[Jim Twiggs' post was apparently misplaced during the birthday celebrations on Friday. Here it is now! -- SES]
Nick,
You mention the place at the end of the Commentary where Kinbote gives way to "the old, happy, heterosexual Russian." I've always thought there's a corresponding point near the end of Shade's poem. It comes here, in lines 923-930:
Now I shall speak of evil as none has
Spoken before. I loathe such things as jazz;
The white-hosed moron torturing a black
Bull, rayed with red; abstractist bric-a-brac;
Primitivist folk-masks; progressive schools;
Music in supermarkets; swimming pools;
Brutes, bores, class-conscious Philistines, Freud, Marx
Fake thinkers, puffed-up poets, frauds and sharks.
Everything after "I loathe" is not Shade but rather pure Nabokov--the VN who speaks in interviews and critical essays and for whom Humbert often provided the voice. But here it is such an obvious intrusion--as if Shade had stopped writing and a pre-cut set of pet peeves had been pasted in--that I assume it's VN's way of winking at us from behind the character he's created and is now making fun of.
If, on the other hand, as many now are claiming, VN was trying in every line to write the best poem he could write, then these lines strike me as being among the weakest in the poem--weak because, if for no other reason, they're downright silly.
It's worth remembering that VN did not always describe the poem in the manner quoted in the article that Matt recently posted. In his letter to Rust Hills dated March 23, 1961, offering the poem to Esquire, he said: "If you want this poem despite its being rather racy and tricky, and unpleasant, and bizarre, I must ask you to publish all four cantos." Those are adjectives that some readers would prefer not to apply to Shade's poem, though they obviously apply to the Commentary and to many other of VN's works.
In any case, I was pleased to read Simon's query and your response. It's good to know that someone besides Dowling is pursuing this line of thought. The problem I've had when I've tried to follow it through is that I can't keep my "ahh" from collapsing, finally, into my "duh" and I find myself back where I started. It's too bad that Dowling himself, at least as far as I know, has never published his promised second paper on the subject.
Jim Twiggs
From: Nick Greer <nicholas.t.greer@GOOGLEMAIL.COM>
To: NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU
Sent: Thu, April 22, 2010 10:55:07 PM
Subject: Re: [NABOKV-L] THOUGHTS: VN's Self-Reference in Pale Fire
Simon,
I gave a lot of attention to this theory during my third reading of PF and ended up writing a paper investigating Nabokov's actual (duh) and inset (ahh) authorship. My initial rationale was that between the veiled but literal V. Botkin explanation, the ghostwriting Shadean & Kinbotean explanations, and even the ghostly Hazel explanation, we as readers could zoom out a meta-level and enjoy the question of authorship itself as a pluralistic authorship rather than a competition between individual explanations. The pluralstic view has one unified perspective, Nabokov's. On the surface this observation seems trivial (i.e. Nabokov is the author of PF so of course he has ultimate authorship, hence the aforementioned 'duh'), but Nabokov makes deliberate gestures that give this some weight.
The baldheaded suntanned professor in a Hawaiian shirt works particularly well as far as an explicit inclusion. I also had Hurricane Lolita and "a nymphet pirouetted" Here are some additional nuggets I cite in support of this view:
Nabokov's unabashed "Russianness"
- Russian “was the fashionable language par excellence, much more so than French, among the nobles of Zembla at least, and at its court” (p. 286, l. 894).
- “Charles the Beloved[,] could boast some Russian blood (p. 245 l. 681).
- An old world Russia “that hated tyrants and Philistines, injustice and cruelty, the Russia of ladies and gentlemen and liberal aspirations” (p. 245 l. 681).
- “Charles Xavier Vseslav,…, surnamed The Beloved” (p. 306), Charles' surname calls out "slav."
- “Botkin, V., American scholar of Russian descent: (p. 306). Considering the former bullet point, a likely choice is "Vseslav," but the initialization allows for a nice insertion of "Vladimir."
Inclusions of Pnin
“’You do know Russian, though?’ said Pardon. ‘I think I heard you, the other day, talking to - what's his name - oh, my goodness’ [laboriously composing his lips].
Shade: ‘Sir, we all find it difficult to attack that name’ [laughing].
Professor Hurley: ‘Think of the French word for “tire”: punoo.’
Shade: ‘Why, Sir, I am afraid you have only punctured the difficulty’ [laughing uproariously].” (p. 268 l. 894)
- Pardon calls out Kinbote speaking with Pnin.
- Shade's use of "attack" is an ironic reference to how Nabokov as narrator in Pnin, attacks Professor Pnin. It is also an acknowledgment of the difficulty a lot of readers had with pronouncing "Pnin" when the book was released. Both jokes are unique to Nabokov's perspective. Note that Prof. Hurley pronounces it incorrectly as well.
End of the Commentary
“I may assume other disguises, other forms, but I shall try to exist. I may turn up yet, on another campus, as an old, happy, healthy, heterosexual Russian, a writer in exile, sans fame, sans future, sans audience, sans anything but his art. I may join forces with Odon in a new motion picture: Escape from Zembla (ball in the palace, bomb in the palace square). I may pander to the simple tastes of theatrical critics and cook up a stage play, an old-fashioned melodrama… History permitting, I may sail back to my recovered kingdom, and with a great sob greet the gray coastline and the gleam of a roof in the rain.” (p. 300-301 l. 1000)
- "[A]n old, happy, healthy, heterosexual Russian, a writer in exile, sans fame, sans future, sans audience, sans anything but his art" is the Nabokov we know.
- "I may join forces with Odon in a new motion picture: Escape from Zembla[.]" A potential reference to his Lolita screenplay.
- "History permitting, I may sail back to my recovered kingdom, and with a great sob greet the gray coastline and the gleam of a roof in the rain." Nabokov forecasting his eventual relocation to Montreux?
I'd be curious if anybody else has notes on this topic. Thanks for reading my patchwork commentary.
-Nick
P.S. Dowling on Pale Fire, great!