Subject
[NABOKOV-L] The Ballad and Pale Fire. Transparent Things and
Pauline anide
Pauline anide
From
Date
Body
In Shades of Frost, Abraham P. Socher notes that "Nabokov had been blocked in the composition of Pale Fire...collecting 'bits of straw and fluff and eating pebbles'," like a bird building a nest. After he composed "a narrative in heroic couplets, 'The Ballad of Longwood Glen'," and only three months later in October 1957, he "jotted down the following note on an index card: 'Waxwings: knocking themselves out in full flight against the reflected world of our picture window. Leaving a little gray fluff on the pane'." Indirectly, Socher's article made me perceive various discrete elements, not only their narrative in heroic couplets, that were shared by "The Ballad of Longwood Glen" and "Pale Fire":
1.Both hide one or more riddles with a mix of suicidal fantasy and metaphysics (For example, Art can reach heaven by climbing a "sky-bound oak" and disappear from human sight, like Millhauser's illusionist. Shade, with his Art, is a verbal conjurer who suffers from chronophobia and insomnia).
2. In the first one Nabokov kills off a pair of kids*, in the second, he kills off the parental couple.
3. In the short ballad he emphasizes that the couple's outing included "three old men"(father Longwood, stepfather and father-in-law) and, later, the different pair named Deforest, rides with "four" elder men
(btw: what does VN's stressing number "four" indicate?)
4. The Longwood children, Pauline and Paul, are frail children who "could not run much...Pauline had asthma, Paul used a crutch" whereas in Pale Fire a similar physical disability is concentrated in one character, the poet Shade ("Then as now/ I walked at my own risk: whipped by the bough,/ Tripped by the stump. Asthmatic, lame and fat,/ I never bounced a ball or swung a bat.")
5. In the ballad, we can hear Mrs. Longwood's demands addressed, perhaps, to her physically timid husband (" 'I wish, said his mother to crippled Paul,/'Some man would teach you to pitch that ball'."), indicating that Art, her husband, may be as physically disabled as Shade.
6. Although the poet's dead parents had been ornithologists, he seems to have been an "artistically caged...preterist...who collects cold nests." In contrast, in the ballad "an ancient nest with a new-laid ball" was discovered among the branches of the felled oak...
Although Nabokov is intricately linked to butterflies (what an awesome URL Sandy Klein sent us today! Cf. http://streamsandforests.wordpress.com/2011/01/16/nabokovs-hilltopping-butterflies/ ) the avian theme is also strangely pervasive. Birds as butterfly predators may represent a subtle allusion to death and to mimetic resources)
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* the Longwood girl is named Pauline and we see "a nest with a new-laid ball." In Transparent Things we find another Pauline and the suggestion of a nest, or something nestled. The protagonists, Armande and Hugh, share a femme-de-ménage with a Belgian artist, who lives in the penthouse above them, the "obese Pauline." And, as "had happened on previous occasions, around ten o'clock a most jarring succession of bumps and scrapes suddenly came from above: it was the cretin upstairs dragging a heavy piece of inscrutable sculpture (catalogued as "Pauline anide") from the center of his studio to the corner it occupied at night."
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1.Both hide one or more riddles with a mix of suicidal fantasy and metaphysics (For example, Art can reach heaven by climbing a "sky-bound oak" and disappear from human sight, like Millhauser's illusionist. Shade, with his Art, is a verbal conjurer who suffers from chronophobia and insomnia).
2. In the first one Nabokov kills off a pair of kids*, in the second, he kills off the parental couple.
3. In the short ballad he emphasizes that the couple's outing included "three old men"(father Longwood, stepfather and father-in-law) and, later, the different pair named Deforest, rides with "four" elder men
(btw: what does VN's stressing number "four" indicate?)
4. The Longwood children, Pauline and Paul, are frail children who "could not run much...Pauline had asthma, Paul used a crutch" whereas in Pale Fire a similar physical disability is concentrated in one character, the poet Shade ("Then as now/ I walked at my own risk: whipped by the bough,/ Tripped by the stump. Asthmatic, lame and fat,/ I never bounced a ball or swung a bat.")
5. In the ballad, we can hear Mrs. Longwood's demands addressed, perhaps, to her physically timid husband (" 'I wish, said his mother to crippled Paul,/'Some man would teach you to pitch that ball'."), indicating that Art, her husband, may be as physically disabled as Shade.
6. Although the poet's dead parents had been ornithologists, he seems to have been an "artistically caged...preterist...who collects cold nests." In contrast, in the ballad "an ancient nest with a new-laid ball" was discovered among the branches of the felled oak...
Although Nabokov is intricately linked to butterflies (what an awesome URL Sandy Klein sent us today! Cf. http://streamsandforests.wordpress.com/2011/01/16/nabokovs-hilltopping-butterflies/ ) the avian theme is also strangely pervasive. Birds as butterfly predators may represent a subtle allusion to death and to mimetic resources)
............................................................................................................................................................................
* the Longwood girl is named Pauline and we see "a nest with a new-laid ball." In Transparent Things we find another Pauline and the suggestion of a nest, or something nestled. The protagonists, Armande and Hugh, share a femme-de-ménage with a Belgian artist, who lives in the penthouse above them, the "obese Pauline." And, as "had happened on previous occasions, around ten o'clock a most jarring succession of bumps and scrapes suddenly came from above: it was the cretin upstairs dragging a heavy piece of inscrutable sculpture (catalogued as "Pauline anide") from the center of his studio to the corner it occupied at night."
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/