curmudgeon

One reader whinged that I was always using words he or she did not know (gender is not always clear from a signature, as many a Sam and Gene can attest). I replied sympathetically, asking for a full list of their unknown words so I could avoid using them.

Returning to my title, I’m forced to admit that beyond what might seem to be an obvious pun, requiring a little French (peut-être means “perhaps, maybe”) and knowledge of the children’s game of counting potatoes, at which point the title at least sounds funny—there, I’ve already broken my rule against over-explicating a joke—you may still not grasp the full import of my waspish wit and unbounded, but lightly worn, erudition. Reluctantly, and risking your jealous scorn, I first remind you of Rabelais’ lament, “Je m’en vais chercher le grand peut-être” (“I’ll be looking out for the big maybe”). Nothing to laugh at yet, considering that the poet is speaking of death, the big unknown, the big perhaps. Move on to Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977) and his baffling masterpiece Pale Fire (a quote from Shakespeare indicating the moon’s poor reflection of the sun), where we find the poet John Shade also pondering his mortality, but fighting back with dark humor:

 

L’if, lifeless tree! You great Maybe, Rabelais The grand potato

I.P.H, a lay

Institute (I) of Preparation (P) for the Hereafter (H) or If, as we

Called it—a big if—engaged for one term To speak on death...

There’s no end of chuckles for the word-sleuths here, and Nabokovians come to blows chasing their allusions. Amusingly, Nabokov himself was fond of rejecting many of the scholars’ claimed solutions, saying that so-and-so was a brilliant interpretation, and he wished he had thought of it at the time of writing.

To quickly note the puns and allusions: l’if is French for the yew tree, of ancient Celtic significance for both death and long life (which just shows how usefully flexible mythology can be); l’if can also be read as “the IF,” well known to programmers who need to branch (trees again) conditionally to remote parts of the coding forest. To play the allusion game you must be bold enough to spot that we have been “learning tree languages from positive examples and membership queries.” This also

happens to be the title of a famous paper on algorithmic learning theory by Jérôme Besombesa and Jean-Yves Marion, in Theoretical Computer Science (Vol. 382, Issue 3), published the very week I moved back to England from the United States. Spooky beyond mere coincidence.

Nabokovians are obsessed by, and have a rare pet name for, spooky dates: fatidic. Look it up before complaining. Rabelais we’ve already met with his big peut-étre/potato, perhaps the biggest “maybe” we mortals face. Nabokov loved, analyzed, and lectured on James Joyce’s Ulysses but couldn’t stand Finnegans Wake (far too cryptic). Perhaps there’s a clue here, an echo of the Big Potato Famine that devastated Ireland in the 1840s. There they sang, “Oh the praties they are small and we dig them in the fall, and we eat them roots and all, over here.” We now have three Frenchmen: the authors Jérôme and Jean-Yves plus Rabelais; why not a fourth, Pascal, whose Wager tests our deathbed faith in salvation?

We then transliterate IF to the Greek IPH, giving us the Institute of Preparation for the Hereafter. We can pause briefly to recall that IPHigenia, daughter of Agamemnon, had a close dice with death until saved by the virgin goddess ARTemis. The theme of art bestowing a form of immortality via the survival of your artistic corpus runs through the work of Russian poets such as Derzhavin and Nabokov. That noble image is abruptly (deliberately?) tarnished by the close positioning of the word preparation and the letter H. Yet the sequence IF, maybe, suppose, suppository confirms our linkages.

Undismayed by Nabokov’s teasing denials of the wilder conjectures, dozens of Pale Fire exegetes have published conflicting readings (Google Pale Fire and try the fine Wiki main article for starters). It’s something of a literary FLT (Fermat’s Last Theorem or Mrs. Fermat’s divine lettuce and tomato sandwich) with some significant differences. First, it’s not quite clear what the puzzle is and whether a unique solution, if such there be, would stand out as unique. Next, the setter and adjudicator—nastily known as Vlad the Impaler by the many butterflies he pinned down (spreading, I think, is the in-name) as a leading lepidopterist—is no longer with us to vet (and denounce) solutions.

It was certainly sound book-commerce to keep the puzzle open as long as possible. I know of only two positive, off-the-cuff, extra-textual hints made by Nabokov during his lifetime: he confirmed that Botkin (a near-Rus-sian-anagram for “nobody”) was indeed a Russian