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[NABOKOV-L] Pale Fire's epigraph, Hazel and Hodges
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J. Twiggs, off-list, to JM: You asked whether anyone has discussed the epigraph to Pale Fire. The answer is yes--I myself discussed it at great length back in December 2006 *
JM: Thanks, Jim. I could now read your message to the List (which had skipped my conscious attention) with profit.
In relation to Shade's poshy lines: "This is kitsch on a stick, wrapped in a parody of Eliot", your assessment is perfect.
Just as your concluding remarks on PF: "Two lost souls whose colossal needs mock their puny gear. Mad for meaning, chasing signs and symbols all over creation, they cannot connect with their own selves, let alone with each other. Read this way the book is both richly comic and deeply humane."
There is a recurrent image in VN, linked to E.A.Poe's inaugural detective stories, in which truth stares at us in the eye (cf. "The Purloined Letter") or to Chesterton's "Father Brown," when he concludes that "the best place to hide a leaf is in a forest."
VN explores this idea in RLSK when V. describes Sebastian's parodies soaring out of the grotesque because sometimes a clown develops wings. Your posting directs us to this same spirit, in Pale Fire, to illustrate how, in spite of Kinbote's pitiful grappling with Eliot and Dante, we must also find Shade's despair in his reference to Rabelais and Swift...
...............................................................
Excerpts related to present posting (Complete J.Twiggs, check VN-List, Dec. 19, 2006) :
In the years that I've belonged to Nabokv-L, a couple of questions keep recurring: How good is Shade's poem? What is the meaning of the epigraph? For me these questions have always been closely related [...] In my view Pale Fire is a brilliant, pitch-black comic novel that contains an artfully constructed but deliberately--and often deliciously--bad poem. [...] as set forth by Wyndham Lewis (1930, The Stuffed Owl). VN tips his hand in the epigraph, from which we can infer that we are to be treated to a ludicrous story told by a more or less unreliable narrator (which Boswell certainly was) who reveals more about his subject and himself than he is aware of. Anyone who has read the Gogol book will also see--and this is the deeper point of the quotation--that the ludicrous story of the young gentleman "running around town shooting cats" has called forth in Johnson an even more ludicrous response: What we have here is a perfect, and perfectly obvious, example of sentimental hogwash--i.e., one of the standard and least harmful forms of poshlust[...]
VN returns to the same theme when Kinbote, in his commentary to line 91, fills out our picture of Aunt Maud--who is revealed to be, like Nabokov himself, a connoisseur of poshlust. This is clear from the fact that the zipper and underwear ads in Maud's scrapbook are of the same general kind as the sample that appears in another of VN's major statements on poshlust, the "Philistines and Philistinism" chapter of Lectures on Russian Literature, under the very wonderful label "Adoration of Spoons." Kinbote, of course, views these ads through the eyes of a randy homosexual [...]
Quite a gal, our Maud--though we wouldn't have known it from Shade's poem. Nor would we have known the extent of Hazel's rage at, and alienation from, her parents--and wouldn't, therefore, have known the full, or at least a fuller, story of her death--unless Kinbote had told us.
We can all agree, I suppose and hope, that Kinbote, in his craziness, is a self-centered, unreliable, self-deceiving, and manipulative narrator whose ludicrous story overflows with elements of kitsch, camp, and poshlust. In my view, Shade, in his quiet fashion, is just about as bad [...]
Shade's guilty conscience mocking his attempt--his need--to exploit Hazel's death in the service of his tacky obsession with the Great Beyond[...] Shade, in Canto Four, seems, most of the time, to fit the role of wise old friend and healthy second-rater. His elaborate wind up--"Now I shall speak" etc.--might lead us to expect one of those windy splurges mentioned by Wyndham Lewis. But no. The delivery, when it comes, is puny--an extended bit of dithering about poetic composition [...]The tone is humorous and folksy; we can't help being charmed. But this other thing keeps breaking in--Now I shall speak of evil and despair as none has spoken./ Now I shall speak . . ./ Now I shall speak of evil as none has spoken[...] This is kitsch on a stick, wrapped in a parody of Eliot. [...]
It's here that we need to revisit the epigraph. Imagine, if you will, that Hodge, despite Johnson's sentimental self-assurances to the contrary, had been felled by a bullet from the young gent's gun. Can't we then also imagine that Johnson would take refuge in the idea that Hodge, though shot on the street and lying there in plain sight, dead as a doornail, is somewhere still alive? [...] And Johnson might well cry out, "But Hodge is not dead; no, no, Hodge is somewhere still alive." Cruel as it may seem to say so, this gush of wishful thinking is not different in kind from Shade's "reasonable certainty" about Hazel. The difference is one of degree, children being, for most of us, more important than pets [...]
Having finished with Hazel as a stand-in for the cat, VN goes on to put Shade himself in the role of Johnson and then, shortly thereafter, in the role of Hodge. First a piece of smug, lip-smacking self-satisfaction in which our bland old second-rater serves up another helping of chicken soup for the soul--this time to the effect that he's reasonably certain he'll live through another night. After that comes a reassuring glance outside (neighbor, wife, garden--everything nicely in place). And then--[... a prime example of what R.W. Flint called VN's "really fiendish, lyric delight in the bottom absurdity of things." [...]
On my reading of Pale Fire, it's best understood along these same lines. Two lost souls whose colossal needs mock their puny gear. Mad for meaning, chasing signs and symbols all over creation, they cannot connect with their own selves, let alone with each other. Read this way the book is both richly comic and deeply humane.
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JM: Thanks, Jim. I could now read your message to the List (which had skipped my conscious attention) with profit.
In relation to Shade's poshy lines: "This is kitsch on a stick, wrapped in a parody of Eliot", your assessment is perfect.
Just as your concluding remarks on PF: "Two lost souls whose colossal needs mock their puny gear. Mad for meaning, chasing signs and symbols all over creation, they cannot connect with their own selves, let alone with each other. Read this way the book is both richly comic and deeply humane."
There is a recurrent image in VN, linked to E.A.Poe's inaugural detective stories, in which truth stares at us in the eye (cf. "The Purloined Letter") or to Chesterton's "Father Brown," when he concludes that "the best place to hide a leaf is in a forest."
VN explores this idea in RLSK when V. describes Sebastian's parodies soaring out of the grotesque because sometimes a clown develops wings. Your posting directs us to this same spirit, in Pale Fire, to illustrate how, in spite of Kinbote's pitiful grappling with Eliot and Dante, we must also find Shade's despair in his reference to Rabelais and Swift...
...............................................................
Excerpts related to present posting (Complete J.Twiggs, check VN-List, Dec. 19, 2006) :
In the years that I've belonged to Nabokv-L, a couple of questions keep recurring: How good is Shade's poem? What is the meaning of the epigraph? For me these questions have always been closely related [...] In my view Pale Fire is a brilliant, pitch-black comic novel that contains an artfully constructed but deliberately--and often deliciously--bad poem. [...] as set forth by Wyndham Lewis (1930, The Stuffed Owl). VN tips his hand in the epigraph, from which we can infer that we are to be treated to a ludicrous story told by a more or less unreliable narrator (which Boswell certainly was) who reveals more about his subject and himself than he is aware of. Anyone who has read the Gogol book will also see--and this is the deeper point of the quotation--that the ludicrous story of the young gentleman "running around town shooting cats" has called forth in Johnson an even more ludicrous response: What we have here is a perfect, and perfectly obvious, example of sentimental hogwash--i.e., one of the standard and least harmful forms of poshlust[...]
VN returns to the same theme when Kinbote, in his commentary to line 91, fills out our picture of Aunt Maud--who is revealed to be, like Nabokov himself, a connoisseur of poshlust. This is clear from the fact that the zipper and underwear ads in Maud's scrapbook are of the same general kind as the sample that appears in another of VN's major statements on poshlust, the "Philistines and Philistinism" chapter of Lectures on Russian Literature, under the very wonderful label "Adoration of Spoons." Kinbote, of course, views these ads through the eyes of a randy homosexual [...]
Quite a gal, our Maud--though we wouldn't have known it from Shade's poem. Nor would we have known the extent of Hazel's rage at, and alienation from, her parents--and wouldn't, therefore, have known the full, or at least a fuller, story of her death--unless Kinbote had told us.
We can all agree, I suppose and hope, that Kinbote, in his craziness, is a self-centered, unreliable, self-deceiving, and manipulative narrator whose ludicrous story overflows with elements of kitsch, camp, and poshlust. In my view, Shade, in his quiet fashion, is just about as bad [...]
Shade's guilty conscience mocking his attempt--his need--to exploit Hazel's death in the service of his tacky obsession with the Great Beyond[...] Shade, in Canto Four, seems, most of the time, to fit the role of wise old friend and healthy second-rater. His elaborate wind up--"Now I shall speak" etc.--might lead us to expect one of those windy splurges mentioned by Wyndham Lewis. But no. The delivery, when it comes, is puny--an extended bit of dithering about poetic composition [...]The tone is humorous and folksy; we can't help being charmed. But this other thing keeps breaking in--Now I shall speak of evil and despair as none has spoken./ Now I shall speak . . ./ Now I shall speak of evil as none has spoken[...] This is kitsch on a stick, wrapped in a parody of Eliot. [...]
It's here that we need to revisit the epigraph. Imagine, if you will, that Hodge, despite Johnson's sentimental self-assurances to the contrary, had been felled by a bullet from the young gent's gun. Can't we then also imagine that Johnson would take refuge in the idea that Hodge, though shot on the street and lying there in plain sight, dead as a doornail, is somewhere still alive? [...] And Johnson might well cry out, "But Hodge is not dead; no, no, Hodge is somewhere still alive." Cruel as it may seem to say so, this gush of wishful thinking is not different in kind from Shade's "reasonable certainty" about Hazel. The difference is one of degree, children being, for most of us, more important than pets [...]
Having finished with Hazel as a stand-in for the cat, VN goes on to put Shade himself in the role of Johnson and then, shortly thereafter, in the role of Hodge. First a piece of smug, lip-smacking self-satisfaction in which our bland old second-rater serves up another helping of chicken soup for the soul--this time to the effect that he's reasonably certain he'll live through another night. After that comes a reassuring glance outside (neighbor, wife, garden--everything nicely in place). And then--[... a prime example of what R.W. Flint called VN's "really fiendish, lyric delight in the bottom absurdity of things." [...]
On my reading of Pale Fire, it's best understood along these same lines. Two lost souls whose colossal needs mock their puny gear. Mad for meaning, chasing signs and symbols all over creation, they cannot connect with their own selves, let alone with each other. Read this way the book is both richly comic and deeply humane.
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/