Within the Pale

I find this hilarious…

“Line 17: And then the gradual; Line 29: gray
By an extraordinary coincidence (inherent perhaps in the contrapuntal nature of Shade’s art) our poet seems to name here (gradual, gray) a man…”

By extraordinary coincidence, too, I have spent years publicly on this Gestalt Real-Time Reviewing site scrying such extraordinary coincidences of literary wordplay, words by instinct or typo or phonetics or semantics or visual graphology, beyond even Wimsatt’s Intentional Fallacy! (I first learnt about the latter literary theory in 1967 from Anne Cluysenaar.) Call it Confirmation-Bias, if you like, but I have found it works well with literature and hyper-imaginative genre fiction. He, old Skinboat claims that Shade here with ‘gray’ and ‘gradual’ refers to (Jacob) Gradus and the story or truth regarding Zembla etc.
…or as if the Pale Fire Cantos are retrocausally affected by this subsequent Commentary and, thus, by Skinboat himself !!….. representing a general conundrum I have publicly grappled with on many occasions.
“We shall accompany Gradus in constant thought, as he makes his way from dim distant Zembla to green Appalachia, through the entire length of the poem.”

From my review of PALE FIRE by Vladimir Nabokov today: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2020/04/06/pale-fire-vladimir-nabokov/#comment-18791

Please also see: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2020/04/12/the-quest-for-the-literary-gestalt-its-goal-finally-in-sight/