Subject
Three PF questions
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I have three more or less trivial questions on /Pale Fire/.
The first two, especially the second, are totally baffling
to me.
1. How do people interpret the apparently overlapping real and
fictional states in the note to line 287? Sybil mentions
Wyoming, Utah, and Montana; Kinbote mentions Utana and Idoming.
Is Kinbote hiding his location from that more competent
Gradus? In that case why name the place at all? Or if he
names it so Nabokov can bring in cedars and Coleridge, why
also bring in the real states? My guess is that it underlines
the fictionality of it all, like anagrams of "Vladimir
Nabokov" in other books, but I'd be interested in people's
thoughts.
2. What is going on with Edsel Ford (note to line 603)? I
looked him up at Wikipedia--he lived from 1893 to 1943,
he was president of Ford Motor Co. from the age of 26 till
his early death from cancer, and he was a noted patron of the
visual arts (including work by black Americans, unusual for
his time), but there was nothing about poetry. The use of
his name strikes me as really pointless. The closest I can
come is that he might be associated with Kinbote's favorite
poetic subject, the death of handsome young men (apparently
his and Housman's version of Poe's dictum that "the death of a
beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetic subject
in the world"), though 49 seems a little old for him to have
that appeal to Kinbote. Of course, the Ford Edsel was a
laughingstock in America around the time Nabokov was writing
PF, but it doesn't strike me as all that funny to name a
fictional poet after an unsuccessful car that was named
after a person who died more than 15 years earlier.
3. Am I right in thinking Pnin's appearance in /Pale Fire/ is the
only time a character from one Nabokov story appears in another?
(As a character, not a hurricane or gitanilla.)
Jerry Friedman
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
The first two, especially the second, are totally baffling
to me.
1. How do people interpret the apparently overlapping real and
fictional states in the note to line 287? Sybil mentions
Wyoming, Utah, and Montana; Kinbote mentions Utana and Idoming.
Is Kinbote hiding his location from that more competent
Gradus? In that case why name the place at all? Or if he
names it so Nabokov can bring in cedars and Coleridge, why
also bring in the real states? My guess is that it underlines
the fictionality of it all, like anagrams of "Vladimir
Nabokov" in other books, but I'd be interested in people's
thoughts.
2. What is going on with Edsel Ford (note to line 603)? I
looked him up at Wikipedia--he lived from 1893 to 1943,
he was president of Ford Motor Co. from the age of 26 till
his early death from cancer, and he was a noted patron of the
visual arts (including work by black Americans, unusual for
his time), but there was nothing about poetry. The use of
his name strikes me as really pointless. The closest I can
come is that he might be associated with Kinbote's favorite
poetic subject, the death of handsome young men (apparently
his and Housman's version of Poe's dictum that "the death of a
beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetic subject
in the world"), though 49 seems a little old for him to have
that appeal to Kinbote. Of course, the Ford Edsel was a
laughingstock in America around the time Nabokov was writing
PF, but it doesn't strike me as all that funny to name a
fictional poet after an unsuccessful car that was named
after a person who died more than 15 years earlier.
3. Am I right in thinking Pnin's appearance in /Pale Fire/ is the
only time a character from one Nabokov story appears in another?
(As a character, not a hurricane or gitanilla.)
Jerry Friedman
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