#since her light theft is derived from the same reference
Not as sweeping as the title might imply. The post draws an association between Kinbote’s homosexuality and some lines of verse imagining a heaven spent playing lyres and having conversational “cypress walks” with Socrates and Proust. It works as both a fantasy of speaking with your departed heroes in the afterlife and as a reflection upon the act of reading, “talking” with the dead via words on paper, a wood byproduct. OP alleges that the choice of cypress (over any other sort of wood) and mention of lyres further refer us to the myth of Orpheus, who, having sworn off of women after losing Eurydice, spends his remaining days in the company of “young boys”, however they mean that. Orpheus would afterward play the lyre and the nearby cypress tree (the tranformed Cyparissus) would sway to the music.
OP doesn’t say as much explicitly, but this implied to me that Kinbote is effectively Pale Fire’s Orpheus, and his sexuality is partly, if not primarily, in service of the allusion. Zembla as Eurydice? While Shade would be Cyparissus, his poem becoming his tree-body which sways in accord with the lyre play (liar play) of Kinbote’s commentary? I don’t know how far the analogy travels, I read the book ages ago.
I stumbled on this while searching for any academic discourse on homosexuality in Pale Fire; in the wake of Slurquest, there seemed to be a potential correlation between Nabokov’s manic gay caricature and the matter of Act 1 Egbert’s glimmer of gender trouble being accompanied by a Pale Fire quote
