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Re: [NABOKOV-L] Botkin, with a PS to "bimanist"
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RSGwynn: In reading these recent posts, I was reminded of The Prisoner of Zenda as a possible source of Kinbote's fantasies. Checking on this, I came across this exchange from five years ago: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/hornboyd.htm.
JM: How would the pair, Kinbote and Shade, appear in silhouette against the horizon when they went out on a stroll? Kinbote was tall, thin and agile, whereas chubby Shade was ponderous and maladroit. I don't recollect any description about how tall he was, otherwise I might imagine the pair as Don Quixote and Sancho Pança.
It seems to me that the word "baroque," in America, is mainly applied, depreciatively, as an adjective (it's been even used against Nabokov, by a few critics!). Such a pity because an entire world of volupty and carnivalesque contrasts disappears with its envelopping madcap irony. In Puritan England, as well, an attempt has been made to censor and subdue baroque excesses, when Alexander Pope's elegance is brought to the fore.*
A little search in the internet revealed an angry article about Nabokov's lectures on Don Quixote, emphasizing what the author considered as a couple of glaring similarities between Cervantes' work and Nabokov's novel, "Lolita.."
I selected two paragraphs to indicate, rashly and superficially, a line of investigation that might serve as a link between "Dom Quixote" and "Pale Fire." A ghostly influence which arises by some of the roles that were attributed to Charles Kinbote as the editor and commentator of Shade's poems. Kinbote's dellusional Zembla might have a dash of parody in connection to Nabokov's vision of Quixotesque ideals.
The author, Carolyn Kunce (such interesting initials) writes that Nabokov "laments Cervantes' failure to take advantage of this counterfeit Don Quixote: "How splendid it would have been if instead of that hasty and vague last encounter with the disguised Carrasco, who tumbles our knight in a jiffy, the real Don Quixote had fought his crucial battle with the false Don Quixote!" ( I couldn't help imagining CK,Shade and Gradus at their final meeting). Further on she adds: "Nabokov discusses the distancing effect of the "discovered manuscript"; he notes that "Cervantes invents from toe to turban, Cid Hamete Benengeli, Arab Historian . . . . Through this silk mask Cervantes will speak. A Spanish-speaking Moor, he says, translated the whole manuscript for him into Castilian in little more than a month and a half". Nabokov suggests that this narrative device of using a discovered and then translated manuscript supposedly "protects" Cervantes: "If any objection can be raised as to [the manuscript's] truth, it can only be because its author was an Arab, since lying is very common among those of that nation . . . it is the business and duty of historians to be exact, truthful, and wholly free from passion." **
Although the subject being examined then was not "Pale Fire," but "Lolita" and its foreword by John Ray Jr. and the afterword by Nabokov, Nabokov's employ of a "distancing effect" through Kinbote is roughly similar. In "Pale Fire" it might have come in handy to doubly disguise Nabokov's ambitions concerning the poem he's attributed to John Shade, for example. Kinbote's life in Zembla, in addition, is a complete reversal of the chivalrous deeds and ideals of courtly-love defended by Quixote.
...........................................................................................................................
* - A.Pope, An Essay on Criticism: lines 267/288: "Once on a time, La Mancha's knight, they say,/ A certain bard encount'ring on the way,/ Discours'd in terms as just, with looks as sage,/ As e'er could Dennis of the Grecian stage;/ Concluding all were desp'rate sots and fools,/ Who durst depart from Aristotle's rules./Our author, happy in a judge so nice,/Produc'd his play, and begg'd the knight's advice,/ Made him observe the subject and the plot,/ The manners, passions, unities, what not?/ All which, exact to rule, were brought about,/Were but a combat in the lists left out./"What! leave the combat out?" exclaims the knight;/"Yes, or we must renounce the Stagirite."/"Not so by Heav'n" (he answers in a rage)/"Knights, squires, and steeds, must enter on the stage."/ So vast a throng the stage can ne'er contain./"Then build a new, or act it in a plain." [...] Thus critics, of less judgment than caprice,/Curious not knowing, not exact but nice,/Form short ideas; and offend in arts/ (As most in manners) by a love to parts."
** - Excerpts from "Cruel and Crude": Nabokov Reading Cervantes Catherine Kunce /Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America 13.2 (1993): 93-104. Copyright © 1993, The Cervantes Society of America (the quotes must be evaluated in the context of the complete article, btw) ..
." Nabokov's posthumously published Lectures on Don Quixote divulges Nabokov's disregard of Cervantes' irony -the same trope Nabokov employs in Lolita. This essay* will explore Nabokov's idiosyncratic apprehension of Cervantes' style...While Nabokov criticizes Don Quixote, he simultaneously imitates Cervantes...The late Stephen Gilman...reminds us that Cervantes' "two supremely naive protagonists are used in order to illuminate ironically a society, swollen with self-importance, that refused to make a place for him despite his past heroism". Gilman places Cervantes in the larger tradition of the novel, concluding that "it was Fielding's conscious adaptation of Cervantine irony that opened the way to the future of the novel" . To the degree, then, that Nabokov refuses Cervantes his irony, he impugns the tenor of his own novels [...]In light of Lolita's frequent and sometimes graphic brutality, Nabokov's sanctimonious denunciation of violence in Don Quixote seems, at the very least, remarkable... Davenport speculates that "as [Nabokov] delivered these . . . lectures, part of his mind . . . must have been on a project concerning Courtly Love, its madness and follies, which would mature three years hence as Lolita" ... Although Davenport finds a number of parallels between the two novels -the "picaresque journey as the 'harmonizing intuition' of the two works" , the madness of both "heroes"- he dismisses any notion of direct influence: "Lolita is too logically a progression of Nabokovian themes (the other as self, the generative power of delusions, the interplay of sense and obsession) to have been influenced by a close and tedious reading of the Quixote". Davenport's conclusion is complex...[O]ne might ask, are not "the other as self," "the generative power of delusions," and "the interplay of sense and obsession," visibly Cervantine themes, too? Critics might fail to apprehend the writers' common thematic interests... Nabokov misses the fine irony that Don Quixote is "confessing" to a compoundedly "mad" mission that sustains some of Christianity's loftiest, presumably antiquated, ideals. By having Don Quixote "confess," Cervantes unmasks both a virtue behind insanity, and an insanity behind a "virtuous" society's exacting of such "confessions." ... Nabokov inadvertently discloses the effectiveness of the ending when he states that Don Quixote's recantation is the book's "saddest scene ...Just as Nabokov discredits the ending of Don Quixote, he deprecates Cervantes' attack upon the ruinous influence of the books of chivalry. Nabokov suspects, probably correctly, that "by 1605, the time of Don Quixote, the chivalry [sic] romances fad had almost faded away, and their decline had been noticeable for the last twenty or thirty years" ...Nabokov appears to believe Cervantes' main purpose was to warn the Spanish against the dangers of reading too many books of chivalry. The marvelous irony of the advice of Cervantes' "friend" in the prologue to Don Quixote is lost on Nabokov [...] Nabokov also laments Cervantes' failure to take advantage of this counterfeit Don Quixote: "How splendid it would have been if instead of that hasty and vague last encounter with the disguised Carrasco, who tumbles our knight in a jiffy, the real Don Quixote had fought his crucial battle with the false Don Quixote!" . Nabokov forgets that the "real" Don Quixote meets a character (Don Alvaro Tarfe) from the false novel and makes him visit a notary public to swear to his creator's ineptness. This metafictional encounter is far superior to a mere brawl... [ By HH's and Quilty's final confrontation, in "Lolita, he] pays an oblique homage to his predecessor, even as he complains of his lack of opportunism [...] Marilyn Joan Edelstein, who discusses the self-consciously rhetorical devices Cervantes employs in the prologues to both parts of Don Quixote, observes a functional similarity in Nabokov's fictional preface to Lolita and in Nabokov's own afterword, "On a Book Entitled Lolita." While Cervantes' ire about Avellaneda sparked the amusing but pointed "Prologue to the Reader" in Book II, Nabokov's irritation about charges of pornography in relation to Lolita instigated his own defense of his work. Nabokov's brilliantly ironic idea of a "defense" is as Cervantine as Cervantes' defense... The narrative structures of the two works also share a decided affinity. Nabokov discusses the distancing effect of the "discovered manuscript"; he notes that "Cervantes invents from toe to turban, Cid Hamete Benengeli, Arab Historian . . . . Through this silk mask Cervantes will speak. A Spanish-speaking Moor, he says, translated the whole manuscript for him into Castilian in little more than a month and a half". Nabokov suggests that this narrative device of using a discovered and then translated manuscript supposedly "protects" Cervantes: "If any objection can be raised as to [the manuscript's] truth, it can only be because its author was an Arab, since lying is very common among those of that nation . . . it is the business and duty of historians to be exact, truthful, and wholly free from passion" ... Out of Nabokov's legendary hatred of psychoanalysis and of Freud, Humbert becomes the Nabokovian counterpart to Cervantes' Cid Hamete Benengeli (all madmen are "liars," like Arabs); "Psychologist" Clarence Choate Clark, Esq. becomes the "hasty" translator of Humbert's text; and John Ray, Jr., Ph.D., custodian of the text, becomes the "real" author, Nabokov himself... Nabokov's ironic condemnation of Cervantes ultimately extends beyond the framework of fiction and into the purview of criticism. Nabokov's scathing indictment of Don Quixote is echoed in critics' analyses of Lolita shortly after publication. .. the final words in Alfred Appel, Jr.'s comments on The Annotated Lolita could, with surprisingly little revision, apply to Don Quixote: "[This 're-nonsense'] sounds from the depths of Vladimir Nabokov's profoundly human comic vision, and the gusto of Humbert's narration, his punning language, his abundant delight in digressions, parodies, and games all attest to a comic vision that overrides the circumscribing sadness, absurdity, and terror of everyday life." The very nature of this essay is quixotic...The most we can hope for is that an index will rightfully link the servant with the master. One can, indeed, speculate about the implications of such a linkage...
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JM: How would the pair, Kinbote and Shade, appear in silhouette against the horizon when they went out on a stroll? Kinbote was tall, thin and agile, whereas chubby Shade was ponderous and maladroit. I don't recollect any description about how tall he was, otherwise I might imagine the pair as Don Quixote and Sancho Pança.
It seems to me that the word "baroque," in America, is mainly applied, depreciatively, as an adjective (it's been even used against Nabokov, by a few critics!). Such a pity because an entire world of volupty and carnivalesque contrasts disappears with its envelopping madcap irony. In Puritan England, as well, an attempt has been made to censor and subdue baroque excesses, when Alexander Pope's elegance is brought to the fore.*
A little search in the internet revealed an angry article about Nabokov's lectures on Don Quixote, emphasizing what the author considered as a couple of glaring similarities between Cervantes' work and Nabokov's novel, "Lolita.."
I selected two paragraphs to indicate, rashly and superficially, a line of investigation that might serve as a link between "Dom Quixote" and "Pale Fire." A ghostly influence which arises by some of the roles that were attributed to Charles Kinbote as the editor and commentator of Shade's poems. Kinbote's dellusional Zembla might have a dash of parody in connection to Nabokov's vision of Quixotesque ideals.
The author, Carolyn Kunce (such interesting initials) writes that Nabokov "laments Cervantes' failure to take advantage of this counterfeit Don Quixote: "How splendid it would have been if instead of that hasty and vague last encounter with the disguised Carrasco, who tumbles our knight in a jiffy, the real Don Quixote had fought his crucial battle with the false Don Quixote!" ( I couldn't help imagining CK,Shade and Gradus at their final meeting). Further on she adds: "Nabokov discusses the distancing effect of the "discovered manuscript"; he notes that "Cervantes invents from toe to turban, Cid Hamete Benengeli, Arab Historian . . . . Through this silk mask Cervantes will speak. A Spanish-speaking Moor, he says, translated the whole manuscript for him into Castilian in little more than a month and a half". Nabokov suggests that this narrative device of using a discovered and then translated manuscript supposedly "protects" Cervantes: "If any objection can be raised as to [the manuscript's] truth, it can only be because its author was an Arab, since lying is very common among those of that nation . . . it is the business and duty of historians to be exact, truthful, and wholly free from passion." **
Although the subject being examined then was not "Pale Fire," but "Lolita" and its foreword by John Ray Jr. and the afterword by Nabokov, Nabokov's employ of a "distancing effect" through Kinbote is roughly similar. In "Pale Fire" it might have come in handy to doubly disguise Nabokov's ambitions concerning the poem he's attributed to John Shade, for example. Kinbote's life in Zembla, in addition, is a complete reversal of the chivalrous deeds and ideals of courtly-love defended by Quixote.
...........................................................................................................................
* - A.Pope, An Essay on Criticism: lines 267/288: "Once on a time, La Mancha's knight, they say,/ A certain bard encount'ring on the way,/ Discours'd in terms as just, with looks as sage,/ As e'er could Dennis of the Grecian stage;/ Concluding all were desp'rate sots and fools,/ Who durst depart from Aristotle's rules./Our author, happy in a judge so nice,/Produc'd his play, and begg'd the knight's advice,/ Made him observe the subject and the plot,/ The manners, passions, unities, what not?/ All which, exact to rule, were brought about,/Were but a combat in the lists left out./"What! leave the combat out?" exclaims the knight;/"Yes, or we must renounce the Stagirite."/"Not so by Heav'n" (he answers in a rage)/"Knights, squires, and steeds, must enter on the stage."/ So vast a throng the stage can ne'er contain./"Then build a new, or act it in a plain." [...] Thus critics, of less judgment than caprice,/Curious not knowing, not exact but nice,/Form short ideas; and offend in arts/ (As most in manners) by a love to parts."
** - Excerpts from "Cruel and Crude": Nabokov Reading Cervantes Catherine Kunce /Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America 13.2 (1993): 93-104. Copyright © 1993, The Cervantes Society of America (the quotes must be evaluated in the context of the complete article, btw) ..
." Nabokov's posthumously published Lectures on Don Quixote divulges Nabokov's disregard of Cervantes' irony -the same trope Nabokov employs in Lolita. This essay* will explore Nabokov's idiosyncratic apprehension of Cervantes' style...While Nabokov criticizes Don Quixote, he simultaneously imitates Cervantes...The late Stephen Gilman...reminds us that Cervantes' "two supremely naive protagonists are used in order to illuminate ironically a society, swollen with self-importance, that refused to make a place for him despite his past heroism". Gilman places Cervantes in the larger tradition of the novel, concluding that "it was Fielding's conscious adaptation of Cervantine irony that opened the way to the future of the novel" . To the degree, then, that Nabokov refuses Cervantes his irony, he impugns the tenor of his own novels [...]In light of Lolita's frequent and sometimes graphic brutality, Nabokov's sanctimonious denunciation of violence in Don Quixote seems, at the very least, remarkable... Davenport speculates that "as [Nabokov] delivered these . . . lectures, part of his mind . . . must have been on a project concerning Courtly Love, its madness and follies, which would mature three years hence as Lolita" ... Although Davenport finds a number of parallels between the two novels -the "picaresque journey as the 'harmonizing intuition' of the two works" , the madness of both "heroes"- he dismisses any notion of direct influence: "Lolita is too logically a progression of Nabokovian themes (the other as self, the generative power of delusions, the interplay of sense and obsession) to have been influenced by a close and tedious reading of the Quixote". Davenport's conclusion is complex...[O]ne might ask, are not "the other as self," "the generative power of delusions," and "the interplay of sense and obsession," visibly Cervantine themes, too? Critics might fail to apprehend the writers' common thematic interests... Nabokov misses the fine irony that Don Quixote is "confessing" to a compoundedly "mad" mission that sustains some of Christianity's loftiest, presumably antiquated, ideals. By having Don Quixote "confess," Cervantes unmasks both a virtue behind insanity, and an insanity behind a "virtuous" society's exacting of such "confessions." ... Nabokov inadvertently discloses the effectiveness of the ending when he states that Don Quixote's recantation is the book's "saddest scene ...Just as Nabokov discredits the ending of Don Quixote, he deprecates Cervantes' attack upon the ruinous influence of the books of chivalry. Nabokov suspects, probably correctly, that "by 1605, the time of Don Quixote, the chivalry [sic] romances fad had almost faded away, and their decline had been noticeable for the last twenty or thirty years" ...Nabokov appears to believe Cervantes' main purpose was to warn the Spanish against the dangers of reading too many books of chivalry. The marvelous irony of the advice of Cervantes' "friend" in the prologue to Don Quixote is lost on Nabokov [...] Nabokov also laments Cervantes' failure to take advantage of this counterfeit Don Quixote: "How splendid it would have been if instead of that hasty and vague last encounter with the disguised Carrasco, who tumbles our knight in a jiffy, the real Don Quixote had fought his crucial battle with the false Don Quixote!" . Nabokov forgets that the "real" Don Quixote meets a character (Don Alvaro Tarfe) from the false novel and makes him visit a notary public to swear to his creator's ineptness. This metafictional encounter is far superior to a mere brawl... [ By HH's and Quilty's final confrontation, in "Lolita, he] pays an oblique homage to his predecessor, even as he complains of his lack of opportunism [...] Marilyn Joan Edelstein, who discusses the self-consciously rhetorical devices Cervantes employs in the prologues to both parts of Don Quixote, observes a functional similarity in Nabokov's fictional preface to Lolita and in Nabokov's own afterword, "On a Book Entitled Lolita." While Cervantes' ire about Avellaneda sparked the amusing but pointed "Prologue to the Reader" in Book II, Nabokov's irritation about charges of pornography in relation to Lolita instigated his own defense of his work. Nabokov's brilliantly ironic idea of a "defense" is as Cervantine as Cervantes' defense... The narrative structures of the two works also share a decided affinity. Nabokov discusses the distancing effect of the "discovered manuscript"; he notes that "Cervantes invents from toe to turban, Cid Hamete Benengeli, Arab Historian . . . . Through this silk mask Cervantes will speak. A Spanish-speaking Moor, he says, translated the whole manuscript for him into Castilian in little more than a month and a half". Nabokov suggests that this narrative device of using a discovered and then translated manuscript supposedly "protects" Cervantes: "If any objection can be raised as to [the manuscript's] truth, it can only be because its author was an Arab, since lying is very common among those of that nation . . . it is the business and duty of historians to be exact, truthful, and wholly free from passion" ... Out of Nabokov's legendary hatred of psychoanalysis and of Freud, Humbert becomes the Nabokovian counterpart to Cervantes' Cid Hamete Benengeli (all madmen are "liars," like Arabs); "Psychologist" Clarence Choate Clark, Esq. becomes the "hasty" translator of Humbert's text; and John Ray, Jr., Ph.D., custodian of the text, becomes the "real" author, Nabokov himself... Nabokov's ironic condemnation of Cervantes ultimately extends beyond the framework of fiction and into the purview of criticism. Nabokov's scathing indictment of Don Quixote is echoed in critics' analyses of Lolita shortly after publication. .. the final words in Alfred Appel, Jr.'s comments on The Annotated Lolita could, with surprisingly little revision, apply to Don Quixote: "[This 're-nonsense'] sounds from the depths of Vladimir Nabokov's profoundly human comic vision, and the gusto of Humbert's narration, his punning language, his abundant delight in digressions, parodies, and games all attest to a comic vision that overrides the circumscribing sadness, absurdity, and terror of everyday life." The very nature of this essay is quixotic...The most we can hope for is that an index will rightfully link the servant with the master. One can, indeed, speculate about the implications of such a linkage...
Search archive with Google:
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