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Re: : Re: Aisenberg's thoughts on PF]
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J.A. Mr. Aisenberg was not trying to shut down interpretion of the novel Pale Fire, he wouldn't know how if he tried; after all, the author himself dismissed Mary Mccarthy's intricate reading of the book and it didn't matter. I was merrely throwing in my two cents about what I took to be the book's essentially comic themes. Other than the minor poltergeist incident and a slight "shade" of meaning in Hazel's empty swing, I never undterstood how a reader was supposed to "see" the influential pattern of the ghosts. Another thing, it seems that Nabokov in this book, relates, tongue in cheek, the idea of "immortality" to literary immortality.
S.D: I doubt that VN would have written puzzles for which the answer is NO ANSWER. The rigor of mathematics poses propositions, both obviously true and dubious, which have yet to be proven decisively, or to be decisively proven to be unprovable. VN, a rigorous thinker, would have found the unprovable NO ANSWER solution too easy and entirely unacceptable.
J.F: Matt Roth commented that interpretations such as yours close off the reason to study the book closely. In principle, that shouldn't be true. The good solver of chess problems (not me!) enjoys not just the key, but also the "play", including the failed attempts to mate and the failed defenses against the key. But sychologically it may be true of people like me. I've learned a lot from solutions to PF that I don't agree with completely.
JM: I wrote that "I'd like to avoid the rigmarole of "taking sides", at this point" because JA is the one to answer MR, as in fact he did ("Mr.Aisenberg was not trying to shut down interpretion of the novel...").
And yet, it seems that MR's interpretation struck various chords as if "no answer" was applicable to the novel itself, not to Shade's, and perhaps VN's own, questionings - or that it "closes off the reason to study the book closely"? I saw Mr.Aisenberg's "I thought the sense of an answer always eluding our passionate readerly search was the point" as an invitation to go on playing VN's games, to explore his devices even further - but without the compeling need to reach a definite answer. Or without having to make explicit what has always been left "implicit" nor rendered in words: answers and explanations are only capable to invent "domestic ghosts" ( "for the most/ We can think up is a domestic ghost" ).
LH: ...Shade's difficulties in getting rid of his "gray stubble", about his hopeless struggle against "patch(es) of prickliness"[...] we must conclude -at least I do- that some sort of parellel, some sort of identity between Shade and Kinbote is showing through, however hard Shade tries to erase it...[...] it is indeed a very painful process to scrape every morning the stubborn stubble that keeps growing = the stubborn Kinbote that keeps showing through...[...] I don't mean that Shade and Kinbote are one and the same character on the plane of the novel...A king trying to mask/ hide / destroy / sink his identity by growing a beard, conversely, as if in a mirror a poet trying to mask/... his identity by shaving off his stubble...
JM: New conjectures about PF are alive and well, as we can verify by Laurence Hochard's argumentation enriched by links to RLSK ( I only left a few of his stepping stones because anyone can read them from his posting, directly).
Btw. remembering Quilty's Assyrian beard ( if it was Q's) - what do we make of Humbert Humbert's sentence, in "Lolita"?
"Alas, I was unable to transcend the simple human fact that whatever spiritual solace I might find[...] Unless it can be proven to me - to me as I am now, today, with my heart and by beard, and my putrefaction - that [...] unless this can be proven (and if it can, then life is a joke)."
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S.D: I doubt that VN would have written puzzles for which the answer is NO ANSWER. The rigor of mathematics poses propositions, both obviously true and dubious, which have yet to be proven decisively, or to be decisively proven to be unprovable. VN, a rigorous thinker, would have found the unprovable NO ANSWER solution too easy and entirely unacceptable.
J.F: Matt Roth commented that interpretations such as yours close off the reason to study the book closely. In principle, that shouldn't be true. The good solver of chess problems (not me!) enjoys not just the key, but also the "play", including the failed attempts to mate and the failed defenses against the key. But sychologically it may be true of people like me. I've learned a lot from solutions to PF that I don't agree with completely.
JM: I wrote that "I'd like to avoid the rigmarole of "taking sides", at this point" because JA is the one to answer MR, as in fact he did ("Mr.Aisenberg was not trying to shut down interpretion of the novel...").
And yet, it seems that MR's interpretation struck various chords as if "no answer" was applicable to the novel itself, not to Shade's, and perhaps VN's own, questionings - or that it "closes off the reason to study the book closely"? I saw Mr.Aisenberg's "I thought the sense of an answer always eluding our passionate readerly search was the point" as an invitation to go on playing VN's games, to explore his devices even further - but without the compeling need to reach a definite answer. Or without having to make explicit what has always been left "implicit" nor rendered in words: answers and explanations are only capable to invent "domestic ghosts" ( "for the most/ We can think up is a domestic ghost" ).
LH: ...Shade's difficulties in getting rid of his "gray stubble", about his hopeless struggle against "patch(es) of prickliness"[...] we must conclude -at least I do- that some sort of parellel, some sort of identity between Shade and Kinbote is showing through, however hard Shade tries to erase it...[...] it is indeed a very painful process to scrape every morning the stubborn stubble that keeps growing = the stubborn Kinbote that keeps showing through...[...] I don't mean that Shade and Kinbote are one and the same character on the plane of the novel...A king trying to mask/ hide / destroy / sink his identity by growing a beard, conversely, as if in a mirror a poet trying to mask/... his identity by shaving off his stubble...
JM: New conjectures about PF are alive and well, as we can verify by Laurence Hochard's argumentation enriched by links to RLSK ( I only left a few of his stepping stones because anyone can read them from his posting, directly).
Btw. remembering Quilty's Assyrian beard ( if it was Q's) - what do we make of Humbert Humbert's sentence, in "Lolita"?
"Alas, I was unable to transcend the simple human fact that whatever spiritual solace I might find[...] Unless it can be proven to me - to me as I am now, today, with my heart and by beard, and my putrefaction - that [...] unless this can be proven (and if it can, then life is a joke)."
Search archive with Google:
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Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
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Visit "Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
Manage subscription options: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/