Subject
THOUGHTS: Bobolinks and apophenia
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Jerry Friedman replies to Jansy Mello:
--- On Sun, 3/29/09, jansymello <jansy@AETERN.US> wrote:
> *** - The quote made above (VN,SO, p.84):
> "incidentally, the boy at St.Mark's
> [Victor?/St.Bart?] and Pnin both dream of a passage from my
> drafts of Pale Fire, the revolution in Zembla and the escape
> of the king - that's telepathy for you!" lets us
> witness Nabokov's intention to stimulate, in his
> readers, the impulse towards a literary kind of
> "apophenia". He deliberately plays the role of a
> scheming god who keeps sending out clues, emitting signs
> that are meaningful only in the corpus of his work, signals
> that sometimes travel from one novel onto another.
...
If I understand you and Joe Aisenberg correctly, I think
you're saying very similar things. Nabokov is satirizing
a doomed quest for meaning and inveigling the reader into
the same quest. And as I've said, I disagree. I think
/Pale Fire/ is a riddle with an elegant solution.
> Kinbote's commentary, about Hazel's ghostly
> registers, that nothing, "nor her own imaginative
> hysteria, express anything here that might be construed,
> however remotely, as containing a warning..."
> represents his common-sense denial of any hidden warning to
> Hazel by appoplexic Aunt Maud.
I don't think it's necessarily common sense. Kinbote just
doesn't find it.
> It is ironical - because Nabokov's satire demands the
> reader's acceptance of a fictionally "real"
> ghostly message. He (informed by the author, perhaps by
> Boyd) is justified in his disdain towards poor demented
> Kinbote who can find in it no warning clues and cannot
> accept the guidance of a well-intentioned spirit.
I don't see it that way. Certainly I can't disdain
Kinbote here, since I couldn't find the message either.
There are plenty of other opportunities to disdain
him.
Maybe Nabokov was imagining readers who would decode
the message, but I think the point is at least as much
that there is survival after death in the world of
/Pale Fire/.
...
> On the other hand ( a conjurer's hand), when we examine
> more closely Shade's lines ( "it sufficed that in
> life I could find some kind of link-and-bobolink...,"
> *) we must realize that, in spite of his fictionally-real
> encounter with a lady who'd seen a "mountain",
> he is in fact thinking not about "real life
> events" but of a plexed artistry! ( whose?).
He decides he doesn't need to know, as you quote below.
> He then says that he wishes to extract "the same
> pleasure in it as they who played it found" ( and yet,
> who is playing ...a game of worlds, promoting pawns?).
> Kinbote, like the author, promotes pawns...
I understand that the author is promoting pawns, but why
Kinbote?
> Although, in the novel, Shade disregards Kinbote's
> Zembla and resists his influence, what is expected from the
> "real" reader? To discern that he, as reader, is a
> pawn, as are Shade and Kinbote?
Do you mean Nabokov's pawn? I think readers are supposed
to consider the idea that they and Nabokov are pawns of
some "aloof and mute" being(s).
> Must the reader accept that,
> for Shade, "a web of sense" is only to be found
> through art?
Why not? That's what Shade says, and there's no particular
reason to doubt him.
> That he, like Kinbote, rejects spiritual
> warnings - while the reader can accept them and feel
> superior...
I still think there's a big difference between not
understanding a cryptic warning and rejecting it.
Jerry Friedman
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--- On Sun, 3/29/09, jansymello <jansy@AETERN.US> wrote:
> *** - The quote made above (VN,SO, p.84):
> "incidentally, the boy at St.Mark's
> [Victor?/St.Bart?] and Pnin both dream of a passage from my
> drafts of Pale Fire, the revolution in Zembla and the escape
> of the king - that's telepathy for you!" lets us
> witness Nabokov's intention to stimulate, in his
> readers, the impulse towards a literary kind of
> "apophenia". He deliberately plays the role of a
> scheming god who keeps sending out clues, emitting signs
> that are meaningful only in the corpus of his work, signals
> that sometimes travel from one novel onto another.
...
If I understand you and Joe Aisenberg correctly, I think
you're saying very similar things. Nabokov is satirizing
a doomed quest for meaning and inveigling the reader into
the same quest. And as I've said, I disagree. I think
/Pale Fire/ is a riddle with an elegant solution.
> Kinbote's commentary, about Hazel's ghostly
> registers, that nothing, "nor her own imaginative
> hysteria, express anything here that might be construed,
> however remotely, as containing a warning..."
> represents his common-sense denial of any hidden warning to
> Hazel by appoplexic Aunt Maud.
I don't think it's necessarily common sense. Kinbote just
doesn't find it.
> It is ironical - because Nabokov's satire demands the
> reader's acceptance of a fictionally "real"
> ghostly message. He (informed by the author, perhaps by
> Boyd) is justified in his disdain towards poor demented
> Kinbote who can find in it no warning clues and cannot
> accept the guidance of a well-intentioned spirit.
I don't see it that way. Certainly I can't disdain
Kinbote here, since I couldn't find the message either.
There are plenty of other opportunities to disdain
him.
Maybe Nabokov was imagining readers who would decode
the message, but I think the point is at least as much
that there is survival after death in the world of
/Pale Fire/.
...
> On the other hand ( a conjurer's hand), when we examine
> more closely Shade's lines ( "it sufficed that in
> life I could find some kind of link-and-bobolink...,"
> *) we must realize that, in spite of his fictionally-real
> encounter with a lady who'd seen a "mountain",
> he is in fact thinking not about "real life
> events" but of a plexed artistry! ( whose?).
He decides he doesn't need to know, as you quote below.
> He then says that he wishes to extract "the same
> pleasure in it as they who played it found" ( and yet,
> who is playing ...a game of worlds, promoting pawns?).
> Kinbote, like the author, promotes pawns...
I understand that the author is promoting pawns, but why
Kinbote?
> Although, in the novel, Shade disregards Kinbote's
> Zembla and resists his influence, what is expected from the
> "real" reader? To discern that he, as reader, is a
> pawn, as are Shade and Kinbote?
Do you mean Nabokov's pawn? I think readers are supposed
to consider the idea that they and Nabokov are pawns of
some "aloof and mute" being(s).
> Must the reader accept that,
> for Shade, "a web of sense" is only to be found
> through art?
Why not? That's what Shade says, and there's no particular
reason to doubt him.
> That he, like Kinbote, rejects spiritual
> warnings - while the reader can accept them and feel
> superior...
I still think there's a big difference between not
understanding a cryptic warning and rejecting it.
Jerry Friedman
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/