Pale Fire

no nabokov expert here, but i did read Ada for some reason many summers ago. some amazing stuff in the first 200 pages! and then a lot of less amazing stuff.

Pnin is awesome, one of my faves by the guy.

one other, obvious, thing about VN, perhaps what moves me most: he seems matchless as a describer of mid-century America. Take the image of the Wordsmith campus that ends Pale Fire notes 47-8, culminating in a boy alone on the football field flying a model aeroplane.

I'm moved because I think there's an idea, maybe VN's own, that what he's describing is banal, but to me it seems idyllic, fascinating and beautiful.

and I say matchless in this regard a) cos he was a better prose writer than almost anyone but b) the 'outsider' schtick helped him see it better, probably, than a lot of American-born observers.

i like descriptions of american childhood stuff in nabokov because it feels like he's seeing things through this filter of intense nostalgia he has for being a (well-off) little boy in late-imperial russia, and like the model airplanes and football fields and baseball gloves are the closest things he has to this lost world with its tragic romantic Fall story (nabokov hates when you say things like this but pale fire is in a weird way one of his most autobiographical). and he has powers of attention and description now that he didn't have then, and using them to reveal american childhood as so voluptuous is the closest he can come to actually revisiting the dacha.

(then there's the summer camp stuff in lolita, which is tremendously acute and like pungent but which has this layer of fetishization on top of everything else that is weird & shivery & very deft)

So, that's not really the issue, we're supposed to see that immediately, and move on to something else
- which is ... what?

I understood Pale Fire as a self-parody of VN's years of obsessively translating and commenting on Onegin. * Which doesn't answer your question at all.

(contrast Rorty who wrote an Intro to this that bizarrely says that for most of the book the reader takes it at face value, thinks Kinbote is a sensible fellow, etc - nah)

Rorty was the self-styled philosopher of debunking philosophy. Maybe he needs a straw man, or a deluded reader that he can see through.

(* With disastrous results, they say)

VN did say that writing Kinbote involved ‘retwisting my own experience’ as editor of Eugene Onegin. (Strong Opinions p.77)

I oddly feel I've benefited from not reading too much about this novel - though I have read Rorty and Michael Wood - because things about it that are probably done to death in secondary material always feel quite fresh to me. Like the parody of scholarship and the fact that the whole thing curiously echoes VN's flight from Russia to the USA, and even the fact that the treatment of Stalinism is so absurd, and mediated by a kind of madman, which seems an odd (and in a way oddly generous and relaxed) thing for such a thorough anti-Stalinist or intuitive anti-Bolshevik to do.

thinking about politics etc, though:
1) Shade's view of psychoanalysis, identical to Kinbote's, is also identical to VN's - this seems strangely limited, not much 'negative capability' going on
2) Shade's view of politics also feels identical to VN's; or maybe less intelligent as he says rather crude things like 'Marxism needs a dictator'. So he's, let's say, a US Cold War liberal.

(again all this feels somewhat interesting to me in a way it might not if I'd read tons more about it)

love that part where kinbote goes to that party with the student

I once read an essay on Pale Fire by Mary McCarthy and it spiraled out of control. It was clear that she had lost the ability to tell where the allusions stopped.

Brian Boyd devoted an entire book to Pale Fire. I have no interest in reading it. Boyd has just edited a facsimile edition of the poem standing alone, which seems like a real misjudgment.

not much 'negative capability' going on

In Dabney's biography of Edmund Wilson, Isaiah Berlin (I think) is quoted on Nabokov: "a vast narcissistic talent and no capacity for conveying other works of art, which needs the negative capability of which he is totally devoid."

Haven't read Boyd's PF book, but another overview of Nabokov was published in '94 or '95 whose name escapes me -- I read it then when I was in thrall to Nabokov -- and it was insightful and hilarious.

nabokov hates when you say things like this

In interviews he used to insist on things that didn't seem true at all. He is not a writer whose opinions you can trust.

If novels were composed of marvelous sentences Nabokov would surely have to be judged the greatest living writer; and it is certain he would be some kind of great writer if he were writing travel brochures, field guides to lepidoptery, technical manuals for the automotive industry.

But novels are not composed of beautiful sentences. Occasionally--perhaps especially when he has stunned us with his performance in sentence after sentence--we long for a huge, lumbering, sweating, grunting workhorse of a sentence that will ploddingly perform the brute labor of bearing its terrible, necessary burden from here to there. But of course getting "there" is not the point of Vadim's novel; the point lies in the elaboration of fantastic, fugal designs, gorgeous patterns and textures, all with contemptuous grace and virtuosity. Such art is in the essence and by disdainful intention decadent, flung in the faces of the "facetious criticules in the Sunday papers" who charge him with "aristocratic obscurity." Nabokov is our great decadent, our reigning mandarin and eccentric, a supreme, determinedly minor artist whom major ones might well envy while criticules continue to carp and gnash the stubs of their teeth.

-- Saul Maloff

Ha! That reads like the pastiche reviews he mocks incessantly in The Gift!

Haven't read Boyd's PF book, but another overview of Nabokov was published in '94 or '95 whose name escapes me -- I read it then when I was in thrall to Nabokov -- and it was insightful and hilarious.

Was it The Magician's Doubts by Michael Wood? That's one fine dense little book.

YES! A marvelous book.

The Magician's Doubts is one of the great works of criticism that I know - but it can't justly be called 'little'.

I didn't think I remembered Kinbote at the party, but now I think I do.

I looked at Boyd's PF book online; it seemed limited in tone. He's the one with the grandest theories about the book's logic I think, which Wood shuns.

The poem on its own sounds an odd idea but maybe would make a good art object or something ... or a way of estranging the poem, taking it away from Kinbote, and seeing if it works in other ways or without him?

"no capacity for conveying other works of art" seems harsh as the poem Pale Fire is such a work, and arguably a staggering impersonation of a different writer - what else does 'conveying' mean: VN's lectures?

Not sure about 'different writer', though, now that I recall that at least one of Shade's poems was written by VN as VN before the novel.

VN, asked about Joyce and Pynchon:

What is your opinion of Joyce's parodies? Do you see any
difference in the artistic effect of scenes such as the
maternity hospital and the beach interlude with Gerty
Macdowell? Are you familiar with the work of younger American
writers who have been influenced by both you and Joyce, such as
Thomas Pynchon (a Cornellian, Class of '59, who surely was in
Literature 312), and do you have any opinion on the current
ascendancy of the so-called parody-novel (John Barth, for
instance)?

The literary parodies in the Maternal Hospital chapter are
on the whole jejunish. Joyce seems to have been hampered by the
general sterilized tone he chose for that chapter, and this
somehow dulled and monotonized the in] aid skits. On the other
hand, the frilly novelette parodies in the Masturbation scene
are highly successful; and the sudden junction of its cliches
with the fireworks and tender sky of real poetry is a feat of
genius. I am not familiar with the works of the two other
writers you mention.

http://www.kulichki.com/moshkow/NABOKOW/Inter06.txt

The "conveying" phrase was made in reference to the Onegin translation.

I don't even know what to make of this:

Since Mr. Nabokov does not like to talk off the cuff
(or "Off the Nabocuff," as he said) no tape recorder was used.

iirc he would respond only if he recieved the questions beforehand, with his responses in writing as well.

ah I meant I can't imagine him saying "Off the Nabocuff"

Since Mr. Nabokov liked to huff a bit of paint in the afternoons
(or "Just taking my Nabohuffs," as he said) the interviews were conducted in the evening.

why paint?

re interviews, did he then READ OUT LOUD the answers that he'd already written down?

I can't remember, but that would be awesomely Kinbotish!

i think there are TV or radio interviews with him where he's basically reading out his prewritten answers, yes

I think the last tv interview VN did - with ROBERT ROBINSON, for the BBC - is like this. Bewilderingly it has yet to show up on youtube.

(contrast Rorty who wrote an Intro to this that bizarrely says that for most of the book the reader takes it at face value, thinks Kinbote is a sensible fellow, etc - nah)

this is why i set (/threw!) this book aside, Kinbote is pretty obviously insane and unbelievable from the off so where can it go? i've voiced my disapproval to others and they tend to tell me that this is the point or alt. that i completely missed the point (/i'm an idiot). since i didn't finish the book i can't produce a counter argument but i did think (what i read of) the book was p. obvious and one-note.

well, I think we can leave aside RR's idea that we do take Kinbote at face value for long.

That is, we can assume that we soon realize he's a very wacky kind of character who claims to be a king. And I don't believe that we ever know for sure whether his claim is true or false.

I think it's true, then, that realizing that he thinks he's the king can't, as such, be the point. It must be a stage on the way to, or a part of, the whole experience of the book.

What does that whole experience include?

The sheer metatextual fun of having these massive notes that dwarf the poem; a play upon the idea of commentating, of misreading, of taking an object and misappropriating it - but then also the ambiguity that the misappropriation might be making a more interesting object than the poem was in the first place, so misreading could be a good thing

the parody of academia, of the age of the institutionalization of modernism (and the portrait of the university and the academics)

The artistry, the intricacy of the design: the thought that VN wrote that whole poem, which works straight-faced, and engineered it so that it could also work as prompt for the notes; the pleasure of the poem itself; the intricacy of the Index

VN's marvellous rendition of post-war USA as I suggested above

pure style, VN's nigh matchless gift with lean unlovely English

camp: daft dashing fun, a sort of gay Indiana Jones or John Buchan or Prisoner of Zembla, with people in drag parachuting out of flying boats - well, not quite that, but that sort of register

the ethical and affective dimension around Hazel: the pathos of her, and of her parents' well-meaning but perhaps (as Wood says) bad attitude here, and then of Kinbote's blindness to it, which Rorty thinks is the great moral rhetoric of the book.

pinefox, you have convinced me to give it another shot, thanks!

took this off the shelf tonight because of this thread. has kind of a reputation as the Cold Fastidious One but it's actually downright goofy: I contented myself on my way out with pulling Gerald Emerald's bowtie loose with a deft jerk of my fingers as I passed by him.

I offered to take him home in my powerful Kramler.

or "Just taking my Nabohuffs," as he said)

Nabokov seems to have such an obsession with cheesy puns in English--I remember reading that his US editor had to really fight him to remove some of them from his books. The joy of using a second language, I guess, is that these things seem more fresh and clever than to native speakers who went through that stage when they were kids.

Should we reevaluate the characterization of Kinbote in light of recent biographical scholars' unpacking of Nabokov's relationship with his gay brother Sergey?

Or not.

We could, just, you know, not do that.

Me? I think it's fair to say that VVN was not comfortable with the topic; how much that leaks into Pale Fire or The Real Life of Sebastian Knight remains an open question.

Haven't read that new biographical stuff so am going to say nope.

I have, however, had the opening lines of the poem swirling around my head for the last three weeks, just popping in again and again and again.

Having only read a paltry few of his books, I feel I'm probably not allowed nor fully equipped to say it, but I suspect this is Nabokov's one and only true masterpiece.

Some great pinefox posts in this thread.

I guess this book is a kind of extension of Gogol's Diary of a Madman? It functions in a similar way -- there's all of this madcap comedy but when you step back and ask yourself what sort of reality presumably lies behind the text, you feel a pit of dread in your stomach.

? For me, it's not dread but disappointment. The fun bits of the story are fantasy. The sad bits are poetry.

Reality is mundane as fuck, and comparatively uninteresting.

I feel like Botkin was an unsettling, not mundane presence to the people around him. That's why all his ping pong companions left.

Gradus is now much nearer to us in space and time than he was in the preceding cantos.