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Re: Pale Fire & scholarship
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Dear all and sundry,
Oof. Or ouf. The list postings these days are dumped in a clump, making them
hard to cope with. I’ll just pick a few burrs out of my hair.
A few years ago Auberon Waugh (RIP) selected Pale Fire as his novel of the
century. No doubt he had many reasons, but the one that struck me most was
that he perceived it as a gigantic and hilarious send-up of the literary
scholarship business.
Here’s one way of looking at it. Kinbote is a frustrated poet trying to be a
scholar. Shade is a career academic, trying to be a poet. Poets are mad.
Scholars are sane. It’s exceedingly rare for the two to meet on the same ground.
No great poets have been scholars; no great scholars have been poets. Pale
Fire, the poem, is ingeniously versified prose. Pale Fire, the book, is
inspired poetry in scholarly footnote form.
Stan Kelly-Bootle’s observation: “All is CONtext!” is stimulating. I’d
been musing for a couple of days that in my posting of 27/10 I’d written: “
Yeats also has a poem on the scholar/artist conflic” ---- after noticing that I’
d dropped a t off the last word. What might a scholar logically deduce from
this harebreath slip, hardly Freudian but just possibly Nabokovian. Was this
an instance of Yoko Ono’s entertaining shortening of “conceptual art” into
“con-art”, merged with “flic”, a Parisian copper, or perhaps “flic[k]”,
a series of static images designed to produce the illusion of motion?
Brian Boyd’s reaction has me baffled. “By your standards Shakespeare's
sonnets would not be poetry either, since some of those have very much been
worried into being (take sonnet
104, for instance). You might try broadening your tastes.”
Whether sonnet 104 was worried into existence or not, having now read it
carefully, it strikes me as poetry of a much higher order than Pale Fire, the
poem. I don’t find it all that easy to grasp what Frost was getting at, but I
suppose it must have something to do with the initial “wild” creative
impulse. I would suggest that this impulse is not the same for scholars or
academics as for poets. Poets have the advantage, since without them scholars would
have nothing to talk about. They also benefit from living outside the box,
whereas career-minded academics are obliged to publish or perish. VN strongly
resembles Falstaff in that respect: not only witty in himself, but the cause
of wit in others.
Besides which, I don’t follow the logic whereby because some sonnets may
have been produced solely by perspiration, the others are also without
inspiration. The strictness of the sonnet form necessarily requires it to be carefully
worked over. Are we not talking in antitheses here? I hope I’m
understanding Brian’s last sentence in the spirit in which it was intended, but as a
European, though in a minority of one, I do find it rather Antipodean. Being
naturally humble, however, I’m always doing my best to broaden my tastes.
Charles
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