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Re: RESPONSE to Aisenberg on Pale Fire's epigraph etc
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Jerry Friedman responds to Jim Twiggs:
Thanks, I understand your position better now.
In my attempt to find something all (most) of us can
agree on, let me try this: If Shade's search for
meaning is comic, as you've suggested, it's at least
partly Nabokov's self-parody, since he repeatedly
stated similar things. (There's another one in
his poem about Tolstoy, translated by Dmitri Nabokov
in the NOJ.) Of course, he could have parodied
himself that way.
I can't dispute that writers say things about their
writing that I don't believe, sometimes things that can
be proven wrong. No one that I've read has taken
into account Nabokov's statement that /Pale Fire/ is
"a perfectly straightforward novel"! (Though there's
a lot of criticism of it I haven't read.) But everything
he said about Shade and the poem seems consistent to me,
and taking it into account is certainly the "intentional
fallacy", only I'm not convinced it's a fallacy.
I do indeed take the werewolf metaphorically; I think
it's Shade's conscious metaphor for himself, agreeing
with you that he's not a paragon. In this view it may
not be great poetry, but it is at least about evil and
despair. I don't know whether Matt and Tiffany take it
as Shade's metaphor or Nabokov's or what.
I too could have lived without Shade's and Kinbote's
repetitions of Nabokov's dislikes.
In response to Andrea Pitzer: I know Nabokov strongly
hinted that he considered himself a genius like
Shakespeare, Milton, Pushkin, Tolstoy, and Joyce, in
the 1969 BBC interview, but I didn't know he restricted
the category to a trinity.
On Shade's status as a poet, I wonder if the cause and
effect aren't the reverse of what you suggested--he
thought he was a genius at novels but not at essays
in English verse, /so/ he made Shade a poet second to
Frost.
Jerry Friedman
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Thanks, I understand your position better now.
In my attempt to find something all (most) of us can
agree on, let me try this: If Shade's search for
meaning is comic, as you've suggested, it's at least
partly Nabokov's self-parody, since he repeatedly
stated similar things. (There's another one in
his poem about Tolstoy, translated by Dmitri Nabokov
in the NOJ.) Of course, he could have parodied
himself that way.
I can't dispute that writers say things about their
writing that I don't believe, sometimes things that can
be proven wrong. No one that I've read has taken
into account Nabokov's statement that /Pale Fire/ is
"a perfectly straightforward novel"! (Though there's
a lot of criticism of it I haven't read.) But everything
he said about Shade and the poem seems consistent to me,
and taking it into account is certainly the "intentional
fallacy", only I'm not convinced it's a fallacy.
I do indeed take the werewolf metaphorically; I think
it's Shade's conscious metaphor for himself, agreeing
with you that he's not a paragon. In this view it may
not be great poetry, but it is at least about evil and
despair. I don't know whether Matt and Tiffany take it
as Shade's metaphor or Nabokov's or what.
I too could have lived without Shade's and Kinbote's
repetitions of Nabokov's dislikes.
In response to Andrea Pitzer: I know Nabokov strongly
hinted that he considered himself a genius like
Shakespeare, Milton, Pushkin, Tolstoy, and Joyce, in
the 1969 BBC interview, but I didn't know he restricted
the category to a trinity.
On Shade's status as a poet, I wonder if the cause and
effect aren't the reverse of what you suggested--he
thought he was a genius at novels but not at essays
in English verse, /so/ he made Shade a poet second to
Frost.
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/