Subject
Boyd on Pale Fire & homophobia (fwd)
Date
Body
EDITOR's NOTE. Brian Boyd, Nabokov biographer and, most recently, author
of NABOKOV's PALE FIRE: THE MAGIC OF ARTISTIC DISCOVERY offers some
thoughts in response to Christopher Berg, who, inter alia, is the composer
of several compositions setting Nabokov poems to music.
-----------------------------------------
From: Brian Boyd <b.boyd@auckland.ac.nz>
Although there is a great deal that I have felt like saying in the discussion
about Pale Fire and homophobia, I have bit my tongue. But I cannot keep silent
when Christopher Berg maligns Kinbote as he does. No wonder he sees the book
as homophobic, if this is what he thinks of Kinbote:
>>Kinbote is another matter altogether: a philistine of the worst kind whose
only redeeming feature is the (not altogether kind) amusement which comes from
our watching the workings of his madness. In Nabokov's formula of art as
"beauty + pity" isn't pity a bit lacking in PF?
How can Christoper Berg call Kinbote a philistine of the worst kind (of any
kind, even?) when the world's favorite Zemblan writes some of the most
breathtaking passages about art, or anything else, in all Nabokov?
End of note to line 991:
We are absurdly accustomed to the miracle of a few written signs being able
to contain immortal imagery, involutions of thought, new worlds with live
people, speaking, weeping, laughing. We take it for granted so simply that in
a sense, by the very act of brutish routine acceptance, we undo the work of
the ages, the history of the gradual elaboration of poetical description and
construction, from the treeman to Browning, from the caveman to Keats. What if
we awake one day, all of us, and find ourselves utterly unable to read? I wish
you to gasp not only at what you read but at the miracle of its being readable
(so I used to tell my students). Although I am capable, through long dabbling
in blue magic, of imitating any prose in the world (but singularly enough not
verse--I am a miserable rhymester), I do not consider myself a true artist,
save in one matter: I can do what only a true artist can do--pounce upon the
forgotten butterfly of revelation, wean myself abruptly from the habit of
things, see the web of the world, and the warp and the weft of that web.
Solemnly I weighed in my hand what I was carrying under my left armpit, and
for a moment I found myself enriched with an indescribable amazement as if
informed that fireflies were making decodable signals on behalf of stranded
spirits, or that a bat was writing a legible tale of torture in the bruised
and branded sky.
I was holding all Zembla pressed to my heart.
Nabokov here makes Kinbote inspired and inspiring as a thinker, a teacher, a
writer. His last line is saturated with need and hope and humor and sadness,
with, precisely, beauty + pity.
I could add that the very next note contains the finest, most wonderfully
observed, description of a particular butterfly, and perhaps of any specimen
from nature, in literature.
Othello is indeed one of the great poets in Shakespeare, which is exactly why
he subverts so wonderfully the racist stereotypes that Brabantio suddenly
believes in and Iago coolly exploits. And Kinbote is one of the great poets in
Nabokov--greater than Humbert, Van and Ada Veen, and I would think even
Fyodor--which surely undermines any possibility of dismissing him as a "mere"
or "typical" homosexual, as an object of the pitiless contempt that
Christopher Berg seems to recall the novel invites.
Reread Pale Fire, please, Mr Berg!
Professor Brian Boyd
English Department
University of Auckland
Private Bag 92019
Auckland, New Zealand
fax + 64 9 373 7429
tel + 64 9 377 7599 x 7480
e-mail: b.boyd@auckland.ac.nz
of NABOKOV's PALE FIRE: THE MAGIC OF ARTISTIC DISCOVERY offers some
thoughts in response to Christopher Berg, who, inter alia, is the composer
of several compositions setting Nabokov poems to music.
-----------------------------------------
From: Brian Boyd <b.boyd@auckland.ac.nz>
Although there is a great deal that I have felt like saying in the discussion
about Pale Fire and homophobia, I have bit my tongue. But I cannot keep silent
when Christopher Berg maligns Kinbote as he does. No wonder he sees the book
as homophobic, if this is what he thinks of Kinbote:
>>Kinbote is another matter altogether: a philistine of the worst kind whose
only redeeming feature is the (not altogether kind) amusement which comes from
our watching the workings of his madness. In Nabokov's formula of art as
"beauty + pity" isn't pity a bit lacking in PF?
How can Christoper Berg call Kinbote a philistine of the worst kind (of any
kind, even?) when the world's favorite Zemblan writes some of the most
breathtaking passages about art, or anything else, in all Nabokov?
End of note to line 991:
We are absurdly accustomed to the miracle of a few written signs being able
to contain immortal imagery, involutions of thought, new worlds with live
people, speaking, weeping, laughing. We take it for granted so simply that in
a sense, by the very act of brutish routine acceptance, we undo the work of
the ages, the history of the gradual elaboration of poetical description and
construction, from the treeman to Browning, from the caveman to Keats. What if
we awake one day, all of us, and find ourselves utterly unable to read? I wish
you to gasp not only at what you read but at the miracle of its being readable
(so I used to tell my students). Although I am capable, through long dabbling
in blue magic, of imitating any prose in the world (but singularly enough not
verse--I am a miserable rhymester), I do not consider myself a true artist,
save in one matter: I can do what only a true artist can do--pounce upon the
forgotten butterfly of revelation, wean myself abruptly from the habit of
things, see the web of the world, and the warp and the weft of that web.
Solemnly I weighed in my hand what I was carrying under my left armpit, and
for a moment I found myself enriched with an indescribable amazement as if
informed that fireflies were making decodable signals on behalf of stranded
spirits, or that a bat was writing a legible tale of torture in the bruised
and branded sky.
I was holding all Zembla pressed to my heart.
Nabokov here makes Kinbote inspired and inspiring as a thinker, a teacher, a
writer. His last line is saturated with need and hope and humor and sadness,
with, precisely, beauty + pity.
I could add that the very next note contains the finest, most wonderfully
observed, description of a particular butterfly, and perhaps of any specimen
from nature, in literature.
Othello is indeed one of the great poets in Shakespeare, which is exactly why
he subverts so wonderfully the racist stereotypes that Brabantio suddenly
believes in and Iago coolly exploits. And Kinbote is one of the great poets in
Nabokov--greater than Humbert, Van and Ada Veen, and I would think even
Fyodor--which surely undermines any possibility of dismissing him as a "mere"
or "typical" homosexual, as an object of the pitiless contempt that
Christopher Berg seems to recall the novel invites.
Reread Pale Fire, please, Mr Berg!
Professor Brian Boyd
English Department
University of Auckland
Private Bag 92019
Auckland, New Zealand
fax + 64 9 373 7429
tel + 64 9 377 7599 x 7480
e-mail: b.boyd@auckland.ac.nz