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Re: THOUGHTS on the Pale Fire poem--response to Friedman
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Dear Jerry,
I put myself on a limb, obviously, by praising Monroe’s essay so highly--a limb that, as far as I can tell, Sam Gwynn has successfully sawed off. I’m grateful to Sam for taking the time to respond so fully to the technical aspects of Monroe’s paper, and I bow to his (and, apparently, your own) superior knowledge. There was a time when I could have explored these questions further by consulting with two of my good friends and former teachers at the University of Arkansas--Sam will know their names--but alas, these men are no longer available for guidance, and I'm too old to immerse myself once again, on my own, after all these years, into the tricky waters of Form and Theory. (I tell you what, folks, we’re getting feeble and dead in a hurry down here in Fudville.) Luckily for me, nothing much turns on whether Monroe’s technical discussion is defensible or not. As you suggest, it was always going to come down to a matter of taste anyway--taste,
judgment, and our (apparently very different) senses of how the poem and the character of Shade fit into the novel as a whole. Considered in this way, the passages I quoted from Monroe still hold firm for the larger view I was trying to develop.
As for your question about a school of “otherworlders,” I refer you to Don Johnson’s and Brian Boyd’s “Prologue: The Otherworld,” in Nabokov’s World, Vol. 1: The Shape of Nabokov’s World(Palgrave-Macmillan, 2002), in which Johnson provides an overview of the history of Nabokov criticism. What I meant by “otherworlders” is summed up by Johnson as follows:
Much of Nabokov’s work is best understood in terms of the possible survival of the individual consciousness (personality and memory) after death. Death is, speculatively, merely the dividing line between levels of consciousness. These levels (or worlds), one exercising a degree of influence over the events in the other, form the basic conceptual categories underlying most, if not all of Nabokov’s work. Much of the technical virtuosity in Nabokov’s work is in aid of hinting at this relationship between dimensions. This approach, sometimes known as the ‘metaphysical’ (as opposed to the earlier ‘metaliterary’) . . . dominated the 1990s. It is the matrix for most current criticism and is, in my view, basically sound, a productive paradigm for continued research. (p. 20)
Although I have high regard for the work of both Johnson and Boyd, and have learned much from both of them, I’m not drawn to this approach to my favorite Nabokov books, and I'm especially suspicious of its application to Pale Fire--in part because the novel is so overtly about these very matters. I was therefore gratified when Johnson goes on to say that
My present discomfort stems from the thought that this dominant critical paradigm discourages critics and readers from attending to the very concrete details that constitute the basis of Nabokov’s stature as an artist. They also tend to ignore the wit and humour that are so central to his work. For the sake of argument, let us suppose that Nabokov is in fact a ‘dirty’ writer who sometimes appeals to the reader’s prurience; let us assume that his values are sometimes less than humanistic, and that his other worlds philosophy is, in itself, badly shopworn. Would acknowledging such assumptions significantly diminish our delight? Would Nabokov be less the consummate artist? Apart from whatever heuristic value they may have, our reigning paradigms should be regarded with scepticism, lest they deflect attention from the area of Nabokov’s greatest originality--the brilliance of his style and wit. (p. 21)
If the otherworld model is the dominant paradigm, then it follows that you're not the only member of what clearly seems to be a "school."
Your question about why an author would deliberately write bad poetry (or prose) is one that you ought to take up with Nabokov himself. The early, "metaliterary" school of VN criticism, mentioned by Johnson, was led by Alfred Appel, Jr., who in 1967 published a famous paper titled "Lolita: The Springboard of Parody," which was later incorporated into the Introduction of The Annotated Lolita. The subtitle of the paper is taken from The Real Life of Sebastian Knight: "As was often the case with Sebastian Knight, he used parody as a kind of springboard for leaping into the highest region of serious emotion . . ." The rest of this passage, quoted on page li of Appel's Introduction, along with Appel's elaboration of VN's use of parody and comedy, is one of the inspirations for my own reading of Pale Fire.
In his response to Johnson, Boyd says:
[H]e asks if it would make any difference whether Nabokov’s otherworldly philosophy were shopworn. To me it certainly would. Eliot’s craving for the authority of tradition, Yeats’s refuge in the irrational, to me seriously diminish their art. Nabokov is of such interest partly because he is such a clear and independent thinker, and his style is the way it is because he has such clarity and independence of thought. (p. 23)
I disagree strongly with Boyd's second sentence. I think most of what he has presented as Nabokov's "deep" side is indeed shopworn, and was shopworn long before Nabokov came on the scene. As Boyd has described it in the pages I've read by him, the "philosophy" is a hodgepodge of familiar ideas--a bit of Ancient Wisdom here (Gnosticism, neo-Platonism, etc.), a spot of pseudo-science there (Blavatsky, Steiner, Dunne, Ouspensky, et al.), pretty standard intimations of immortality and nature mysticism, and some ideas about design that have been around for a very long while.
This isn't to say that I don't think there's depth in Nabokov. Pale Fire is a deep novel indeed, a novel that I greatly admire, but I don't think Boyd has the handle on what the depth consists of. But that's a matter for another time. For now, Jerry, I appreciate your interest in my postings, and I hope I've answered your questions. There's one thing we definitely agree on--namely, that Hazel's suicide is suitably motivated. In my estimation, this is set up wonderfully and believably well.
Jim Twiggs
P.S. You're right, you don't have to remind me that the difference between "comic" and "cosmic" is a single letter. It's a question of which word is to be master, and which way the influence runs.
________________________________
From: Jerry Friedman <jerryfriedman1@GMAIL.COM>
This is a matter of taste, and all the critics on one side or the other aren't going to change anyone's opinion. As you said below, the question that's important to the interpretation of the book is whether it's intentionally bad.
I disagree with most of your arguments about the poem, but I think they're far stronger than Monroe's. If he was going to ignore so much of the conventional wisdom on poetry and so much of what Nabokov did in other poems, he could have at least said why.
[...]
>
I don't need to remind you what's one letter away from the comic.
But that is indeed a crucial point, and you won't be surprised if I say that 999 lines of intentionally bad poetry by someone who could do better doesn't tickle my funnybone. There's plenty of comically bad poetry in the world, starting with MacGonagall. Undoubtedly that different taste in humor is one reason for our different interpretations.
Nabokov could have written bad prose just as well or better, but as far as I know, he never did so at any length. (I hope someone will correct me if I'm wrong.) My feeling is that he couldn't stand it. He wouldn't even write much dialogue by people of normal conversational ability, at least in the novels I've read. So I doubt he could stand to write and publish so much intentionally bad verse.
It's pleasant (in an un-Nabokovian way) to know I'm following a school! If you don't
mind, who are some of the others, beside Brian Boyd and Victoria
Alexander? (In their books, Vladimir Alexandrov doesn't see much
otherworldly in /Pale Fire/ and Don Johnson doesn't see many worlds in
regression, as I recall.) I recently found an early sketch of the idea that the book
points to a world above ours: Julian Moynahan (1971), /Vladimir Nabokov/, University of Minnesota Press, pp. 40–45.
http://books.google.com/books?id=Bqag980h9sUC&pg=RA1-PA41#v=onepage&q=&f=false
>Oddly enough, it won't mean much to my interpretation if I'm forced to accept that Nabokov did mean the poem to be amusingly bad.
As long as I'm arguing, I'm going to argue with Joseph Aisenberg, Jansy Mello, and R. S. Gwynn about Hazel's suicide. It's not just because of one blind date, or even because of her ugliness. As Carolyn Kunin and I have pointed out here, very unattractive women can survive that to live happy lives including a satisfactory quantity and quality of sex. Hazel is not only "shy"--she has "miseries" and "strange fears, strange fantasies, strange force of character". She's "morose" and never happy--see especially lines 350-356. It's clear that she has depression, which is what makes people kill themselves, and Pete Provost's rejection is the last straw, not just to her hope for love and sex, but to a lifetime of pain. This may not be perfect psychological character construction, but it does show that Nabokov didn't want Hazel to commit suicide over one failure.
And I think that Shade feels guilt over more than the genes that R. S. Gwynn mentions, which aren't even Shade's responsibility. If I may repeat myself, he at least /should/ have some idea that his and Sybil's irrational pitying pessimism about Hazel's looks has contributed greatly to her pain.
Jerry Friedman
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I put myself on a limb, obviously, by praising Monroe’s essay so highly--a limb that, as far as I can tell, Sam Gwynn has successfully sawed off. I’m grateful to Sam for taking the time to respond so fully to the technical aspects of Monroe’s paper, and I bow to his (and, apparently, your own) superior knowledge. There was a time when I could have explored these questions further by consulting with two of my good friends and former teachers at the University of Arkansas--Sam will know their names--but alas, these men are no longer available for guidance, and I'm too old to immerse myself once again, on my own, after all these years, into the tricky waters of Form and Theory. (I tell you what, folks, we’re getting feeble and dead in a hurry down here in Fudville.) Luckily for me, nothing much turns on whether Monroe’s technical discussion is defensible or not. As you suggest, it was always going to come down to a matter of taste anyway--taste,
judgment, and our (apparently very different) senses of how the poem and the character of Shade fit into the novel as a whole. Considered in this way, the passages I quoted from Monroe still hold firm for the larger view I was trying to develop.
As for your question about a school of “otherworlders,” I refer you to Don Johnson’s and Brian Boyd’s “Prologue: The Otherworld,” in Nabokov’s World, Vol. 1: The Shape of Nabokov’s World(Palgrave-Macmillan, 2002), in which Johnson provides an overview of the history of Nabokov criticism. What I meant by “otherworlders” is summed up by Johnson as follows:
Much of Nabokov’s work is best understood in terms of the possible survival of the individual consciousness (personality and memory) after death. Death is, speculatively, merely the dividing line between levels of consciousness. These levels (or worlds), one exercising a degree of influence over the events in the other, form the basic conceptual categories underlying most, if not all of Nabokov’s work. Much of the technical virtuosity in Nabokov’s work is in aid of hinting at this relationship between dimensions. This approach, sometimes known as the ‘metaphysical’ (as opposed to the earlier ‘metaliterary’) . . . dominated the 1990s. It is the matrix for most current criticism and is, in my view, basically sound, a productive paradigm for continued research. (p. 20)
Although I have high regard for the work of both Johnson and Boyd, and have learned much from both of them, I’m not drawn to this approach to my favorite Nabokov books, and I'm especially suspicious of its application to Pale Fire--in part because the novel is so overtly about these very matters. I was therefore gratified when Johnson goes on to say that
My present discomfort stems from the thought that this dominant critical paradigm discourages critics and readers from attending to the very concrete details that constitute the basis of Nabokov’s stature as an artist. They also tend to ignore the wit and humour that are so central to his work. For the sake of argument, let us suppose that Nabokov is in fact a ‘dirty’ writer who sometimes appeals to the reader’s prurience; let us assume that his values are sometimes less than humanistic, and that his other worlds philosophy is, in itself, badly shopworn. Would acknowledging such assumptions significantly diminish our delight? Would Nabokov be less the consummate artist? Apart from whatever heuristic value they may have, our reigning paradigms should be regarded with scepticism, lest they deflect attention from the area of Nabokov’s greatest originality--the brilliance of his style and wit. (p. 21)
If the otherworld model is the dominant paradigm, then it follows that you're not the only member of what clearly seems to be a "school."
Your question about why an author would deliberately write bad poetry (or prose) is one that you ought to take up with Nabokov himself. The early, "metaliterary" school of VN criticism, mentioned by Johnson, was led by Alfred Appel, Jr., who in 1967 published a famous paper titled "Lolita: The Springboard of Parody," which was later incorporated into the Introduction of The Annotated Lolita. The subtitle of the paper is taken from The Real Life of Sebastian Knight: "As was often the case with Sebastian Knight, he used parody as a kind of springboard for leaping into the highest region of serious emotion . . ." The rest of this passage, quoted on page li of Appel's Introduction, along with Appel's elaboration of VN's use of parody and comedy, is one of the inspirations for my own reading of Pale Fire.
In his response to Johnson, Boyd says:
[H]e asks if it would make any difference whether Nabokov’s otherworldly philosophy were shopworn. To me it certainly would. Eliot’s craving for the authority of tradition, Yeats’s refuge in the irrational, to me seriously diminish their art. Nabokov is of such interest partly because he is such a clear and independent thinker, and his style is the way it is because he has such clarity and independence of thought. (p. 23)
I disagree strongly with Boyd's second sentence. I think most of what he has presented as Nabokov's "deep" side is indeed shopworn, and was shopworn long before Nabokov came on the scene. As Boyd has described it in the pages I've read by him, the "philosophy" is a hodgepodge of familiar ideas--a bit of Ancient Wisdom here (Gnosticism, neo-Platonism, etc.), a spot of pseudo-science there (Blavatsky, Steiner, Dunne, Ouspensky, et al.), pretty standard intimations of immortality and nature mysticism, and some ideas about design that have been around for a very long while.
This isn't to say that I don't think there's depth in Nabokov. Pale Fire is a deep novel indeed, a novel that I greatly admire, but I don't think Boyd has the handle on what the depth consists of. But that's a matter for another time. For now, Jerry, I appreciate your interest in my postings, and I hope I've answered your questions. There's one thing we definitely agree on--namely, that Hazel's suicide is suitably motivated. In my estimation, this is set up wonderfully and believably well.
Jim Twiggs
P.S. You're right, you don't have to remind me that the difference between "comic" and "cosmic" is a single letter. It's a question of which word is to be master, and which way the influence runs.
________________________________
From: Jerry Friedman <jerryfriedman1@GMAIL.COM>
This is a matter of taste, and all the critics on one side or the other aren't going to change anyone's opinion. As you said below, the question that's important to the interpretation of the book is whether it's intentionally bad.
I disagree with most of your arguments about the poem, but I think they're far stronger than Monroe's. If he was going to ignore so much of the conventional wisdom on poetry and so much of what Nabokov did in other poems, he could have at least said why.
[...]
>
I don't need to remind you what's one letter away from the comic.
But that is indeed a crucial point, and you won't be surprised if I say that 999 lines of intentionally bad poetry by someone who could do better doesn't tickle my funnybone. There's plenty of comically bad poetry in the world, starting with MacGonagall. Undoubtedly that different taste in humor is one reason for our different interpretations.
Nabokov could have written bad prose just as well or better, but as far as I know, he never did so at any length. (I hope someone will correct me if I'm wrong.) My feeling is that he couldn't stand it. He wouldn't even write much dialogue by people of normal conversational ability, at least in the novels I've read. So I doubt he could stand to write and publish so much intentionally bad verse.
It's pleasant (in an un-Nabokovian way) to know I'm following a school! If you don't
mind, who are some of the others, beside Brian Boyd and Victoria
Alexander? (In their books, Vladimir Alexandrov doesn't see much
otherworldly in /Pale Fire/ and Don Johnson doesn't see many worlds in
regression, as I recall.) I recently found an early sketch of the idea that the book
points to a world above ours: Julian Moynahan (1971), /Vladimir Nabokov/, University of Minnesota Press, pp. 40–45.
http://books.google.com/books?id=Bqag980h9sUC&pg=RA1-PA41#v=onepage&q=&f=false
>Oddly enough, it won't mean much to my interpretation if I'm forced to accept that Nabokov did mean the poem to be amusingly bad.
As long as I'm arguing, I'm going to argue with Joseph Aisenberg, Jansy Mello, and R. S. Gwynn about Hazel's suicide. It's not just because of one blind date, or even because of her ugliness. As Carolyn Kunin and I have pointed out here, very unattractive women can survive that to live happy lives including a satisfactory quantity and quality of sex. Hazel is not only "shy"--she has "miseries" and "strange fears, strange fantasies, strange force of character". She's "morose" and never happy--see especially lines 350-356. It's clear that she has depression, which is what makes people kill themselves, and Pete Provost's rejection is the last straw, not just to her hope for love and sex, but to a lifetime of pain. This may not be perfect psychological character construction, but it does show that Nabokov didn't want Hazel to commit suicide over one failure.
And I think that Shade feels guilt over more than the genes that R. S. Gwynn mentions, which aren't even Shade's responsibility. If I may repeat myself, he at least /should/ have some idea that his and Sybil's irrational pitying pessimism about Hazel's looks has contributed greatly to her pain.
Jerry Friedman
Search the archive Contact the Editors Visit "Nabokov Online Journal"
Visit Zembla View Nabokv-L Policies Manage subscription options
All private editorial communications, without
exception, are
read by both co-editors.
Search archive with Google:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
Visit "Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
Manage subscription options: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/