Dear all and
sundry,
Oof. Or ouf. The
list postings these days are dumped in a clump, making them hard to cope with.
I’ll just pick a few burrs out of my hair.
A few years ago
Auberon Waugh (RIP) selected Pale Fire as his novel of the century. No doubt
he had many reasons, but the one that struck me most was that he perceived it
as a gigantic and hilarious send-up of the literary scholarship
business.
Here’s one way of
looking at it. Kinbote is a frustrated poet trying to be a scholar. Shade is a
career academic, trying to be a poet. Poets are mad. Scholars are sane.
It’s exceedingly rare for the two to meet on the same ground. No great poets
have been scholars; no great scholars have been poets. Pale Fire, the poem, is
ingeniously versified prose. Pale Fire, the book, is inspired poetry in
scholarly footnote form.
Stan Kelly-Bootle’s
observation: “All is CONtext!” is stimulating. I’d been musing for a couple of days
that in my posting of 27/10 I’d written: “Yeats also has a poem on the
scholar/artist conflic” ---- after noticing that I’d dropped a t off the last
word. What might a scholar logically deduce from this harebreath slip, hardly
Freudian but just possibly Nabokovian. Was this an instance of Yoko Ono’s
entertaining shortening of “conceptual art” into “con-art”, merged with “flic”, a Parisian copper,
or perhaps “flic[k]”, a series of static images designed to produce the
illusion of motion?
Brian Boyd’s
reaction has me baffled. “By your
standards Shakespeare's sonnets would not be poetry either, since some of
those have very much been worried into being (take sonnet
104, for
instance). You might try broadening your tastes.”
Whether sonnet 104
was worried into existence or not, having now read it carefully, it strikes me
as poetry of a much higher order
than Pale Fire, the poem. I don’t find it all that easy to grasp what Frost
was getting at, but I suppose it must have something to do with the initial
“wild” creative impulse. I would suggest that this impulse is not the same for
scholars or academics as for poets. Poets have the advantage, since without
them scholars would have nothing to talk about. They also benefit from living
outside the box, whereas career-minded academics are obliged to publish
or perish. VN strongly resembles
Falstaff in that respect: not only witty in himself, but the cause of wit in
others.
Besides which, I
don’t follow the logic whereby because some sonnets may have been produced
solely by perspiration, the others are also without inspiration. The
strictness of the sonnet form necessarily requires it to be carefully worked
over. Are we not talking in antitheses here? I hope I’m understanding Brian’s last
sentence in the spirit in which it was intended, but as a European, though in
a minority of one, I do find it rather Antipodean. Being naturally humble,
however, I’m always doing my best to broaden my tastes.
Charles