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Re: Keys to PF?
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George Shimanovich wrote:
a. VN's details stubbornly refuse to comply with grandeur of our theories.
b. I was always enjoying the harmony of VN’s construction of PF but was
missing unity of my understanding (as a programmer I can’t do without it).
c. To me PF slips away from any theory used to “solve” it, that I am
familiar with. Not that it attempts to ‘solve’ the novel but I think that Pale
Fire was designed to play out the artistic concept summed up by this phrase.
d. What we then have is a novel projecting given artist’s view of his art –
hard as it is but said and done in Pale Fire.
Dear George,
In the above remarks I seem to sense some sympathy with the issues I have
been hoping to raise.
Puzzles and riddles have intensely engaged me since childhood, and I have
spent many hours in contemplating them and attempting their solution. A good
answer to “Why is a raven like a writing-desk?” is “Because they both begin
with r, except for writing-desk.” What is the game of chess but one puzzle
after another? White sets Black a puzzle. It is Black’s task to solve it, and
then set one for White.
Discussions of the puzzles internal to Pale Fire are extremely enjoyable and
interesting, and I wouldn't want to suppress them for the world. However, to
me they still smack somewhat of the kind of Shakespeare criticism which was
in vogue prior to about 1935. What is an asp? How could a clock strike in
Julius Caesar? Where is the sea-coast of Bohemia? Was there ever an Athenian
mechanical called Bottom? How old was Hamlet when he died? How many children
had Lady Macbeth?
High art lends itself to this kind of pastime. At present there is intense
popular debate surrounding Hitchcock’s film Vertigo, which has been steadily
climbing the cineastes’ ladder of greatness for the last 30 years. I believe
it is now about in second place. One of the theories is that the entire film
played itself out in James Stewart’s mind just before he followed his police
buddy, and crashed to his death on the street several stories below. [At one
time I had a job as a proof-reader.]
I do suspect, though, that pursuit of optical illusions, fractals and
kaleidoscopes is the more fruitful path of enquiry, if the question is what makes
Pale Fire so fascinating. The essences of music, chess and mathematics are
inborn: they appear to reside in the native structure of the mind. I do find
Frost's little essay The Figure a Poem Makes most stimulating. It's so nice and
short.
Someone else (I’m afraid I didn’t note who) wrote:
“It's funny how, once deep in the thickets of PF, everything I read seems to
relate to it somehow.”
Agree entirely. Coleridge once said that he couldn’t help thinking Hamlet
was all about himself: that he was Hamlet, in fact. The Alice books have been
endlessly cited in apparently alien contexts.
Charles
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