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Re: THOUGHTS on the Pale Fire poem--response to Friedman
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Dear Jerry,
About Shade's poem, I hasten to say (as I've said before on the List), that I don't think it's 999 lines of bad poetry. Both Adams and Hardwick were in my opinion far too harsh in suggesting such a thing. My view is closer to Monroe's nontechnical opinions and, especially, to the views of Dupee. In case you weren't able to access the essay I recommended, here's how Dupee sums up the poem:
. . . the poem maunders along, lovely in spots, penetrating in other spots, now elegiac, now cheery. It clothes itself in a simulacrum of Popian couplets without attaining to the hard antitheses, the decisive pauses, which are the prosodic mirror of Pope's tougher mind. Shade is a portrait of the poet as rustic American. The rustic American poet could use some of Kinbote's passion—but instead gets the bullet intended for Kinbote. As so often in our author's books, it takes two men to make a Nabokovian man—two men who, however, rarely get together.
A passage that you and I seem to agree is less than first rate is the one that Gary Lipon quoted a few days ago and that Jansy mentions this morning as smacking of Rupert Brooke. I'm not qualified to comment on Brooke, but to me the passage is good and bad in about the same way a Norman Rockwell painting is both good and bad. Except for the part about Hazel's ghost, it would be right at home on a Hallmark card. It all but oozes sincerity, doesn't it?--which brings me to a further point.
Several people have mentioned the description of Shade as being "one oozy footstep" behind Frost as if this were high praise. It isn't clear in the poem whether "oozy" is a word used by a critic or is Shade's own judgment on his work. In either case, I don't see it as being much of a compliment.
As you may recall, I'm one of those on the List--we may be few in number, but we used to make a good deal of noise--who don't see Shade as being a wholly admirable person or a completely reliable narrator. If we're right about this, the fact that Shade often serves as VN's mouthpiece doesn't mean that he always does, or that what he says is the whole truth and nothing but the truth. In my view, things are much more complicated than that, and the novel is much more radical (more Nabokovian, you might say) than it would be if Shade were the rock that many readers take him to be.
One of the writers I mentioned as forerunners of some of VN's ideas is J.W. Dunne. He's in Wikipedia, of course, and his influence on VN is described in the recently translated book by Michael Maar titled Speak, Nabokov. We are fortunate to have this fine book coming along so soon after Stephen Blackwell's highly readable and informative The Quill and the Scalpel.
Jim Twiggs
________________________________
JERRY FRIEDMAN WROTE:
I see I'll have to read /Nabokov's World/. What I'm interested in finding is a specific interpretation of /Pale Fire/: that a lot in the book points us to the author's higher world, and thus by implication to a world above the author. I have the comfort of having come up with it independently of others, but that's the belief of every fish in the school.
In yet another difference from you, I like the fact that /Pale Fire/ is overtly about "the beyond". Otherwise I wouldn't have seen (or thought I saw) the covert connections.
In the Nabokov parodies I recognize (such as Boswell and Johnson, and Ruritanian romance, in /Pale Fire/, Annabel Leigh as a parody of Freudianism and Poe in /Lolita/), either there's no change of style, or the change doesn't last long. Appel says Nabokov is "a master parodist of literary styles" as well as parodying works in ways that don't require him to imitate his subject's style. What I'm wondering is whether his parodies ever involved intentional bad writing at the length of "Pale Fire" the poem.
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About Shade's poem, I hasten to say (as I've said before on the List), that I don't think it's 999 lines of bad poetry. Both Adams and Hardwick were in my opinion far too harsh in suggesting such a thing. My view is closer to Monroe's nontechnical opinions and, especially, to the views of Dupee. In case you weren't able to access the essay I recommended, here's how Dupee sums up the poem:
. . . the poem maunders along, lovely in spots, penetrating in other spots, now elegiac, now cheery. It clothes itself in a simulacrum of Popian couplets without attaining to the hard antitheses, the decisive pauses, which are the prosodic mirror of Pope's tougher mind. Shade is a portrait of the poet as rustic American. The rustic American poet could use some of Kinbote's passion—but instead gets the bullet intended for Kinbote. As so often in our author's books, it takes two men to make a Nabokovian man—two men who, however, rarely get together.
A passage that you and I seem to agree is less than first rate is the one that Gary Lipon quoted a few days ago and that Jansy mentions this morning as smacking of Rupert Brooke. I'm not qualified to comment on Brooke, but to me the passage is good and bad in about the same way a Norman Rockwell painting is both good and bad. Except for the part about Hazel's ghost, it would be right at home on a Hallmark card. It all but oozes sincerity, doesn't it?--which brings me to a further point.
Several people have mentioned the description of Shade as being "one oozy footstep" behind Frost as if this were high praise. It isn't clear in the poem whether "oozy" is a word used by a critic or is Shade's own judgment on his work. In either case, I don't see it as being much of a compliment.
As you may recall, I'm one of those on the List--we may be few in number, but we used to make a good deal of noise--who don't see Shade as being a wholly admirable person or a completely reliable narrator. If we're right about this, the fact that Shade often serves as VN's mouthpiece doesn't mean that he always does, or that what he says is the whole truth and nothing but the truth. In my view, things are much more complicated than that, and the novel is much more radical (more Nabokovian, you might say) than it would be if Shade were the rock that many readers take him to be.
One of the writers I mentioned as forerunners of some of VN's ideas is J.W. Dunne. He's in Wikipedia, of course, and his influence on VN is described in the recently translated book by Michael Maar titled Speak, Nabokov. We are fortunate to have this fine book coming along so soon after Stephen Blackwell's highly readable and informative The Quill and the Scalpel.
Jim Twiggs
________________________________
JERRY FRIEDMAN WROTE:
I see I'll have to read /Nabokov's World/. What I'm interested in finding is a specific interpretation of /Pale Fire/: that a lot in the book points us to the author's higher world, and thus by implication to a world above the author. I have the comfort of having come up with it independently of others, but that's the belief of every fish in the school.
In yet another difference from you, I like the fact that /Pale Fire/ is overtly about "the beyond". Otherwise I wouldn't have seen (or thought I saw) the covert connections.
In the Nabokov parodies I recognize (such as Boswell and Johnson, and Ruritanian romance, in /Pale Fire/, Annabel Leigh as a parody of Freudianism and Poe in /Lolita/), either there's no change of style, or the change doesn't last long. Appel says Nabokov is "a master parodist of literary styles" as well as parodying works in ways that don't require him to imitate his subject's style. What I'm wondering is whether his parodies ever involved intentional bad writing at the length of "Pale Fire" the poem.
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/