kinbote are two people on either side of the poem, “Pale Fire,” which is acting as a mirror, because as “tragic poetry” it “presents to us the condition of man as though she were a brightly shining mirror” (Dunn 6).    

I think Kinbote, as an exile from an unreal world, chooses to see it (Zembla) in the poem, because it contains more potential than the "real."  But his land of “resemblers” feels kind of shattered.  There’s that glass explosion, Gradus- failed glass guy, mosaic face (who was actually pretending to be a mosaic face) etc.  It’s all taken over by “Shadows.”  Shade, maybe.

Shade is the “shadow of the waxwing slain,/by the false azure in the windowpane;”   Also glass. 

I need to think more, but something really quick I found in that Dunn article---- Mirrors “as a phenomenon, it falls within the science of optics, and it can serve only as a problem in the phenomenology of perception. . .Don Quixote believes that he is remaking our real world in the image of a superior world of chivalric romance.  In the view of the “real world” characters, he is a looking-glass person at large in their real world; whereas he believes that he is the only real person in a looking-glass world” (12).

Dunn, Peter. “Don Quijote Through the Looking Glass.”

http://www.h-net.org/~cervant/csa/artics92/dunn.htm