Subject
Re: THOUGHTS: VN's Self-Reference in Pale Fire
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Date
Body
James Twiggs sends to Simon Roberry: http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~wcd/palenarr.htm)http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~wcd/palenarr.htm ( April 21, 2010 7:48:43 PM)
JM: A body of assembled texts, including works written over the centuries by various narrators, may form a collection which then becomes a unity, often a sacred book.
It imparts a sense of unity and identity to a human collection of people and it provides an ideal or a model hero as, on a secular plane, we encounter in ancient epics. Sometimes the unifying element relies solely on the author's name heading his own "collected works" and this, apparently easy, achievement may bring about a new set of problems: who was Homer? Who was Shakespeare? Who wrote "The Song of Prince Igor"?
We can rest assured that Sirin and Nabokov are the same person, but are they the same author? And what about Vladimir Nabokov's "unreliable narrators": how are his readers expected to envision them among Nabokov's various personae? Up to now it seems to me that this search concerning "the real life of Vladimir Nabokov" is split, too. There are those who inquire into his "real life" by researching his writings and referring them to facts about his objective life and history (a privilege that is denied to those who want to know more about Homer, or Jesus).
There are others who concentrate their efforts in identifying a single voice which emerges from his words:Was Nabokov a kind and generous person, some demand to know.* Others investigate his passage from the Russian into the American-English; his "fifth arc"; his literary memoirs; his style...
After I started to read the review James Twiggs sent to the list ( William C.Dowling in "Who's the Narrator of Nabokov's Pale Fire?") my curiosity moved from my -until now - futile questionings about "Who is the author that guarantees the unity of 'Vladimir Nabokov's Collected Works'," onto "Who is the Real Narrator...of Pale Fire."**
( Perhaps a "Collection of Narrator's voices, assembled under the signature of V.Nabokov" may become an interesting project and even entitled to a celebratory date for their "multiversaries". Most probably, though, they'll end up as another paper-chase which yields no indication nor acquires any special "meaning.")
......................................................................................................................................
* - From a recent exchange in the Nab-List:
Carolyn Kunin: "...although I know Dmitri and Brian Boyd like to harp on VN's virtues, awareness of a single act of loving-kindness escapes me. Waiting (and this time hoping) to be proved wrong as usual..."
Anthony Stadlen: "Into one of his American homes, did not a strange cat (or was it a small dog?) enter, and VN kindly fed it, or approved of Vera feeding it, and also allowed it to explore the house? (Recall his saying approvingly that Mr Bloom speaks charmingly to his cat in the scene in "Ulysses" that VN calls one of the greatest passages in all literature.) Also, he was a generous tipper in the Montreux hotel, and the staff were protective and fond of him. But no doubt Dmitri and Brian Boyd can supply many more impressive examples."
There is also a surprising (for me) material available from "The Slate" on-line , in April 1999 [ James Wood & Richard Lamb http://www.slate.com/id/2000072/entry/1002648/ ], constituted by eight exchanges which I superficially abridged here, risking a severe distortion that may be corrected by going directly to the URL which, once again, was sent by James Twiggs.
(Abridged excerpts):
James Woods: Perhaps most readers have this rather mottled experience in reading Nabokov; we tend to select from that gorgeous prose what we like, as if playing only the white notes on the piano, and benignly pass over what seems precious, fussy, cold, and sometimes didactic...Nabokov's aestheticism of detail--a kind of religion of retrieval, in which the writer must hoard and worship the tiniest noticings, for fear that they will disappear--is related to his own lost childhood... it was natural that Nabokov should so fiercely clutch at this invented Eden, given the historical eruptions that shattered his life, and then we proceed to notice that the entire edifice of his work is tremblingly built on this beautiful Freudian denial--on Nabokov's very Freudian refusal to admit to his own Freudianism. [Nabokov's] nery precision of language is deliciously pedantic....art does truly triumph over history, and style over content. Yes, at moments likes this, Nabokov is a master of the most beautiful pedantry, the only one that, artistically speaking, counts. [...] Nabokov is a kind of detective of his own childhood, and turns us, his readers, into private eyes, hermeneuts of the invisible. (This code-cracking quality is sometimes enthralling and sometimes irritating...)Somebody's future recollection might stand as a motto for all of Nabokov's work, particularly its sense of fragility: for what you now visually possess may tomorrow be only an invisible recollection. Unsurprisingly, it is in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, his first novel in English, that we feel the greatest pathos of loss...The character, Sebastan Knight, is the author of a book called, of all things, Lost Property, in which he writes: It has always distressed me that people in restaurants never notice the animated mysteries... Now, this Nabokov, who told his students to "caress the divine details," can be too pious for me, and indeed a bit empty: We don't always save the world simply by noticing things. Clearly, then, there is noticing and noticing, and Nabokov's kind of noticing too easily slides into a fetishism of the visual.[...] I evade this frustration [ with Nabokov as an autobiographer] by converting Speak, Memory out of the category of confession and into the realm of artistic lie...My difficulties with Nabokov are aesthetic--though of course, the aesthetic is the human... Criticism celebrates Nabokov's aestheticism as the most refined moral warning against the dangers of that very same aestheticism. Nevertheless, people like Brian Boyd and Richard Rorty ... are so concerned to find the humane in Nabokov that Nabokov's aestheticism can do no wrong, and is never found to be inhumane....I'm inclined to find fault with Nabokov, while cherishing him for all his lusters... I feel, paradoxically, that Nabokov is neither wholly humane nor wholly sterile. Speaking artistically, I used to love Nabokov's variant of Shklovsky's technique, "making it strange." But Nabokov's brilliance in this regard has had an overpowering, and not always very fruitful, influence on two or three generations after him. First, it has incarnated the idea--for which Flaubert is ultimately, if complicatedly, responsible--that detail is above all visual, that the writer scans the world with his brilliant eye, and then uses that eye to turn the world into riddling metaphor... Second, both in practice and in teaching ("caress the divine details"), Nabokov imparts the idea that fictional narrative is, at its highest moments, a string of such details, a convoy of little visual perfections (again, Flaubert is to blame here, too).Third, and consequently, the Nabokovian idea of cherished detail and stuffed perfection is too artistic an idea for a form that must surrender itself to the freedom of its characters. For characters are generally not artistic at all, are they? In this respect, novels are not like poems, and it is wrongheaded to try to turn them into poems. We do not read novels to feel the constant artistic control of the author, but to share in the wayward, inartistic freedom of created human beings. Nabokov was dismissive of Chekhov's "prosaicisms," but the wonder of Chekhov's similes and metaphors is that they are not, in this sense, "artistic" at all, but are the kinds of connections that ordinary people--i.e. Chekhov's characters--might make. Chekhov's involves the surrendering of the "artistic" while, of course, retaining final artistic control; Nabokov's involves the mere assertion of artistic control. After several hours of effort we might well come up with, in our study, "asphalt's parakeet." But you have to know a community to let a character hear "an expensive-sounding accordion." That takes a lifetime. If Nabokov feels such pity, why is it such a delicious little "quiver"? --one needs more human evocation, more ordinary sympathy, more evidence, than Nabokov provides, before one simply believes him just because he tells us he feels it. If Lenski really existed, as a created character, then we might believe in Nabokov's feelings. But Lenski is just a counter, to be moved about on the artistic board. He is a pattern. As you suggested yesterday, Nabokov is at his best when "crystalline and cartoonish." That's not enough for me, nor for you, I suspect.[...] After the age of 23 or so, perhaps we are all recovering from an earlier infatuation with Nabokov's work... The old fire of infatuation may now only be a torch of admiration, but what an awful lot there is to admire! Such beauty ("the mobile shade of the trees"), and many, many moments of real sympathy. At his best, despite all my strictures, Nabokov is able to wring great pathos from the delicate games he plays.... Nabokov describes Sirin's career, beginning in 1925 (the date of Nabokov's first novel), "until he vanished as strangely as he had come," and then writes that: "Across the dark sky of exile, Sirin passed, to use a simile of a more conservative nature, like a meteor, and disappeared, leaving nothing much else behind him than a vague sense of uneasiness." It is impossible not to be moved by this. It is not merely a game; or rather, it is a game of high beauty. Remember that Nabokov wrote this passage in English, in America, in 1950, having left Europe ten years before. So, it is an elegy for a lost self, a Nabokov who was once called Sirin and who once wrote in Russian, and who did truly vanish "as strangely as he had come." But there is a further delicacy. When Nabokov wrote these words, he was an obscure American writer, still making his way in American letters. ...So, when Nabokov wrote those words, he was not playing quite the game of recognition he seems to be playing now. Most of his readers will not have got the joke, and Nabokov knew this.
Richard Lamb: None of the books, except perhaps parts of The Gift, which is ravishing as you say, and possibly Lolita, uses the lineaments of personal connection to unfold. Instead, each is full of human information gleaned from objects, documents, phenomena. These are closely examined until they yield up a sort of quiddity or presiding spirit that our hero may draw conclusions from and proceed, still perplexed. Meanwhile, Nabokov--as has been observed--has a way of seeming to conspire with you over the predicament of these unfortunates. Thus you have the bright pleasure of a sort of reverse Schadenfreude . Yet there is an overarching pathos, for these assorted predicaments are all much too close to the bone, they are closer to your predicament than you would care to admit, and I imagine they were closer to Nabokov's (that impulse to puzzle out the anguish).[...] it is here, in the tension between familiarity and strangeness that the book....becomes merely wonderful, rather than great? Strangeness was Nabokov's stock in trade. He was a master--the master--of a technique in Russian fiction called ostranenie: making strange. He cultivated the habit of seeing the world anew, from cars, to puddles, to people, to countries. Nabokov's best images...cartoonish and crystalline, dynamic and static at the same time: Freud would have said "uncanny."The most maddening thing about Speak, Memory, though, if I may usher in the baleful Viennese ..., is the author's failing to see the object of object relations. He seems oblivious to emotional give and take. Usually Nabokov manages through various sleights of voice to elude this problem to some extent...I could not help but think as I read Speak, Memory, that it exhibits, as do all of the works, a sort of virtuoso autism. [...] The case of Anna Karenina bears on our discussion. If appreciating the book had anything, actually, to do with the interior decoration of the Imperial Railroad System, Tolstoy would be an unfamiliar name. More important is a moment such as that which takes place when Anna debouches from her sleeping car, having gathered up her red handbag and perhaps taken leave of the stout lady. At the station she meets Karenin and realizes--I can't remember whether it's an offending hat or a new haircut that prompts this--that she no longer loves her husband. As for Rorty's attempt to find the humane in Nabokov, it seems pointless, but I suppose there is no other way to appreciate him from a Pragmatist standpoint.[...] You were right, early on, to call Nabokov "the last living embodiment of Valéry-fed, fin de siècle aestheticism." Mary McCarthy, in her review of Pale Fire, called him the last dandy novelist (that was before the new crop)...An equally stringent, equally 19th-century scientific empiricism might be added to the mix. Nabokov himself practiced a sort of serial ekphrasis, and the fact that we affect what we observe does not produce enough cause and effect to power a novel in most hands. He is irresistable, though. He has the mysterious charisma he called "shamanstvo." The result is the contagion you have alluded to, and perhaps that's what I was really writing yesterday, a hasty fable on the--avoided--subject of contagion... A story, like Gogol's, about a man whose nose leaves him is not necessarily funny in broad concept. What is funny is the horrifying, mundane, human bewilderment of the noseless man recognizing that lost organ at a party and not being able to claim it because the nose has become a privy councilor and outranks him. Nabokov repeatedly manages this wry and wonderful trick, maybe because he had himself lost his beloved Russian nose and, as history trumps the individual, he could not have it back. His nose outranked him. Exasperation aside, Nabokov is, I think, the best writer of the century who can be read for sheer pleasure: Lolita, Pale Fire, but also The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Pnin, and maybe Bend Sinister...
** (excerpts)
Almost since the moment Nabokov's Pale Fire was published, readers have been engaged in a complex argument about who the "real" narrator of the story is.
(1) The real narrator is the person corresponding to John Shade, who does not really die but composes a work in which he makes his own death an incident so that he can go on and compose a commentary to his own completed poem: "Man's life as commentary to abstruse / Unfinished poem."
(2) The real narrator is the person corresponding to Kinbote (Botkin), who writes a poem and imagines the death of the poet so as to have an excuse to tell the story he is really interested in -- the magical tale of his lost kingdom of Zembla and his escape and exile.
(3) there really are two narrators in Pale Fire, one corresponding to Shade, one to Kinbote.In "Nabokov's Pale Fire: The Magic of Artistic Discovery," Brian Boyd presents his "two narrator" solution. in a poem and commentary much concerned with the life of consciousness in "another realm" after physical death...the ghosts of both Hazel Shade and John Shade exert pressure on the narrative at various points, sending "coded" messages that account for the resonances and reverberations between the poem and commentary.
(4) I think that John Shade and Kinbote are creations of a narrator resembling Vladimir Nabokov, and that this narrator "shows himself" at a certain crucial point ...I don't mean that the narrator corresponds in any sense to the "real" Vladimir Nabokov...Nabokov when he was alive believed in art as something like the ultimate reality. If he explicitly survived in his art as "Nabokov" -- as he does, for instance, as the narrator of the novel Pnin, where he appears as rather an unpleasant character -- it would have to be as a presence IN the story: ...
...the Nabokov-like narrator is telling the story as a voice that, if it survives, will have exactly the same status as John Shade and Kinbote...the Nabokov-like narrator is saying something like this: "A work of art originates in the consciousness of a creator, but it does so in a manner of speaking 'from the outside' ." This is what the ancient invocation of the Muses was about... When the creator has finished a work of art, he's still present in the world, but there is this 'other him' that is caught forever in the words of the work that has come to birth through him." ... There is are consciousnesses in the world that belong to literary geniuses like Shakespeare, Puskin, and Nabokov. But when the "real" Nabokov who escaped from Russia and came to the United States begins work on Pale Fire, his consciousness "passes into" John Shade and becomes, for the nonce, the American poet who writes Pale Fire. Then this same consciousness "passes into" Kinbote and becomes, for the nonce, the mad commentator of Pale Fire. Then, as this consciousness leaves Kinbote, it briefly shows itself as a "third consciousness" identical neither with Shade nor Kinbote. The end of the "passing through" period -- what involves consciousness passing on and leaving the completed work behind -- is in each case represented as a death. For John Shade, it is getting killed by the bullet of an assassin....the "third narrator," it is the spectre that briefly appears at the very end of the book -- "a bigger, more respectable, more competent Gradus"
The moment at which I see Shade "dying" and Kinbote coming into existence as a narrator is, therefore, the moment of Gradus's assassination attempt...watch carefully and you'll see the "transmigration of consciousness" from one narrator to the next as the manuscript of the poem Pale Fire passes from poet to commentator: I instinctively backed, bellowing and spreading my great strong arms (with my left hand still holding the poem) in an effort to halt the advancing madman and shield John, whom I feared he might, quite accidentally, hit. . . . I felt -- I still feel -- John's hand fumbling at mine, seeking my fingertips, finding them, only to abandon them at once as if passing to me, in a sublime relay race, the baton of life. For the evidence for Dowling's reading, please consult his article directly (Copyright (c) 2003 by William C. Dowling)
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JM: A body of assembled texts, including works written over the centuries by various narrators, may form a collection which then becomes a unity, often a sacred book.
It imparts a sense of unity and identity to a human collection of people and it provides an ideal or a model hero as, on a secular plane, we encounter in ancient epics. Sometimes the unifying element relies solely on the author's name heading his own "collected works" and this, apparently easy, achievement may bring about a new set of problems: who was Homer? Who was Shakespeare? Who wrote "The Song of Prince Igor"?
We can rest assured that Sirin and Nabokov are the same person, but are they the same author? And what about Vladimir Nabokov's "unreliable narrators": how are his readers expected to envision them among Nabokov's various personae? Up to now it seems to me that this search concerning "the real life of Vladimir Nabokov" is split, too. There are those who inquire into his "real life" by researching his writings and referring them to facts about his objective life and history (a privilege that is denied to those who want to know more about Homer, or Jesus).
There are others who concentrate their efforts in identifying a single voice which emerges from his words:Was Nabokov a kind and generous person, some demand to know.* Others investigate his passage from the Russian into the American-English; his "fifth arc"; his literary memoirs; his style...
After I started to read the review James Twiggs sent to the list ( William C.Dowling in "Who's the Narrator of Nabokov's Pale Fire?") my curiosity moved from my -until now - futile questionings about "Who is the author that guarantees the unity of 'Vladimir Nabokov's Collected Works'," onto "Who is the Real Narrator...of Pale Fire."**
( Perhaps a "Collection of Narrator's voices, assembled under the signature of V.Nabokov" may become an interesting project and even entitled to a celebratory date for their "multiversaries". Most probably, though, they'll end up as another paper-chase which yields no indication nor acquires any special "meaning.")
......................................................................................................................................
* - From a recent exchange in the Nab-List:
Carolyn Kunin: "...although I know Dmitri and Brian Boyd like to harp on VN's virtues, awareness of a single act of loving-kindness escapes me. Waiting (and this time hoping) to be proved wrong as usual..."
Anthony Stadlen: "Into one of his American homes, did not a strange cat (or was it a small dog?) enter, and VN kindly fed it, or approved of Vera feeding it, and also allowed it to explore the house? (Recall his saying approvingly that Mr Bloom speaks charmingly to his cat in the scene in "Ulysses" that VN calls one of the greatest passages in all literature.) Also, he was a generous tipper in the Montreux hotel, and the staff were protective and fond of him. But no doubt Dmitri and Brian Boyd can supply many more impressive examples."
There is also a surprising (for me) material available from "The Slate" on-line , in April 1999 [ James Wood & Richard Lamb http://www.slate.com/id/2000072/entry/1002648/ ], constituted by eight exchanges which I superficially abridged here, risking a severe distortion that may be corrected by going directly to the URL which, once again, was sent by James Twiggs.
(Abridged excerpts):
James Woods: Perhaps most readers have this rather mottled experience in reading Nabokov; we tend to select from that gorgeous prose what we like, as if playing only the white notes on the piano, and benignly pass over what seems precious, fussy, cold, and sometimes didactic...Nabokov's aestheticism of detail--a kind of religion of retrieval, in which the writer must hoard and worship the tiniest noticings, for fear that they will disappear--is related to his own lost childhood... it was natural that Nabokov should so fiercely clutch at this invented Eden, given the historical eruptions that shattered his life, and then we proceed to notice that the entire edifice of his work is tremblingly built on this beautiful Freudian denial--on Nabokov's very Freudian refusal to admit to his own Freudianism. [Nabokov's] nery precision of language is deliciously pedantic....art does truly triumph over history, and style over content. Yes, at moments likes this, Nabokov is a master of the most beautiful pedantry, the only one that, artistically speaking, counts. [...] Nabokov is a kind of detective of his own childhood, and turns us, his readers, into private eyes, hermeneuts of the invisible. (This code-cracking quality is sometimes enthralling and sometimes irritating...)Somebody's future recollection might stand as a motto for all of Nabokov's work, particularly its sense of fragility: for what you now visually possess may tomorrow be only an invisible recollection. Unsurprisingly, it is in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, his first novel in English, that we feel the greatest pathos of loss...The character, Sebastan Knight, is the author of a book called, of all things, Lost Property, in which he writes: It has always distressed me that people in restaurants never notice the animated mysteries... Now, this Nabokov, who told his students to "caress the divine details," can be too pious for me, and indeed a bit empty: We don't always save the world simply by noticing things. Clearly, then, there is noticing and noticing, and Nabokov's kind of noticing too easily slides into a fetishism of the visual.[...] I evade this frustration [ with Nabokov as an autobiographer] by converting Speak, Memory out of the category of confession and into the realm of artistic lie...My difficulties with Nabokov are aesthetic--though of course, the aesthetic is the human... Criticism celebrates Nabokov's aestheticism as the most refined moral warning against the dangers of that very same aestheticism. Nevertheless, people like Brian Boyd and Richard Rorty ... are so concerned to find the humane in Nabokov that Nabokov's aestheticism can do no wrong, and is never found to be inhumane....I'm inclined to find fault with Nabokov, while cherishing him for all his lusters... I feel, paradoxically, that Nabokov is neither wholly humane nor wholly sterile. Speaking artistically, I used to love Nabokov's variant of Shklovsky's technique, "making it strange." But Nabokov's brilliance in this regard has had an overpowering, and not always very fruitful, influence on two or three generations after him. First, it has incarnated the idea--for which Flaubert is ultimately, if complicatedly, responsible--that detail is above all visual, that the writer scans the world with his brilliant eye, and then uses that eye to turn the world into riddling metaphor... Second, both in practice and in teaching ("caress the divine details"), Nabokov imparts the idea that fictional narrative is, at its highest moments, a string of such details, a convoy of little visual perfections (again, Flaubert is to blame here, too).Third, and consequently, the Nabokovian idea of cherished detail and stuffed perfection is too artistic an idea for a form that must surrender itself to the freedom of its characters. For characters are generally not artistic at all, are they? In this respect, novels are not like poems, and it is wrongheaded to try to turn them into poems. We do not read novels to feel the constant artistic control of the author, but to share in the wayward, inartistic freedom of created human beings. Nabokov was dismissive of Chekhov's "prosaicisms," but the wonder of Chekhov's similes and metaphors is that they are not, in this sense, "artistic" at all, but are the kinds of connections that ordinary people--i.e. Chekhov's characters--might make. Chekhov's involves the surrendering of the "artistic" while, of course, retaining final artistic control; Nabokov's involves the mere assertion of artistic control. After several hours of effort we might well come up with, in our study, "asphalt's parakeet." But you have to know a community to let a character hear "an expensive-sounding accordion." That takes a lifetime. If Nabokov feels such pity, why is it such a delicious little "quiver"? --one needs more human evocation, more ordinary sympathy, more evidence, than Nabokov provides, before one simply believes him just because he tells us he feels it. If Lenski really existed, as a created character, then we might believe in Nabokov's feelings. But Lenski is just a counter, to be moved about on the artistic board. He is a pattern. As you suggested yesterday, Nabokov is at his best when "crystalline and cartoonish." That's not enough for me, nor for you, I suspect.[...] After the age of 23 or so, perhaps we are all recovering from an earlier infatuation with Nabokov's work... The old fire of infatuation may now only be a torch of admiration, but what an awful lot there is to admire! Such beauty ("the mobile shade of the trees"), and many, many moments of real sympathy. At his best, despite all my strictures, Nabokov is able to wring great pathos from the delicate games he plays.... Nabokov describes Sirin's career, beginning in 1925 (the date of Nabokov's first novel), "until he vanished as strangely as he had come," and then writes that: "Across the dark sky of exile, Sirin passed, to use a simile of a more conservative nature, like a meteor, and disappeared, leaving nothing much else behind him than a vague sense of uneasiness." It is impossible not to be moved by this. It is not merely a game; or rather, it is a game of high beauty. Remember that Nabokov wrote this passage in English, in America, in 1950, having left Europe ten years before. So, it is an elegy for a lost self, a Nabokov who was once called Sirin and who once wrote in Russian, and who did truly vanish "as strangely as he had come." But there is a further delicacy. When Nabokov wrote these words, he was an obscure American writer, still making his way in American letters. ...So, when Nabokov wrote those words, he was not playing quite the game of recognition he seems to be playing now. Most of his readers will not have got the joke, and Nabokov knew this.
Richard Lamb: None of the books, except perhaps parts of The Gift, which is ravishing as you say, and possibly Lolita, uses the lineaments of personal connection to unfold. Instead, each is full of human information gleaned from objects, documents, phenomena. These are closely examined until they yield up a sort of quiddity or presiding spirit that our hero may draw conclusions from and proceed, still perplexed. Meanwhile, Nabokov--as has been observed--has a way of seeming to conspire with you over the predicament of these unfortunates. Thus you have the bright pleasure of a sort of reverse Schadenfreude . Yet there is an overarching pathos, for these assorted predicaments are all much too close to the bone, they are closer to your predicament than you would care to admit, and I imagine they were closer to Nabokov's (that impulse to puzzle out the anguish).[...] it is here, in the tension between familiarity and strangeness that the book....becomes merely wonderful, rather than great? Strangeness was Nabokov's stock in trade. He was a master--the master--of a technique in Russian fiction called ostranenie: making strange. He cultivated the habit of seeing the world anew, from cars, to puddles, to people, to countries. Nabokov's best images...cartoonish and crystalline, dynamic and static at the same time: Freud would have said "uncanny."The most maddening thing about Speak, Memory, though, if I may usher in the baleful Viennese ..., is the author's failing to see the object of object relations. He seems oblivious to emotional give and take. Usually Nabokov manages through various sleights of voice to elude this problem to some extent...I could not help but think as I read Speak, Memory, that it exhibits, as do all of the works, a sort of virtuoso autism. [...] The case of Anna Karenina bears on our discussion. If appreciating the book had anything, actually, to do with the interior decoration of the Imperial Railroad System, Tolstoy would be an unfamiliar name. More important is a moment such as that which takes place when Anna debouches from her sleeping car, having gathered up her red handbag and perhaps taken leave of the stout lady. At the station she meets Karenin and realizes--I can't remember whether it's an offending hat or a new haircut that prompts this--that she no longer loves her husband. As for Rorty's attempt to find the humane in Nabokov, it seems pointless, but I suppose there is no other way to appreciate him from a Pragmatist standpoint.[...] You were right, early on, to call Nabokov "the last living embodiment of Valéry-fed, fin de siècle aestheticism." Mary McCarthy, in her review of Pale Fire, called him the last dandy novelist (that was before the new crop)...An equally stringent, equally 19th-century scientific empiricism might be added to the mix. Nabokov himself practiced a sort of serial ekphrasis, and the fact that we affect what we observe does not produce enough cause and effect to power a novel in most hands. He is irresistable, though. He has the mysterious charisma he called "shamanstvo." The result is the contagion you have alluded to, and perhaps that's what I was really writing yesterday, a hasty fable on the--avoided--subject of contagion... A story, like Gogol's, about a man whose nose leaves him is not necessarily funny in broad concept. What is funny is the horrifying, mundane, human bewilderment of the noseless man recognizing that lost organ at a party and not being able to claim it because the nose has become a privy councilor and outranks him. Nabokov repeatedly manages this wry and wonderful trick, maybe because he had himself lost his beloved Russian nose and, as history trumps the individual, he could not have it back. His nose outranked him. Exasperation aside, Nabokov is, I think, the best writer of the century who can be read for sheer pleasure: Lolita, Pale Fire, but also The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Pnin, and maybe Bend Sinister...
** (excerpts)
Almost since the moment Nabokov's Pale Fire was published, readers have been engaged in a complex argument about who the "real" narrator of the story is.
(1) The real narrator is the person corresponding to John Shade, who does not really die but composes a work in which he makes his own death an incident so that he can go on and compose a commentary to his own completed poem: "Man's life as commentary to abstruse / Unfinished poem."
(2) The real narrator is the person corresponding to Kinbote (Botkin), who writes a poem and imagines the death of the poet so as to have an excuse to tell the story he is really interested in -- the magical tale of his lost kingdom of Zembla and his escape and exile.
(3) there really are two narrators in Pale Fire, one corresponding to Shade, one to Kinbote.In "Nabokov's Pale Fire: The Magic of Artistic Discovery," Brian Boyd presents his "two narrator" solution. in a poem and commentary much concerned with the life of consciousness in "another realm" after physical death...the ghosts of both Hazel Shade and John Shade exert pressure on the narrative at various points, sending "coded" messages that account for the resonances and reverberations between the poem and commentary.
(4) I think that John Shade and Kinbote are creations of a narrator resembling Vladimir Nabokov, and that this narrator "shows himself" at a certain crucial point ...I don't mean that the narrator corresponds in any sense to the "real" Vladimir Nabokov...Nabokov when he was alive believed in art as something like the ultimate reality. If he explicitly survived in his art as "Nabokov" -- as he does, for instance, as the narrator of the novel Pnin, where he appears as rather an unpleasant character -- it would have to be as a presence IN the story: ...
...the Nabokov-like narrator is telling the story as a voice that, if it survives, will have exactly the same status as John Shade and Kinbote...the Nabokov-like narrator is saying something like this: "A work of art originates in the consciousness of a creator, but it does so in a manner of speaking 'from the outside' ." This is what the ancient invocation of the Muses was about... When the creator has finished a work of art, he's still present in the world, but there is this 'other him' that is caught forever in the words of the work that has come to birth through him." ... There is are consciousnesses in the world that belong to literary geniuses like Shakespeare, Puskin, and Nabokov. But when the "real" Nabokov who escaped from Russia and came to the United States begins work on Pale Fire, his consciousness "passes into" John Shade and becomes, for the nonce, the American poet who writes Pale Fire. Then this same consciousness "passes into" Kinbote and becomes, for the nonce, the mad commentator of Pale Fire. Then, as this consciousness leaves Kinbote, it briefly shows itself as a "third consciousness" identical neither with Shade nor Kinbote. The end of the "passing through" period -- what involves consciousness passing on and leaving the completed work behind -- is in each case represented as a death. For John Shade, it is getting killed by the bullet of an assassin....the "third narrator," it is the spectre that briefly appears at the very end of the book -- "a bigger, more respectable, more competent Gradus"
The moment at which I see Shade "dying" and Kinbote coming into existence as a narrator is, therefore, the moment of Gradus's assassination attempt...watch carefully and you'll see the "transmigration of consciousness" from one narrator to the next as the manuscript of the poem Pale Fire passes from poet to commentator: I instinctively backed, bellowing and spreading my great strong arms (with my left hand still holding the poem) in an effort to halt the advancing madman and shield John, whom I feared he might, quite accidentally, hit. . . . I felt -- I still feel -- John's hand fumbling at mine, seeking my fingertips, finding them, only to abandon them at once as if passing to me, in a sublime relay race, the baton of life. For the evidence for Dowling's reading, please consult his article directly (Copyright (c) 2003 by William C. Dowling)
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