George Shimanovich
wrote:
a. VN's details
stubbornly refuse to comply with grandeur of our theories.
b. I was always enjoying the harmony of VN’s construction of PF but was missing unity of my understanding (as a programmer I can’t do without it).
c. To me PF slips away from any theory used to “solve” it, that I am familiar with. Not that it attempts to ‘solve’ the novel but I think that Pale Fire was designed to play out the artistic concept summed up by this phrase.
d. What we then have is a novel projecting given artist’s view of his art – hard as it is but said and done in Pale Fire.
Dear
George,
In the
above remarks I seem to sense some sympathy with the issues I have been hoping
to raise.
Puzzles
and riddles have intensely engaged me since childhood, and I have spent many
hours in contemplating them and attempting their solution. A good answer to “Why is a raven like a
writing-desk?” is “Because they both begin with r, except for writing-desk.”
What is the game of chess but one puzzle after another? White sets Black a
puzzle. It is Black’s task to solve it, and then set one for
White.
Discussions
of the puzzles internal to Pale Fire are extremely enjoyable and interesting,
and I wouldn't want to suppress them for the world. However, to me they still
smack somewhat of the kind of Shakespeare criticism which was in vogue prior to
about 1935. What is an asp? How
could a clock strike in Julius Caesar? Where is the sea-coast of
High art lends itself
to this kind of pastime. At present there is intense popular debate surrounding
Hitchcock’s film Vertigo, which has been steadily climbing the cineastes’ ladder
of greatness for the last 30 years. I believe it is now about in second place.
One of the theories is that the entire film played itself out in James Stewart’s
mind just before he followed his police buddy, and crashed to his death on the
street several stories below. [At one time I had a job as a
proof-reader.]
I do suspect, though, that pursuit of optical illusions, fractals and kaleidoscopes is the more fruitful path of enquiry, if the question is what makes Pale Fire so fascinating. The essences of music, chess and mathematics are inborn: they appear to reside in the native structure of the mind. I do find Frost's little essay The Figure a Poem Makes most stimulating. It's so nice and short.
Someone else (I’m
afraid I didn’t note who) wrote:
“It's funny how, once
deep in the thickets of PF, everything I read seems to relate to it
somehow.”
Agree entirely. Coleridge once said that he couldn’t help thinking Hamlet was all about himself: that he was Hamlet, in fact. The Alice books have been endlessly cited in apparently alien contexts.
Charles