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Re: THOUGHTS: VN's Self-Reference in PF
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There are various samples of Nabokov's self-reference in PF, and elsewhere, from his own testimonies during interviews.
Even after he had already finished his novel "Pale Fire" there was a tendency in his interviewers to focus on "Lolita," while he tried to introduce "Pale Fire" into the conversation.
In the first published item, in Strong Opinions, in June 5, 1962, Nabokov said:
"My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, sofr music. My pleasures are the most intense known to man: writing and butterfly hunting." (SO,p.3)
In mid-July 1962, he said: "my more responsible characters are given some of my own ideas. There is John Shade, in Pale Fire, the poet. He does borrow some of my opinions.
There is one passage in his poem, which is part of the book, where he says something I think I can endorse. He says - let me quote it, if I can remember, yes, I think I can do it: " I loathe such things s jazz, the white-hosed moron torturing a black bull, rayed with red, abstractist bric-a-brac, primitivist folk masks, progressive schools, music in supermarkets,swimming pools, brutes, bores, class-conscious philistines, Freud, Marx, fake thinkers, puffed-up poets, frauds and sharks." That's how it goes."(SO, page 18), in an almost Kinbotean show of spontaneous recollection of what he could access in his own archives - before writing his answers down for the interview... In this same interview he quoted his poem about the swallows "that I happened to give to my main character in that novel." (The Gift)
The most interesting item, as I see it, related to Shade's "dissociative" crisis involving body-parts (lines 145-156), but described poetically and in a very "sane" and humoristic vein:
There was a sudden sunburst in my head.[...]
And then black night. That blackness was sublime.
I felt distributed through space and time:
One foot upon a mountaintop, one hand
Under the pebbles of a panting strand,
One ear in Italy, one eye in Spain,
In caves, my blood, and in the stars, my brain.
There were dull throbs in my Triassic; green
Optical spots in Upper Pleistocene,
An icy shiver down my Age of Stone,
And all tomorrows in my funnybone.
In August 18, 1964, while answering about the places he would have liked to live he wrote:
"I would have to construct a mosaic of time and space to suit my desires and demands. It would be too complicated to tabulate all the elements of this combination [...] I think I would like my head to be in the United States of the nineteen-sixties, but would not mind distributing some of my other organs and limbs through various centuries and countries."
When inquired about which of the languages he considers most beautiful he stated: "My head says English, my heart, Russian, my ear, French." (SO,p.48-49)*
When, later on, Shade describes his shaving procedures during his bath, there are also bodily-geographical ennumerations (cheek=Old Zemblan fields, hands =slaves making hay), in a complicated game with similes and recondite allusions. This is why I hesitate to consider them, simply, as an expression of his growing madness. The latter must be identified by a failing in technical skills, in the verses structure, not by its images.
I agree with Carolyn ( I had asserted something similar almost at the same time) that this Canto might profit from being read side by side with Kinbote's foreword.
There are other striking parallels bt. the poem and Kinbote's fictive biographical items in the lspirit of bringing up parallels between "body-cosmos" (the merry-go-round/caleidoscope/car lights and trucks, vertigo, spiralings and stellar explosions in his lungs).
The same issue has been precisely rendered by Kinbote himself, when he describes the approach of Gradus in synchrony with Shade's process of writing, as he moves like a monkey that moves from paragraph onto paragraph or rides a train of thought and a lot more.Wonderful synchronization and metaphors, not at all crazy if considered as metaphors (which they clearly are). I find in these lines (Shade's and Kinbote's) the same authorial design.
Once I heard a doctor explain to me that transient body-parts, such as hair and nails (... shaving a beard and paring his fingernails) are technically described as "phaneros" from the Greek, they indicate sudden apparitions, fast disappearing visions, like those used in words such as "epiphany." We might also be interested in considering that there is a lot of light in the bath-room scene or that mirrors, used in shaving, are often hung from a window with the light streaming over the face and then these illumined fields can be more clearly seen in the mirror reflexion.
(One of the very few items to remain in Freud's museum in Vienna is his shaving-mirror which hangs from a lovely window with a view and its arch blends the outside and the inside).
............................................................................................................
*- I ask the List-readers to forgive me for all my typos and imprecisions whenever I transcribe a text here. The references to pages and links will suffice, so I hope, for those who want to get them down correctly. There were more than ten spelling errors the "Battel" (shits instead of shifts, for example).
My chief purpose has been to bring the lines to our discussion is a more visually practical way.
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
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Visit "Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
Manage subscription options: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/
Even after he had already finished his novel "Pale Fire" there was a tendency in his interviewers to focus on "Lolita," while he tried to introduce "Pale Fire" into the conversation.
In the first published item, in Strong Opinions, in June 5, 1962, Nabokov said:
"My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, sofr music. My pleasures are the most intense known to man: writing and butterfly hunting." (SO,p.3)
In mid-July 1962, he said: "my more responsible characters are given some of my own ideas. There is John Shade, in Pale Fire, the poet. He does borrow some of my opinions.
There is one passage in his poem, which is part of the book, where he says something I think I can endorse. He says - let me quote it, if I can remember, yes, I think I can do it: " I loathe such things s jazz, the white-hosed moron torturing a black bull, rayed with red, abstractist bric-a-brac, primitivist folk masks, progressive schools, music in supermarkets,swimming pools, brutes, bores, class-conscious philistines, Freud, Marx, fake thinkers, puffed-up poets, frauds and sharks." That's how it goes."(SO, page 18), in an almost Kinbotean show of spontaneous recollection of what he could access in his own archives - before writing his answers down for the interview... In this same interview he quoted his poem about the swallows "that I happened to give to my main character in that novel." (The Gift)
The most interesting item, as I see it, related to Shade's "dissociative" crisis involving body-parts (lines 145-156), but described poetically and in a very "sane" and humoristic vein:
There was a sudden sunburst in my head.[...]
And then black night. That blackness was sublime.
I felt distributed through space and time:
One foot upon a mountaintop, one hand
Under the pebbles of a panting strand,
One ear in Italy, one eye in Spain,
In caves, my blood, and in the stars, my brain.
There were dull throbs in my Triassic; green
Optical spots in Upper Pleistocene,
An icy shiver down my Age of Stone,
And all tomorrows in my funnybone.
In August 18, 1964, while answering about the places he would have liked to live he wrote:
"I would have to construct a mosaic of time and space to suit my desires and demands. It would be too complicated to tabulate all the elements of this combination [...] I think I would like my head to be in the United States of the nineteen-sixties, but would not mind distributing some of my other organs and limbs through various centuries and countries."
When inquired about which of the languages he considers most beautiful he stated: "My head says English, my heart, Russian, my ear, French." (SO,p.48-49)*
When, later on, Shade describes his shaving procedures during his bath, there are also bodily-geographical ennumerations (cheek=Old Zemblan fields, hands =slaves making hay), in a complicated game with similes and recondite allusions. This is why I hesitate to consider them, simply, as an expression of his growing madness. The latter must be identified by a failing in technical skills, in the verses structure, not by its images.
I agree with Carolyn ( I had asserted something similar almost at the same time) that this Canto might profit from being read side by side with Kinbote's foreword.
There are other striking parallels bt. the poem and Kinbote's fictive biographical items in the lspirit of bringing up parallels between "body-cosmos" (the merry-go-round/caleidoscope/car lights and trucks, vertigo, spiralings and stellar explosions in his lungs).
The same issue has been precisely rendered by Kinbote himself, when he describes the approach of Gradus in synchrony with Shade's process of writing, as he moves like a monkey that moves from paragraph onto paragraph or rides a train of thought and a lot more.Wonderful synchronization and metaphors, not at all crazy if considered as metaphors (which they clearly are). I find in these lines (Shade's and Kinbote's) the same authorial design.
Once I heard a doctor explain to me that transient body-parts, such as hair and nails (... shaving a beard and paring his fingernails) are technically described as "phaneros" from the Greek, they indicate sudden apparitions, fast disappearing visions, like those used in words such as "epiphany." We might also be interested in considering that there is a lot of light in the bath-room scene or that mirrors, used in shaving, are often hung from a window with the light streaming over the face and then these illumined fields can be more clearly seen in the mirror reflexion.
(One of the very few items to remain in Freud's museum in Vienna is his shaving-mirror which hangs from a lovely window with a view and its arch blends the outside and the inside).
............................................................................................................
*- I ask the List-readers to forgive me for all my typos and imprecisions whenever I transcribe a text here. The references to pages and links will suffice, so I hope, for those who want to get them down correctly. There were more than ten spelling errors the "Battel" (shits instead of shifts, for example).
My chief purpose has been to bring the lines to our discussion is a more visually practical way.
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/