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Re: JF re JM re SS re "note to the editor"
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JM in a former posting "could not find one small example of another poet's inclusion of a self-addressed 'note for further use' in a poem."
JF answered: Sorry, I was too late! By the way, I should have included the date of "The Book of Ephraim": 1976. This device is an example of what Barthes called "anti-paralypsis": talking about something by saying you're going to talk about it. I feel sure that it must have been used in "experimental" fiction, but that only example I can think of is a science-fiction story by Barry Malzberg, "A Galaxy Called Rome",which describes a story he was thinking about writing.
JM: I was actually remembering poetry, perhaps something from "The New Yorker", perhaps in romance language poets. Truth is, I found nothing to date, despite the intensity of my "deja vu" experience and familiarity with this type of insertion.
Science-fiction texts may carry examples like those you mention: "Timescapes: Stories of Time Travel" edited and introduced by Peter Haining offers a representative selection and my favourite is Ray Bradubury's "Time Intervening". There is Italo Calvino's "If, on a winter's night, a passenger...", too and some of the stories he wrote in "Numbers in the Dark". In "KQK" I found a reference to a dream in which Franz sees his own retreating back, like we view in Kubrick's "2001,Space Odissey"
Thanks for adding data on Barthes and "anti-paralypsis". Verses that mention "a flowerless garden" ( instead of " an arid garden) could fall into this category, or when people promise not to tell a secret about this and that?
I think that jotting down, as a complete text, what one is going to write in the future occurs in other VN works and there are other instances of it in "Pale Fire", no?
And yet, how to distinguish this procedure from VN's mixing times ( the tryptich mirror with past-present-future reflecting each other), for example, Shade's viewing a Red Admiral during a stroll with tinkling horseshoes and a gardener with Kinbote's retelling this experience at some later time while placing himself side by side Shade, at a time when the poet would still be writing in his porch, or even before that, in his study? ( The details about the Red Admiral's wings could only be something Shade remembered from a previous close-view examination.)
JF quotes Kinbote again: "If I correctly understand the sense of this succinct observation, our poet suggests here that human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece." and adds: "I finally believe you--it was very slow of me not to see that "Disjointed notes, insomnia's mean verse" is a description of the whole book, just as "Man's life as commentary..." is, though the former is self-depreciating. SS had written about a "new meaning to OUR reading of the poem - it may be seen as a kind of an extratextual metaphor - our life is an afterlife with respect to the life "inside" the book, so, what is the afterlife with respect to our lives?"
JF noted that "Sergei put his finger on my interpretation of the book--We are its otherworld, so what is ours? ... But if I try to understand why Shade wrote it and why he put it there, other than a vague connection to the afterlife, I still find it very puzzling."
JM: I must set down on my original understanding before I feel ready to change it!
I always thought that "vast obscure unfinished masterpiece" was a book written by the gods and which, like minute ants moving on a world atlas, we are reading piecemeal while "making comments about our particular strip of experience" ( fatalism is absent because the "masterpiece is unfinished"...)
You think that the abstruse poem is Pale Fire, either Shade's or his Creator's, i.e:Nabokov. So,we, as readers, are the afterlife of what occurs "inside the book" .
Are we then not trapped by a Moebius-band "circularity", where there is no outside/inside and afterlife is now?.
I think that Vic Perry indirectly offered a fascinating solution by wishfulwriting, prospectively: "I like to imagine coming across Kinbote's kidnapped edition...and saying what the hell is this? Of course, "Pale Fire" (the poem) is far more easily available in Shade's "Collected Poems," the whole Botkin alias Kinbote episode only a sordid footnote to the official Shade story... Meanwhile, an ever growing cult following for the increasingly expensive Kinbote edition ... - finally leads to unauthorized republishings on the internet and at least one influential short essay hailing his commentary as an exemplary instance of true outsider literature."
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JF answered: Sorry, I was too late! By the way, I should have included the date of "The Book of Ephraim": 1976. This device is an example of what Barthes called "anti-paralypsis": talking about something by saying you're going to talk about it. I feel sure that it must have been used in "experimental" fiction, but that only example I can think of is a science-fiction story by Barry Malzberg, "A Galaxy Called Rome",which describes a story he was thinking about writing.
JM: I was actually remembering poetry, perhaps something from "The New Yorker", perhaps in romance language poets. Truth is, I found nothing to date, despite the intensity of my "deja vu" experience and familiarity with this type of insertion.
Science-fiction texts may carry examples like those you mention: "Timescapes: Stories of Time Travel" edited and introduced by Peter Haining offers a representative selection and my favourite is Ray Bradubury's "Time Intervening". There is Italo Calvino's "If, on a winter's night, a passenger...", too and some of the stories he wrote in "Numbers in the Dark". In "KQK" I found a reference to a dream in which Franz sees his own retreating back, like we view in Kubrick's "2001,Space Odissey"
Thanks for adding data on Barthes and "anti-paralypsis". Verses that mention "a flowerless garden" ( instead of " an arid garden) could fall into this category, or when people promise not to tell a secret about this and that?
I think that jotting down, as a complete text, what one is going to write in the future occurs in other VN works and there are other instances of it in "Pale Fire", no?
And yet, how to distinguish this procedure from VN's mixing times ( the tryptich mirror with past-present-future reflecting each other), for example, Shade's viewing a Red Admiral during a stroll with tinkling horseshoes and a gardener with Kinbote's retelling this experience at some later time while placing himself side by side Shade, at a time when the poet would still be writing in his porch, or even before that, in his study? ( The details about the Red Admiral's wings could only be something Shade remembered from a previous close-view examination.)
JF quotes Kinbote again: "If I correctly understand the sense of this succinct observation, our poet suggests here that human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece." and adds: "I finally believe you--it was very slow of me not to see that "Disjointed notes, insomnia's mean verse" is a description of the whole book, just as "Man's life as commentary..." is, though the former is self-depreciating. SS had written about a "new meaning to OUR reading of the poem - it may be seen as a kind of an extratextual metaphor - our life is an afterlife with respect to the life "inside" the book, so, what is the afterlife with respect to our lives?"
JF noted that "Sergei put his finger on my interpretation of the book--We are its otherworld, so what is ours? ... But if I try to understand why Shade wrote it and why he put it there, other than a vague connection to the afterlife, I still find it very puzzling."
JM: I must set down on my original understanding before I feel ready to change it!
I always thought that "vast obscure unfinished masterpiece" was a book written by the gods and which, like minute ants moving on a world atlas, we are reading piecemeal while "making comments about our particular strip of experience" ( fatalism is absent because the "masterpiece is unfinished"...)
You think that the abstruse poem is Pale Fire, either Shade's or his Creator's, i.e:Nabokov. So,we, as readers, are the afterlife of what occurs "inside the book" .
Are we then not trapped by a Moebius-band "circularity", where there is no outside/inside and afterlife is now?.
I think that Vic Perry indirectly offered a fascinating solution by wishfulwriting, prospectively: "I like to imagine coming across Kinbote's kidnapped edition...and saying what the hell is this? Of course, "Pale Fire" (the poem) is far more easily available in Shade's "Collected Poems," the whole Botkin alias Kinbote episode only a sordid footnote to the official Shade story... Meanwhile, an ever growing cult following for the increasingly expensive Kinbote edition ... - finally leads to unauthorized republishings on the internet and at least one influential short essay hailing his commentary as an exemplary instance of true outsider literature."
Search the archive: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/archives/nabokv-l.html
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