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Re: RESPONSE to Aisenberg on Pale Fire's epigraph etc.
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Jim Twiggs responds to Joseph Aisenberg
Dear Aisenberg--
I appreciate your compliments and am glad you found something worthwhile in the passages that Jansy Mello posted. For my part, even when I disagree with some detail or other, I’ve been generally sympathetic to your relentlessly secular readings of VN and impressed by your insights into VN’s narrative techniques.
As for our disagreements in the present case, I will not repeat here my reasons for thinking the poem to be in many places deliberately bad. It’s worth noting, however, that a dim view of the poem’s merits is not as idiosyncratic as you seem to think. The topic was, for example, hotly debated on the List before I became a member. And we doubters on the List were preceded by a number of well-known and well-respected critics, including William Monroe, George Cloyne, F.W. Dupee, Alvin B. Kernan, Richard Rorty, Michael Wood, Robert M. Adams, and Elizabeth Hardwick. If you’re interested in pursuing the matter further, I’ll be glad to send you, off-List, links to some of the relevant reviews and essays.
My only originality, if I can claim any at all, is in tying the question of the merits of the poem to the epigraph. I also tried to stress the particular kind of humor that I believe starts with the epigraph and runs through the book. Finally, I believe that Nabokov the novelist is never in more control than when the poem is at its shakiest. At the very least, I would claim that Nabokov the novelist had his reasons which Nabokov the poet, if in fact he was striving for perfection in every line, didn’t know. In the right context, a piece of flawed poetry can be a key element in a powerful work of literary art.
On the question of Shade’s character, the prevailing view, I think it’s fair to say, is of Shade as an exemplary man, stable and upright and blessed with a wife that everyone, except of course Kinbote, would envy and adore. But you came to the List at a time when the only people still writing on the subject--Kunin, Roth, Mello, and I--are the very ones who, each in his/her own way and for his/her own purposes, have tried, from time to time, to knock Shade and his wife off their pedestals. It’s easy to see, therefore, how you might form a sense that Shade the man is not much appreciated on the List.
To take but one example of why some of us don’t think too highly of Shade, consider again the passage that Matt Roth recently put up for discussion--i.e., Kinbote’s note to line 230, which is, surely, one of the key passages of the novel. The picture that I (as a nonbeliever in supernatural manifestations) have always gotten from this passage is of a bitter young woman throwing a month-long tantrum over the cruel or at least thoughtless behavior of her mother and father. Given her dad’s interest in the spirit-world, this is, to me at least, a hideously funny, deeply ironic passage. It’s true, as you pointed out, that the supernatural elements of the story may have been supplied by Jane Provost. Or perhaps it’s an idea that Jane and Hazel concocted together. In any case, the truth in the matter seems to be that Sybil had unceremoniously dispatched Maud’s beloved little dog and that Hazel was in a rage about it. I think it’s also clear that
Sybil and John did not handle the matter well and can be held accountable, in their thoughtlessness, for Hazel’s behavior. And of course later on, when Hazel takes an interest in the supernatural, her father arranges the destruction of the old barn where the supposed manifestations were taking place.
It is for these and a few other reasons that some of us do not worship at the shrine of John Shade. I do, however, take seriously your arguments (in the form of quotes from VN) and admit that they pose a problem. My answer, for now anyway, is that similar problems arise with other writers. Consider, for example, Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” Nobody, not even Flannery herself, will ever convince me that that wonderful, and wonderfully mean and bitter story, has anything to do with grace, Christian or otherwise. As John Hawkes said a long time ago, O’Connor, regardless of her explicit claims, was of the Devil’s party. So, I think, was Nabokov--and never more so than in Pale Fire.
It’s worth adding that I do not consider Shade himself a “joke” (whatever that might mean) or his poem completely worthless.
Yours,
Jim Twiggs
________________________________
From: joseph Aisenberg <vanveen13@SBCGLOBAL.NET>
To: NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU
Sent: Wednesday, April 22, 2009 2:14:57 AM
Subject: Re: [NABOKV-L] [NABOKOV-L] Pale Fire's epigraph, Hazel and Hodges
I rather like Twigg's reading here quite a bit. I actually think I've been suggesting something like this, except I hadn't thought of casting in quite so elegant, and eloquent, a fashion such a very cold eye indeed on the figure of Shade and his poem. I'm rather more doubtful, however, that Nabokov intended Shade's poem to be bad; it's not bad. Maybe not great, but there a few terrific patches. I have to say, I'm also surprised so many people on the list seem to find Shade's character so suspicious and unpleasant, since by Nabokovian standards he is, with the exception of Pnin, the kindest, most optimistic, least egocentric, best adjusted of any of his characters, but I suppose this is a judgment call. And I believe that Nabokov did refer to Shade in interviews as one of his positive, and not perverse characters. I'll search for it. Also, I keep thinking of a scene from Stacy Shciff's bio Vera. During possibly the most interesting part of the book, while
Nabokov was composing Shade's poem, he and his wife were visited by an intriguing neurotic woman by the name of Filippa Rolf early in 1961. At one point he asks her if she'd like to hear what he's been working on. "He had been complaining that he was trying to make the thing obscure, a difficult task as he was by nature so eminently lucid. Vera and Rolf sat together on the couch as Vladimir, from his armchair, recited the first two cantos of Pale Fire, his voice swelling "like a happy church organ." Was it moving? he asked when he had finished. It was very much meant to be. The three were nearly drunk on his poetry; Vera's face was wet afterward, glistening with sweat and tears. Out into the street they spilled after discussing the work, Rolf singing, Vladimir shouting, "What a delightful evening, what a perfectly wonderful evening!" (Vera, hardcover, p278) All this is attributed to a letter written by Rolf January 16th of '61. Certainly this would seem
to suggest pretty heavily that Nabokov did not intend this poem to be bad. Ah, I found the quote from Nabokov I was looking for in Strong Opinions. Pg 119, he is rather sillily asked: "Would it be fair to say that you see life as very funny but cruel joke?" After questioning the use of the word "life" for almost a page, Nabokov says this: "As to the lives of my characters, not all are grotesque and not all are tragic: Fyodor in The Gift is blessed with a faithful love and an early recognition of his genuius; Joh Shade in Pale Fire leads an intense inner existence, far removed from what you call a joke." Although this doesn't competely refute Twigg's understanding of N's "intention" as concerns John Shade's character and work, I think it strongly suggests a rethinking.
--- On Tue, 4/21/09, Jansy <jansy@AETERN.US> wrote:
From: Jansy <jansy@AETERN.US>
Subject: [NABOKV-L] [NABOKOV-L] Pale Fire's epigraph, Hazel and Hodges
To: NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU
Date: Tuesday, April 21, 2009, 8:51 AM
J. Twiggs, off-list, to JM: You asked whether anyone has discussed the epigraph to Pale Fire. The answer is yes--I myself discussed it at great length back in December 2006 *
JM: Thanks, Jim. I could now read your message to the List (which had skipped my conscious attention) with profit.
In relation to Shade's poshy lines: "This is kitsch on a stick, wrapped in a parody of Eliot", your assessment is perfect.
Just as your concluding remarks on PF: "Two lost souls whose colossal needs mock their puny gear. Mad for meaning, chasing signs and symbols all over creation, they cannot connect with their own selves, let alone with each other. Read this way the book is both richly comic and deeply humane."
There is a recurrent image in VN, linked to E.A.Poe's inaugural detective stories, in which truth stares at us in the eye (cf. "The Purloined Letter") or to Chesterton's "Father Brown," when he concludes that "the best place to hide a leaf is in a forest."
VN explores this idea in RLSK when V. describes Sebastian's parodies soaring out of the grotesque because sometimes a clown develops wings. Your posting directs us to this same spirit, in Pale Fire, to illustrate how, in spite of Kinbote's pitiful grappling with Eliot and Dante, we must also find Shade's despair in his reference to Rabelais and Swift...
...............................................................
Excerpts related to present posting (Complete J.Twiggs, check VN-List, Dec. 19, 2006) :
In the years that I’ve belonged to Nabokv-L, a couple of questions keep recurring: How good is Shade’s poem? What is the meaning of the epigraph? For me these questions have always been closely related [...] In my view Pale Fire is a brilliant, pitch-black comic novel that contains an artfully constructed but deliberately--and often deliciously--bad poem. [...] as set forth by Wyndham Lewis (1930, The Stuffed Owl). VN tips his hand in the epigraph, from which we can infer that we are to be treated to a ludicrous story told by a more or less unreliable narrator (which Boswell certainly was) who reveals more about his subject and himself than he is aware of. Anyone who has read the Gogol book will also see--and this is the deeper point of the quotation--that the ludicrous story of the young gentleman “running around town shooting cats” has called forth in Johnson an even more ludicrous response: What we have here is a perfect, and perfectly
obvious, example of sentimental hogwash--i.e., one of the standard and least harmful forms of poshlust[...]
VN returns to the same theme when Kinbote, in his commentary to line 91, fills out our picture of Aunt Maud--who is revealed to be, like Nabokov himself, a connoisseur of poshlust. This is clear from the fact that the zipper and underwear ads in Maud’s scrapbook are of the same general kind as the sample that appears in another of VN’s major statements on poshlust, the “Philistines and Philistinism” chapter of Lectures on Russian Literature, under the very wonderful label “Adoration of Spoons.” Kinbote, of course, views these ads through the eyes of a randy homosexual [...]
Quite a gal, our Maud--though we wouldn’t have known it from Shade’s poem. Nor would we have known the extent of Hazel’s rage at, and alienation from, her parents--and wouldn’t, therefore, have known the full, or at least a fuller, story of her death--unless Kinbote had told us.
We can all agree, I suppose and hope, that Kinbote, in his craziness, is a self-centered, unreliable, self-deceiving, and manipulative narrator whose ludicrous story overflows with elements of kitsch, camp, and poshlust. In my view, Shade, in his quiet fashion, is just about as bad [...]
Shade’s guilty conscience mocking his attempt--his need--to exploit Hazel’s death in the service of his tacky obsession with the Great Beyond[...] Shade, in Canto Four, seems, most of the time, to fit the role of wise old friend and healthy second-rater. His elaborate wind up--”Now I shall speak” etc.--might lead us to expect one of those windy splurges mentioned by Wyndham Lewis. But no. The delivery, when it comes, is puny--an extended bit of dithering about poetic composition [...]The tone is humorous and folksy; we can’t help being charmed. But this other thing keeps breaking in--Now I shall speak of evil and despair as none has spoken./ Now I shall speak . . ./ Now I shall speak of evil as none has spoken[...] This is kitsch on a stick, wrapped in a parody of Eliot. [...]
It’s here that we need to revisit the epigraph. Imagine, if you will, that Hodge, despite Johnson’s sentimental self-assurances to the contrary, had been felled by a bullet from the young gent’s gun. Can’t we then also imagine that Johnson would take refuge in the idea that Hodge, though shot on the street and lying there in plain sight, dead as a doornail, is somewhere still alive? [...] And Johnson might well cry out, “But Hodge is not dead; no, no, Hodge is somewhere still alive.” Cruel as it may seem to say so, this gush of wishful thinking is not different in kind from Shade’s “reasonable certainty” about Hazel. The difference is one of degree, children being, for most of us, more important than pets [...]
Having finished with Hazel as a stand-in for the cat, VN goes on to put Shade himself in the role of Johnson and then, shortly thereafter, in the role of Hodge. First a piece of smug, lip-smacking self-satisfaction in which our bland old second-rater serves up another helping of chicken soup for the soul--this time to the effect that he’s reasonably certain he’ll live through another night. After that comes a reassuring glance outside (neighbor, wife, garden--everything nicely in place). And then--[... a prime example of what R.W. Flint called VN’s “really fiendish, lyric delight in the bottom absurdity of things.” [...]
On my reading of Pale Fire, it’s best understood along these same lines. Two lost souls whose colossal needs mock their puny gear. Mad for meaning, chasing signs and symbols all over creation, they cannot connect with their own selves, let alone with each other. Read this way the book is both richly comic and deeply humane.
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