On May 2, 2010, at 10:22 PM, R. S. Gwynn wrote:
Irony is the key term in Canto 4.
Shade's ultimate conclusion, ... is that the here and now ..., the quotidian, is the only reality worth celebrating, including the pet(ty) peeves that make up "evil as none has / Spoken before." Shade's remarkable claims about beauty ... are not remarkable at all; "as none has / Spied on it yet" means ... he will spy on the not very "beautiful" everyday reality of a 60-ish poet shaving in his bath! The canto and the poem end in a celebration of the everyday, the ordinary, with the "faint hope" ... that tomorrow will be a "day that will probably be fine." ...
I hate to take recourse in rephrasing such an old and common saw,
but the damn thing practically leaps into my hands:
Irony, like beauty, lies in the ear, or eye, of the beholder.
Which is to say that I hear irony in Canto 4, as do you, and VN, but does Shade?
My left hand helps, and holds. And shifts its stance.
Now I shall speak . . . Better than any soap
Is the sensation for which poets hope
When inspiration and its icy blaze,
The sudden image, the immediate phrase
Over the skin a triple ripple send
Making the little hairs all stand on end
As in the enlarged animated scheme
Of whiskers mowed when held up by Our Cream.
Now I shall speak of evil as none has
Spoken before.
There's irony in the phrase beginning Better than any soap
but it's a grotesque irony of extreme exaggeration, or caricature that evokes the reader's derision.
Irony can, and often does, invert the plain meaning of a phrase, that said, it's hard for me to find here the kind of irony that would allow me to read this as vaunting the quotidian.
Again we see a disjunction, this time occasioned by frustration.
Now I shall speak . . . clears the stage, and prepares for the coming declaration.
First Shade expresses his complete disdain for the whole shaving process [, which might be inflated to include the whole quotidian,] then, in contrast, he offers poetic composition as one of life's nobler pursuits. But this comes in the form of a wonderful, wild-eyed, manic description of the poetic process, which is high camp, hilarious slap-stick, uniquely bathetic, and due to its emotionalism and directness of expression, probably the funniest passage in all of Pale Fire, the book. Never has the poetic process been so weirdly and wildly depicted.
There's a pause after hope, although not explicitly punctuated, then from a firm foothold, [like a gathering storm,] Shade crescendoes up an emotional slope that climaxes at Our Cream. Triple forte as the musicians say. And this loud inspiration then carries him through his Litany of Loathes. The promise of Now I shall cry out as none has / cried out is raucously and ironically fulfilled.
After this Shade is mostly spent[, the brain is drained ].
Shade's mind quiets suddenly as he continues,
And while the safety blade with scrape and screak
Travels across the country of my cheek,
Cars on the highway pass, and up the steep
Incline big trucks around my jawbone creep,
Hints of monomania still swirl around big trucks, and recur later in: my old versipel, is with me everywhere, / In carrel and in car and in my chair.
Finally Sybil steps in to soothe the savage breast. Shade's final tribute to his wife, recalls his earlier tribute in being so wonderfully maudlin. It shouldn't be indulged-in, but who can resist? And here we see the importance of how the previous passages are read. For without a manically agitated Shade, there's nothing for Sybil to mollify, and so her role is considerably less angelic, and the passage lessened of its over-ripe sweetness.
Finally, in a brief remission, Shade gives his beautifully serene envoy, [that sounds like] a berceuse, and the poem is over.
And this is how I read what I guess I must call the critical passage in Pale Fire, emotional, mad, funny, kooky (a tonsorial term I think).
[Call me iconoclastic.]
Everyone else seems to read it as odd, eccentric, petulant perhaps, even whimsical.
And they don't seem to like it, the central portions, very much.
I think the canto is frequently misread because most readers are not expecting the emotion that I find there.
Indeed it is out of character for John Shade to emote so. Anger is not a part of Kinbote's portrait of Shade or of his own; except for Canto 4. Yet one reads about it everyday, the quiet man who runs amuck, snaps.
Call it a flamboyance that anticipates Charles Kinbote, or a device that realizes that transformation.
Recently I've tried to show the looseness of metaphor, the disrupted thoughts in Canto 4, as indicating madness in Shade. Here I've tried to describe how the central passage might be acted, or vocally rendered. Hopefully this convinces, if only a little bit. What convinces me most though is something that might be said to be profoundly elemental: the need for climax near the end of a temporally long work of art. Symphonies and even piano sonatas climax thus. So do plays and movies and even firework displays, as do other hum-drum acts.
After three cantos, about fifty minutes, of wonderfully sound, ironic verse, I can't read the last canto as shuffling off the stage whimsically, and [seemingly] leaving behind the questions about Shade's faith and doubt unanswered. Of course my reading doesn't answer those questions either, but that's because fate, [you might say,] or VN, has intervened. Nevertheless the reading, with its cathartic climax, provides an aesthetic resolution to the poem. There's a pathetic climax at the end of Canto 2 with Hazel's death which is now balanced [architecturally, - a pompous word] with the silly and sad collapse of Shade's aspirations and identity.
Iconoclastically yours,
–GSL
ps.:
A "Newport Frill" is an old-fashioned style of mustache; a mustache is the wick of the mouth, right, being above it? Now I can't find where I learned this, but I did mark it in the margins of the poem.
I take a Newport Frill as being the thinnest of beards, a barbe en colliere, corrupted from Newgate Frill by VN (this via Matt Roth).
My point isn't, of course, that it is meaningless, but that it's difficult, abstruse, and took about thirty or forty years to decipher. What did readers think all that time?
a mustache is the wick of the mouth, right, being above it?
I honestly hadn't thought of that! I should be chagrined. Fortunately your next sentence gracefully allows me to save some face, for apparently you too needed help deciphering, and when you learned it marked it down presumably because it was rather far-fetched or else relatively inconsequential and hence eminently forgettable and thus in need of recording.
My point again is that these difficult metaphors occur more frequently in Canto 4 than the rest of the poem, and taken together with the odd subject matter and disjointed thoughts are symptomatic of Shade's unstable mental state.
Concerning just the point of the frequency of difficult metaphors in Canto 4 vis-a-vis the rest of the poem, this proposition might actually be explored by listing out all the metaphors in the poem and rating them for difficulty and seeing what emerges. There's problems with this as regards subjectivity in the ranking process, nevertheless they might be overcome, a set of standards might be set up and applied. Personally I don't see myself doing this sort of thing any time soon. Nevertheless I would enjoy hearing any opinions regarding this question of frequency of difficulty, wideness of association, of the metaphors in Canto 4, or anything else...