Subject
PF Narrator?
Date
Body
----
>From: Gennady Barabtarlo <gragb@showme.missouri.edu>
>Subject: PF narrator
>
>I apologize for a somewhat didactic tone of these notes, some of which are
>lifted from a rough draft for an essay on principles
>>>of VN's writing; that is why these thoughts are stated more firmly
>>>than I would have in a more spontaneous e-gram.
>>>1. I was surprised that Brian Boyd, in his summary of evidence in
>>>support of his theory, did not refer to a strong one used in his book,
>>>namely to the
>>>draft of the ending of VN's foreword to the 1966 revision of SM:
>>>
>>>"As John Shade says somewhere,
>>>
>>> Nobody will heed my index,
>>> I suppose,
>>> But through it a gentle wind ex
>>> Ponto blows."
>>>
>>>One wonders whether the omission owed anything to David Lodge's dismissive
>>>criticism (reprinted in the book mentioned in this thread) which labels
>>>this line of argument as a classical example of "intentional fallacy" as
>>>defined by Wimsatt and Beardsley in their 1971 essay so titled. According
>>>to that manual of exegetic etiquette, it is a _mistake_ to interpret a
>>>literary text by _seeking_ evidence of the author's intentions outside that
>>>text. This is rum. It is a mistake only if one plays by the
>>>Wimsatt&Beardsley book of rules, which states, more or less, that the
>>>barristers are to be sequestered for the duration of the trial. But other
>>>codes exist, and some of us do not consider it a fallacy to adduce good
>>>evidence from retrospective forewords (e.g. to Bend Sinister), afterthought
>>>afterwords (Lolita), add-on end-notes (Ada), made-up "interviews"
>>>(Transparent Things), and indeed archival material, all of which is
>>>principally outside the text under study. It would be a mistake indeed to
>>>ignore, for example, VN's letter to K. White regarding The Vane Sisters,
>>>without which no real understanding of this story and many adjacent works
>>>is possible.
>>>
>>>What I consider especially salient about this "ex ponto" draft is precisely
>>>that VN decided in the end to take Shade out of it. I see only two
>>>plausible explanations: either he reconsidered an initial impulse to let
>>>the secret out (an impulse that he did not resist in regard to TT, when he
>>>saw that nobody had come close to the understanding of the book's overall
>>>design, and gruffily explained it in an "interview" forged ad hoc), or
>>>else he was afraid that this unrelated joke about "Shade's Index" might
>>>mislead someone to advance the very theory that Boyd has advanced.
>>>
>>>2. I hold the former to be correct. Among many "sequestered", inner
>>>arguments that
>>>Boyd gives two are especially strong: the title (for the poem _and_ the
>>>book that contains it) and the floweret-pansy line. Each of VN's books has
>>>a main angle which forms a cardinal artistic challenge, as it were. In
>>>many, it's a distortive passion, which warps reality for its victim and
>>>usually is lethal. Technically, it required a first-person narrative voice
>>>(to set up a pattern of distortion, to be comprehended, gauged, and
>>>corrected by the reader), and most, if not indeed _all_, VN's English works
>>>are done in that mode. For instance, in Aleppo it's ravenous jealousy, in
>>>Lolita nymphetolepsy, in Ada, extreme carnal "ardour" and blinding pride,
>>>and in PF it's homosexuality. None of these captures the whole of the
>>>respective fiction; they only name the main _passion_ that sets up its
>>>design. True love sometimes breaks through the neatly organized mess of
>>>that distortion (the
>>>Carmen-finale in L, Disa-filled-dreams in PF, the motif of separation
>>>and tapering
>>>of timeflow in Ada), but it never is strong enough to transform a Nabokov
>>>character (in fact, they almost never change).
>>> The title "Pale Fire", in addition to, or rather by way of, its
>>>well-known Shakespearean connotations, may also point to the prism of
>>>homosexuality through which Kinbote's describes both his adoptive world and
>>>his distant native one. Vasili Rozanov's famous 1909 (or was it 1911?) book
>>>about homosexuality (which Nabokov evidently knew -- there are many good
>>>evidences for that) was entitled The Moonlight People (Liudi lunnago
>>>svieta). And it is not for nothing, of course, that PF goes, in part, under
>>>A Kingdom by the Sea in LATH, thus emblematically spanning its contents
>>>over both Lolita (blinding passion) and the original Solus Rex, with its
>>>insular homosexual débaucheries etc.
>>>
>>>3. However, every good first-person narration must have a third-person
>>>surveyor
>>>hovering over it, and VN's novels always have a superstratum in which this
>>>objective agent resides. A "representative" does not have to be fleshed
>>>out or named; in VN's English novels, he is more often invisible and
>>>unmentionable. Therefore, the Shadean theory, while correct at its
>>>elevation, is not, to my
>>>mind, terminal but rather a higher altitude camp, while the peak is all
>>>mist and quite prohibitive. Yet it's there. The trouble with
>>>modern mountaineers is that they think it is absurd to presume that certain
>>>summits are not meant to be scaled at all, but only scanned.
>
>I agree that one ought to pay special heed to VN onomatology. The
>_conceivable_ key to Lolita is Humbert Humbert's "real name". In that
>sense, "Shade" should alert "the Shadeans" to a not-quite-resolved
>something underfoot. It may be luminous in one light (as Ellen Pifer has
>suggested), but moves the first "s" to the end, and observe the effect.
>(See Priscilla Meyer's finds on "John SHade and Afterlife" in her
>encyclopedic "Sailor", 1988).
>>>
>>>4. As for Pnin (as a guest super in PF), it is a weak argument in any
>>>event. Pale Fire was not written only for the readers of "Pnin"; it's
>>>perfectly hermetic and self-sufficient. VN installed him, I think, for his
>>>private delectation, perhaps in response to a private grievance appeal.
>>>Besides, let
>>>us not forget that even in the novel so named we face a cosmogonic problem
>>>very similar to PF's: there, character N. writes fact or fiction about
>>>character Pnin ("for the moment, I am his doctor, so let me repeat..." etc.
>>>etc.), develops his narration masterfully, then flips it in the last
>>>chapter and "lets his subject" "liberate himself". (but Pnin, like Kinbote,
>>>was supposed to die in the book). I once applied a rather intricate theory
>>>to this paradox, trying to explain why N. and Pnin cannot appear on stage
>>>together ('When A is in, B is out', and v-v). However, in that immediately
>>>preceding book there is a unmistakably perceived superstratum issuing an
>>>inaudible voice that makes N. himself a subject
>>>of objective narration, although its source cannot be deduced from the
>>>text. ("Vladimir Vladimirovich" of Ch. 5 = N., nothing else).
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>GB
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>
>
Gennady Barabtarlo
451 GCB University of Missouri
Columbia, MO 65211
573-882-9454 Fax 573-884-8456
>From: Gennady Barabtarlo <gragb@showme.missouri.edu>
>Subject: PF narrator
>
>I apologize for a somewhat didactic tone of these notes, some of which are
>lifted from a rough draft for an essay on principles
>>>of VN's writing; that is why these thoughts are stated more firmly
>>>than I would have in a more spontaneous e-gram.
>>>1. I was surprised that Brian Boyd, in his summary of evidence in
>>>support of his theory, did not refer to a strong one used in his book,
>>>namely to the
>>>draft of the ending of VN's foreword to the 1966 revision of SM:
>>>
>>>"As John Shade says somewhere,
>>>
>>> Nobody will heed my index,
>>> I suppose,
>>> But through it a gentle wind ex
>>> Ponto blows."
>>>
>>>One wonders whether the omission owed anything to David Lodge's dismissive
>>>criticism (reprinted in the book mentioned in this thread) which labels
>>>this line of argument as a classical example of "intentional fallacy" as
>>>defined by Wimsatt and Beardsley in their 1971 essay so titled. According
>>>to that manual of exegetic etiquette, it is a _mistake_ to interpret a
>>>literary text by _seeking_ evidence of the author's intentions outside that
>>>text. This is rum. It is a mistake only if one plays by the
>>>Wimsatt&Beardsley book of rules, which states, more or less, that the
>>>barristers are to be sequestered for the duration of the trial. But other
>>>codes exist, and some of us do not consider it a fallacy to adduce good
>>>evidence from retrospective forewords (e.g. to Bend Sinister), afterthought
>>>afterwords (Lolita), add-on end-notes (Ada), made-up "interviews"
>>>(Transparent Things), and indeed archival material, all of which is
>>>principally outside the text under study. It would be a mistake indeed to
>>>ignore, for example, VN's letter to K. White regarding The Vane Sisters,
>>>without which no real understanding of this story and many adjacent works
>>>is possible.
>>>
>>>What I consider especially salient about this "ex ponto" draft is precisely
>>>that VN decided in the end to take Shade out of it. I see only two
>>>plausible explanations: either he reconsidered an initial impulse to let
>>>the secret out (an impulse that he did not resist in regard to TT, when he
>>>saw that nobody had come close to the understanding of the book's overall
>>>design, and gruffily explained it in an "interview" forged ad hoc), or
>>>else he was afraid that this unrelated joke about "Shade's Index" might
>>>mislead someone to advance the very theory that Boyd has advanced.
>>>
>>>2. I hold the former to be correct. Among many "sequestered", inner
>>>arguments that
>>>Boyd gives two are especially strong: the title (for the poem _and_ the
>>>book that contains it) and the floweret-pansy line. Each of VN's books has
>>>a main angle which forms a cardinal artistic challenge, as it were. In
>>>many, it's a distortive passion, which warps reality for its victim and
>>>usually is lethal. Technically, it required a first-person narrative voice
>>>(to set up a pattern of distortion, to be comprehended, gauged, and
>>>corrected by the reader), and most, if not indeed _all_, VN's English works
>>>are done in that mode. For instance, in Aleppo it's ravenous jealousy, in
>>>Lolita nymphetolepsy, in Ada, extreme carnal "ardour" and blinding pride,
>>>and in PF it's homosexuality. None of these captures the whole of the
>>>respective fiction; they only name the main _passion_ that sets up its
>>>design. True love sometimes breaks through the neatly organized mess of
>>>that distortion (the
>>>Carmen-finale in L, Disa-filled-dreams in PF, the motif of separation
>>>and tapering
>>>of timeflow in Ada), but it never is strong enough to transform a Nabokov
>>>character (in fact, they almost never change).
>>> The title "Pale Fire", in addition to, or rather by way of, its
>>>well-known Shakespearean connotations, may also point to the prism of
>>>homosexuality through which Kinbote's describes both his adoptive world and
>>>his distant native one. Vasili Rozanov's famous 1909 (or was it 1911?) book
>>>about homosexuality (which Nabokov evidently knew -- there are many good
>>>evidences for that) was entitled The Moonlight People (Liudi lunnago
>>>svieta). And it is not for nothing, of course, that PF goes, in part, under
>>>A Kingdom by the Sea in LATH, thus emblematically spanning its contents
>>>over both Lolita (blinding passion) and the original Solus Rex, with its
>>>insular homosexual débaucheries etc.
>>>
>>>3. However, every good first-person narration must have a third-person
>>>surveyor
>>>hovering over it, and VN's novels always have a superstratum in which this
>>>objective agent resides. A "representative" does not have to be fleshed
>>>out or named; in VN's English novels, he is more often invisible and
>>>unmentionable. Therefore, the Shadean theory, while correct at its
>>>elevation, is not, to my
>>>mind, terminal but rather a higher altitude camp, while the peak is all
>>>mist and quite prohibitive. Yet it's there. The trouble with
>>>modern mountaineers is that they think it is absurd to presume that certain
>>>summits are not meant to be scaled at all, but only scanned.
>
>I agree that one ought to pay special heed to VN onomatology. The
>_conceivable_ key to Lolita is Humbert Humbert's "real name". In that
>sense, "Shade" should alert "the Shadeans" to a not-quite-resolved
>something underfoot. It may be luminous in one light (as Ellen Pifer has
>suggested), but moves the first "s" to the end, and observe the effect.
>(See Priscilla Meyer's finds on "John SHade and Afterlife" in her
>encyclopedic "Sailor", 1988).
>>>
>>>4. As for Pnin (as a guest super in PF), it is a weak argument in any
>>>event. Pale Fire was not written only for the readers of "Pnin"; it's
>>>perfectly hermetic and self-sufficient. VN installed him, I think, for his
>>>private delectation, perhaps in response to a private grievance appeal.
>>>Besides, let
>>>us not forget that even in the novel so named we face a cosmogonic problem
>>>very similar to PF's: there, character N. writes fact or fiction about
>>>character Pnin ("for the moment, I am his doctor, so let me repeat..." etc.
>>>etc.), develops his narration masterfully, then flips it in the last
>>>chapter and "lets his subject" "liberate himself". (but Pnin, like Kinbote,
>>>was supposed to die in the book). I once applied a rather intricate theory
>>>to this paradox, trying to explain why N. and Pnin cannot appear on stage
>>>together ('When A is in, B is out', and v-v). However, in that immediately
>>>preceding book there is a unmistakably perceived superstratum issuing an
>>>inaudible voice that makes N. himself a subject
>>>of objective narration, although its source cannot be deduced from the
>>>text. ("Vladimir Vladimirovich" of Ch. 5 = N., nothing else).
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>GB
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>
>
Gennady Barabtarlo
451 GCB University of Missouri
Columbia, MO 65211
573-882-9454 Fax 573-884-8456