I agree rather strongly. If The Vane Sisters is a great short story it must be mainly for its descriptiveness,
and not for its acrostic-ality. Nobody, I think,
ever solved, independently, this puzzle.
And without VN's revealing the answer,
no one ever would solve it.
Nobody ever experienced, or will, that Aha!-moment
that the piece was seemingly written to evoke.
It's just a kind of stunt played to show
how impossibly abstruse the game can get,
replete with extra-textual instructions, very much like Eliot!
On the other hand I think a central understanding of Shade
derives in large part from attempting to physically render Canto 4;
and realizing then that the sound, sense and feeling
of an interpretation based upon just the words themselves
are apt to be very different than one
based upon Kinbote's misinterpretation
as given in his commentary to the opening of Canto 4.
Lines 835-838: Now I shall spy, etc.
The canto, begun on July 19th, on card sixty-eight, opens with a typical Shadism: the cunning working-in of several inter-echoing phrases into a jumble of enjambments. Actually, the promise made in these four lines will not be really kept except for the repetition of their incantatory rhythm in lines
915 and
923-924 (leading to the savage attack in
925-930). The poet like a fiery rooster seems to flap his wings in a preparatory burst of would-be inspiration, but the sun does not rise. Instead of the wild poetry promised here, we get a jest or two, a bit of satire, and at the end of the canto, a wonderful radiance of tenderness and repose.
In fact the sun does rise, quite fiercely even,
but only when one pushes aside Kinbote's silly misreadings.
VN believed strongly in deception as an essential part of story telling;Kinbote is mainly a bumbling diversion-ist, especially in things poetic.
Nabokov's puzzles sometimes require a kind of reading
that most readers are not likely to undertake.
In the case of The Vane Sisters, no one could
possibly read it on their own in the requisite way.
In the case of Pale Fire, Canto 4 however,
a performer responding to the potentiality of the words alone,
might ignore Kinbote's misdirections and discover
a wonderfully vibrant wildness & subsequent repose.
Tangentially yours,
~/gsl.
On Oct 11, 2012, at 3:46 PM, Anthony Stadlen wrote:
I don't quite know how to put this with due respect to VN, but am I
alone in finding this business of committees of ghosts attending to the
destinies of the quick so idiosyncratic and trivial as to be a real turn-off? I
enjoyed the bit about Tolstoy and the acrostic in The Vane Sisters,
but if it becomes the underlying metaphysics of his oeuvre, so to speak, it
just seems silly. Of course, each man is entitled to his religion, but as
Bertrand Russell said in response to D. H. Lawrence's "Look, we have come
through!", they may have come through but why should we look?
Anthony
Stadlen
"Oakleigh"
2A Alexandra Avenue
GB - London N22
7XE
Tel.: +44 (0) 20 8888 6857
For Existential Psychotherapy and
Inner Circle Seminars see:
http://anthonystadlen.blogspot.com
It
could be that the answer to many ghost-related riddles in Nabokov
(including
PF) is in "Pnin":
"He
did not believe in an autocratic God. He did believe, dimly, in a democracy of
ghosts.
The
souls of the dead, perhaps, formed committees, and these, in
continuous
session, attended to the destinies of the quick."
It
is the interaction and struggle between ghosts, each
protecting
his or her own "quick", much like Greek gods, that can
explain
the incosistencies.
As
for the tradition of ghosts in the Russian literature, it's
huge
but it seems that Nabokov's treatment of the theme was
influenced
more by spiritualistic and theosophical
teachings
immensely popular in Russia at the time of Nabokov's youth.
Tatiana
Ponomareva
--
Susan Elizabeth Sweeney
Co„Editor,
NABOKV„L
All private
editorial communications are read by both co-editors.
All private editorial communications are
read by both co-editors.