Rather than replay my own arguments or discuss those that Stan has put forth, my purpose here is to show that our shared view, though it may now seem the minority opinion, has a long history. Besides a few members of the List who seem largely to have fallen silent, Stan and I are joined by a number of well-known and well-respected critics, including George Cloyne, F.W. Dupee, Alvin B. Kernan, Richard Rorty, Michael Wood, Robert M. Adams, Elizabeth Hardwick, and William Monroe.
But it’s mainly to William Monroe’s essay “Lords and Owners: Nabokov’s Sequestered Imagination” that I wish to call your attention.
I disagree with most of your arguments about the poem, but I think they're far stronger than Monroe's. If he was going to ignore so much of the conventional wisdom on poetry and so much of what Nabokov did in other poems, he could have at least said why.
In my 12/18/06 message, referred to above, I quoted with approval from R.W. Flynt’s 1957 review of Lolita in which he spoke of Nabokov’s “really fiendish, lyric delight in the bottom absurdity of things.” Flynt also praised VN’s Gogol book as “the best treatise on comedy that I know of.” The thing I miss in so much Nabokov scholarship is an appreciation of how funny my version of Pale Fire is in comparison to that of most of his recent critics,
I don't need to remind you what's one letter away from the comic.
But that is indeed a crucial point, and you won't be surprised if I say that 999 lines of intentionally bad poetry by someone who could do better doesn't tickle my funnybone. There's plenty of comically bad poetry in the world, starting with MacGonagall. Undoubtedly that different taste in humor is one reason for our different interpretations.
Nabokov could have written bad prose just as well or better, but as far as I know, he never did so at any length. (I hope someone will correct me if I'm wrong.) My feeling is that he couldn't stand it. He wouldn't even write much dialogue by people of normal conversational ability, at least in the novels I've read. So I doubt he could stand to write and publish so much intentionally bad verse.
especially the otherworlders.
It's pleasant (in an un-Nabokovian way) to know I'm following a school! If you don't mind, who are some of the others, beside Brian Boyd and Victoria Alexander? (In their books, Vladimir Alexandrov doesn't see much otherworldly in /Pale Fire/ and Don Johnson doesn't see many worlds in regression, as I recall.) I recently found an early sketch of the idea that the book points to a world above ours: Julian Moynahan (1971), /Vladimir Nabokov/, University of Minnesota Press, pp. 40–45.
http://books.google.com/books?id=Bqag980h9sUC&pg=RA1-PA41#v=onepage&q=&f=false
=====
So then, to come to the question behind all of this, what will it mean to us Shade-doubters if we're forced to accept that Nabokov didn't intend the poem to be funny? I can't speak for Stan or the others, but all it will mean for me is that Nabokov, by being less of a poet than he thought himself to be, wrote a far better novel than even he might have imagined.
| Search the archive | Contact the Editors | Visit "Nabokov Online Journal" |
| Visit Zembla | View Nabokv-L Policies | Manage subscription options |