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Re: : Re: Aisenberg's thoughts on PF]]
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jansymello <jansy@AETERN.US> wrote: I wish we would quote different scholars to widen our discussion about Pale Fire's "domestic ghosts" but, in fact, this idea seems to be mainly Boydian who, apparently, does not consider the comic dimension present in PF in the same way as JA sees it.
I agree with JA, this novel is wonderfully "tragicomic".
VN's use of "hereafter" instead of "otherworld" (potustoronnost) emphasizes its "thisourworldliness" of its "meta"physical ideas and the delightful quotidian fleshyness of its characters.
J.A.: Yes, I think this elegantly gets at the way the book strikes me.
are we necessarily criticizing Boyd or merely opposing a metaphysical dimension added to such pathetic domestic ghosts?
J.A.: I definitely have my difficulties with Boyd's way of reading the book, and the motivations which lay behind it, while still liking much of what he's written ("Even Homais Nods" is a very sassy sensible piece of writing, I think).
MR agrees that if ' "false vistas" are placed there by the author, then we had better go ahead and explore them.They may not take us where wewanted to go, but they are still a worthwhile destination.' At present there is no agreement on how to distinguish "false vistas" and "true revelations" ( of whatever kind) MR adds that "VN's novels are different because they so often take the form of puzzles. And what is the fun of a puzzle if we have no regard for the intentions of the designer." Nabokov was a Designer intermingled with the corpus of the novel ( this interfering playful Designer must be heeded!) while at the same time, he remained Authorially external to it ( not to mention his unconscious to add a bit to that "externality").'
J.A.: I think, presuming I understand all of the above, that this was to a certain extent my point. Nabokov imitates the creator by imitating "The Author" which, as I recall, in Speak Memory, Nabokov pointed out when discussing the art of chess problems and their complex accoutrements. The whole discussion was clearly meant to be an analogy to literary composition (these pages of chapter fourteen, part three, pgs. 226-229 of the Everyman edition, make for instructive reading in my sense of N.'s blending of art, chess, and the deific). When explaining the purpose of a particularly involved chess problem that had given him great difficulty he writes it had been "...meant for the delectation of the very expert solver. The unsophisticated might miss the point of the problem entirely, and discover its fairly simple, 'thetic' solution without having passed through the pleasurable torment prepared for the sophisticated one. The latter would start by falling for an illusory
pattern of play based on a fashionable avant-garde theme (exposing White's king to checks), which the composer had taken the greatest pains to 'plant' (with only one obscure little move by an inconspicous pawn to upset it). Having passed through this 'antithetic' inferno the by now ultrasophisticated solver would reach the simple key move (bishop to c2) as somebody on a wild goose chase might go from Albany to New York by way of Vancouver, Eurasia and the Azores. The pleasant experience of the roundabout route (strange landscapes, gongs, tigers, exotic customs, the thrice-repeated circuit of a newly married couple around the sacred fire of an earthen brazier) would amply reward him for the misery of the deceit, and after that, his arrival at the simple key move would provide him with a synthesis of poignant artistic delight." One might also add to that trip from Albany to New York, I suspect, a long side-tour through Zembla. Clearly Nabokov composed his work in a
rigorously rhetorical way, and I think this nicely backs up my theory that with Pale Fire it is the reader's catching something akin to Kinbote's fever, not because there is an ultimate answer to anything, but just because the fever itself is fun, thereby exploiting a basic component of our reasoning faculties, their amazing facility and will to know, and also their flawed perspective-marred flesh and blood limitations, which really make the novel such a novel machine.Nabokov is playing with the reader, not instructing them; the better they are at it the more they have a chance of missing the trees for the forest, to take to my point the blunt bathetic blade of an old saw--ha ha.
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