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THOUGHTS: Nihilistic shaving, irony in Canto 4 of Pale Fire
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[R. S. Gwynn writes in response to Gary Lipon's recent posting and postscript. -- SES]
ps.: other difficult metaphors in Canto 4: Newport Frill, the mouth ... its wick.
A "Newport Frill" is an old-fashioned style of mustache; a mustache is the wick of the mouth, right, being above it? Now I can't find where I learned this, but I did mark it in the margins of the poem.
Irony is the key term in Canto 4.
Without going into great detail, let me offer an alternate "general" reading of Canto 4. At the end of Canto 3, all that he can offer to Sybil (who is the "you" addressed throughout) as the results of his questionings about the afterlife and the fountain/mountain debacle is "some faint hope" that, we assume, Hazel still has some kind of existence ("reasonably sure" in 977-78). That's not much to bring back after IPH ("If?") and all of the earlier metaphysical speculations about the hereafter. Thus, Canto IV pulls back from the earlier themes in a retrenchment celebrating what Stevens called "the pleasures of merely circulating." Shade's ultimate conclusion, which shouldn't come as much of a shock, is that the here and now (ici-bas, as Mallarme called it), the quotidian, is the only reality worth celebrating, including the pet(ty) peeves that make up "evil as none has / Spoken before." Shade's remarkable claims about beauty in this canto, as he well knows, are not remarkable at all; "as none has / Spied on it yet" means nothing more than he will spy on the not very "beautiful" everyday reality of a 60-ish poet shaving in his bath! The canto and the poem end in a celebration of the everyday, the ordinary, with the "faint hope" (ironic now that we know what happened the next day) that tomorrow will be a "day that will probably be fine." It's beautifully ironic that line 984 (which stretches out as one of the visually longest lines in the poem) is only 9 syllables long, perhaps ironically signaling (it is VN's irony!) the short time that Shade has left.
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ps.: other difficult metaphors in Canto 4: Newport Frill, the mouth ... its wick.
A "Newport Frill" is an old-fashioned style of mustache; a mustache is the wick of the mouth, right, being above it? Now I can't find where I learned this, but I did mark it in the margins of the poem.
Irony is the key term in Canto 4.
Without going into great detail, let me offer an alternate "general" reading of Canto 4. At the end of Canto 3, all that he can offer to Sybil (who is the "you" addressed throughout) as the results of his questionings about the afterlife and the fountain/mountain debacle is "some faint hope" that, we assume, Hazel still has some kind of existence ("reasonably sure" in 977-78). That's not much to bring back after IPH ("If?") and all of the earlier metaphysical speculations about the hereafter. Thus, Canto IV pulls back from the earlier themes in a retrenchment celebrating what Stevens called "the pleasures of merely circulating." Shade's ultimate conclusion, which shouldn't come as much of a shock, is that the here and now (ici-bas, as Mallarme called it), the quotidian, is the only reality worth celebrating, including the pet(ty) peeves that make up "evil as none has / Spoken before." Shade's remarkable claims about beauty in this canto, as he well knows, are not remarkable at all; "as none has / Spied on it yet" means nothing more than he will spy on the not very "beautiful" everyday reality of a 60-ish poet shaving in his bath! The canto and the poem end in a celebration of the everyday, the ordinary, with the "faint hope" (ironic now that we know what happened the next day) that tomorrow will be a "day that will probably be fine." It's beautifully ironic that line 984 (which stretches out as one of the visually longest lines in the poem) is only 9 syllables long, perhaps ironically signaling (it is VN's irony!) the short time that Shade has left.
Search archive with Google:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
Visit "Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
Manage subscription options: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/