Subject
[NABOKOV] [ THOUGHTS] Gradus and Shade converge on a birthday;
Ashen Glow and Pale Fire
Ashen Glow and Pale Fire
From
Date
Body
What does Kinbote express at the end of his note to line 1000 (= Line1...???????)
" 'And you, what will you be doing with yourself, poor King...?'
God will help me, I trust, to rid myself of any desire to follow the example of two other characters in this work. I shall continue to exist...I may cook up..an old-fashioned melodrama with three principles: a lunatic..., another lunatic...and a distinguished old poet who stumbles by chance into the line of fire, and perishes in the clash between the two figments ... but whatever happens, wherever the scene is laid, somebody, somewhere, will quietly set out... a bigger, more respectable, more competent Gradus."
Cocteau wrote a variant of a theme to which VN constantly returns. " La vie est une chute horizontale" ( we drop not in space but in time).
Dealing with "chronophobia" and "memory" Nabokov created the unforgettable image about our cradle-tumb balancing-act over two eternities of darkness. When the advance of the assassin, Gradus, is synchronized to "Pale Fire" on the day of it's author's, John Shade's, birthday, this might be considered as still another rendering of the same metaphor.
Shade is a famous poet in New Wye ( fiction) and also in the "world" ( fiction inside fiction), for he is read in Zembla.
Nabokov ( non-fiction poet, commentator, writer) considers Shade to be the greatest fictional poet and this assessment creates, at least, another involuted world ( is only one of them real?).
Just like in the story of the poet in the play "The Enchanted Hunters" we find a poet at the vortex of a convolution... Fictional Kinbote describes another fictional poet who has to be distinguished from two fictional fictions ("poet" versus "figments", but Kinbote who tells us that story about poet and figments is also one of the latter...).
Nabokov, if we consider him to be the unmentioned Earth of "Pale Fire", might have made his reflective appearance (an "ashen-glow") in the novel by revealing the real contours of a waxing or crescent moon, together with the motion of the sun on Earth whereas, as the Earth itself, Nabokov holds his ground as the locus in which everything else is taking place.
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" 'And you, what will you be doing with yourself, poor King...?'
God will help me, I trust, to rid myself of any desire to follow the example of two other characters in this work. I shall continue to exist...I may cook up..an old-fashioned melodrama with three principles: a lunatic..., another lunatic...and a distinguished old poet who stumbles by chance into the line of fire, and perishes in the clash between the two figments ... but whatever happens, wherever the scene is laid, somebody, somewhere, will quietly set out... a bigger, more respectable, more competent Gradus."
Cocteau wrote a variant of a theme to which VN constantly returns. " La vie est une chute horizontale" ( we drop not in space but in time).
Dealing with "chronophobia" and "memory" Nabokov created the unforgettable image about our cradle-tumb balancing-act over two eternities of darkness. When the advance of the assassin, Gradus, is synchronized to "Pale Fire" on the day of it's author's, John Shade's, birthday, this might be considered as still another rendering of the same metaphor.
Shade is a famous poet in New Wye ( fiction) and also in the "world" ( fiction inside fiction), for he is read in Zembla.
Nabokov ( non-fiction poet, commentator, writer) considers Shade to be the greatest fictional poet and this assessment creates, at least, another involuted world ( is only one of them real?).
Just like in the story of the poet in the play "The Enchanted Hunters" we find a poet at the vortex of a convolution... Fictional Kinbote describes another fictional poet who has to be distinguished from two fictional fictions ("poet" versus "figments", but Kinbote who tells us that story about poet and figments is also one of the latter...).
Nabokov, if we consider him to be the unmentioned Earth of "Pale Fire", might have made his reflective appearance (an "ashen-glow") in the novel by revealing the real contours of a waxing or crescent moon, together with the motion of the sun on Earth whereas, as the Earth itself, Nabokov holds his ground as the locus in which everything else is taking place.
Search the archive: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/archives/nabokv-l.html
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