''Vladimir Nabokov's Comic Quest for Reality' - Nottingham eTheses

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standing' of the poem do not hold as arguments to
rule him out as primary author has been shown. However,
there are clues which, indeed, point to
Shade as the more likely candidate for that role.
In connection with The Real Life of Sebastian
Knight the relation (if any) between an author's life
and autobiography and his works has been shown. Nabokov's
own works abound in details that come clearly
from his own life and experience: persons, major
events, and incidents, but also a goodly quantity of
trivia noticed in passing (like a sign on a snapshot
69),
booth
echoes and scenes from films he has seen
70
and "an extraordinary amount of material drawn from
71
his quotidian.,,
But he makes it quite clear that
all these should not be used to draw conclusions
about his personality. They are mostly taken out of
their original contexts and are combined with new
elements, partly real and partly invented ones, so
that something quite new is created out of them which
has nothing to do with the author's identity. They
go into an author's work for purely artistic reasons.
There is in Pale Fire a passage which describes this
very process. Kinbote, talking of Shade, expresses
his own wonder at the process of literary creation:
I am witnessing a unique physiological
phenomenon: John Shade perceiving and
transforming the world, taking it in,
and taking it apart, re-combining its
elements in the very process of storing
them up so as to produce at some unspecified
date an organic miracle, a fusion
of image and music, a line of verse (27).
Kinbote applies this to the creation of the poem,