Dear Sir - re Shade's poem and its alleged greatness. Could i offer a few thoughts extracted from Vladimir Nabokov and the Problem of Seeing? Many Thanks, Michael Glynn
When Kinbote finally learns that Shade’s poem is wholly oblivious to his Zemblan idyll, Kinbote’s assessment of the great man’s work is trenchant and pointedly Nabokovian. To Kinbote, Shade’s poem is simply “an autobiographical, eminently Appalachian, rather old-fashioned narrative in a neo-Popian prosodic style.” I would suggest that Kinbote’s verdict is intended to command the assent of the reader, and that Nabokov’s treatment of Shade and his poem is in fact ironic. This is a notion that would discomfit some critics: Herbert Grabes holds the poem to be “an extremely elaborate work of art, typical of the later phases of some literary epoch,” and Andrew Field sees it as an important work, one worthy of critical study in isolation from the rest of the text. Brian Boyd, a staunch champion of Shade as presiding genius in the novel, hails the poem somewhat hyperbolically as a “masterpiece” and “a deliberate challenge to both Pound’s Cantos and Eliot’s Four Quartets.” G.M. Hyde argues that Shade’s poem reveals a serious and deep kinship with the work of Frost in that it manifests the latter’s characteristic stoicism in the face of “terrible and incomprehensible things.” Others have, however, expressed reservations about Shade’s poetic offering. Douglas Fowler finds the poem’s heroic couplet form to be limiting whilst Alvin B. Kernan argues that the poem should be read as “an extended and amusing spoof.” In my view, the challenge Nabokov set himself in writing “Shade’s” poem was to produce a highly competent but highly conventional piece of work, one which would ultimately be deemed an artistic failure. Nabokov appears deliberately to over-egg the pudding, having Shade present us with a daughter who is not only plump and plain but also unpopular, squinty-eyed, clumsy, swollen-footed, psoriatic and, perhaps not surprisingly in view of her multiple afflictions, deeply mentally troubled. Furthermore, it appears to have gone generally unremarked that this central conceit of the plain teenager rejected by her peers is a suspiciously mawkish one, the stuff of adolescent fiction or any number of late twentieth century pop songs. A brief comparative exercise will, I believe, throw into relief Nabokov’s slyly ironic intent. Consider the following three extracts:
1) It must have broke your poor little heart
When the boys used to say to you looked better in the dark
…………………………………………………………….
The teacher would ask a question
But somehow you never got your turn
My eyes would fill with water, inside I’d burn, oh yes I did
2) At Christmas parties, games were rough, no doubt,
And one shy little guest might be left out;
But let’s be fair: while children of her age
Were cast as elves and fairies on the stage
That she’d helped paint for the school pantomime,
My gentle girl appeared as Mother Time,
A bent charwoman with slop pail and broom,
And like a fool I sobbed in the men’s room.
3) I learned the truth at seventeen
That love was meant for beauty queens
And high school girls with clear skinned smiles
Who married young and then retired.
The valentines I never knew
The Friday night charades of youth
Were spent on one more beautiful
At seventeen I learned the truth
And those of us with ravaged faces
Desperately remained at home
Inventing lovers on the phone
Who called to say – Come dance with me
As will be readily appreciated, the first and third extracts, song lyrics from The Chi-Lites’ Homely Girl and Janis Ian’s At Seventeen respectively, are characterised by a degree of triteness. However, the second extract, from Shade’s poem, is almost identical in terms of subject matter and tone. Nabokov was too much the literary sophisticate unconsciously to produce such lachrymose and hackneyed work. If, as I maintain, Shade’s poem is in part mawkish and conventional, it is because Nabokov intends it to be so. Nabokov is suggesting that Shade’s attempt artistically to confront the loss of his daughter fails where Kinbote’s distorted and distorting exploration of loss succeeds. As I have already suggested, Shade was instinctively Symbolist, concerned ultimately with there rather than here. However, when he addresses the tragic situation of his daughter he attempts to do so in a direct, immediate and sincere way, thereby hoping to give the reader an unmediated slice of reality. I believe that Nabokov wishes us to see this as a doomed attempt. Not for nothing is Shade so called. The poet’s effort is eclipsed by the madman’s commentary. When Shade attempts to evoke his daughter’s tragic situation in conventional, heartfelt verse, he is betrayed into triteness. It is Kinbote’s estranging method that can capture the essence of a tragic reality. In order to evoke the twin pains of exile and unhappy marriage, Kinbote, via oblique means, triumphantly transcends what Shklovsky termed “the sphere of automatised perception.”