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Re: Prisons, Cages and Neon-bars
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On Nov 28, 2011, at 8:11 PM, Jansy wrote:
> Perhaps we can stretch the related images of Kafka's and Nabokov's cage-bars in Lolita a little further. We may look at Pale Fire's Hazel Shade while she is standing outside the azure entrance of a bar, with its neon-barred puddles (lines 397-400).
> The... words "bar/neon-bar" are 'unpoetically' placed close together
[I read them as ten lines apart!? I do believe that neon-barred does allude to imprisonment.]
> ... Perhaps the word "bar" in that instance serves to emphasize the hopelessness of her romantic situation and how emprisioned she feels by her "Hazelhood." ...
> If there's any freedom and hope left, it's up to her father to explore and to recover.
>
Funny, I have been writing a little essay on a new interpretation of Pale Fire that oddly touches upon this point.
In this interpretation Hazel is destined to die young in order to provide a theme,(motivation?) for Shade's Magnus Opus, Pale Fire.
Through composing this work Shade believes he has, or will become, immortal.
other men die; but I / Am not another; therefore I’ll not die.
Even though the mind searches for an ironic interpretation of this line,
I have never been able to find one. It's notable that it is logically incorrect,
but this merely guarantees that we try to clarify the meaning even more!
From the beginning Shade has been making claims that he later modifies in a bathetic ways,
so the reader may well anticipate another bathetic retreat here, but where is it?
This line is one of two instances where Nabokov hides alternate meanings in plain sight,
like a purloined letter.
The other is where the English Linguist utters:
je nourris
Les pauvres cigales—meaning that he
Fed the poor sea gulls!
Of course this really means: I feed the cicadas.
The cicada in Lafontaine specifically sings;
The ending of a stanza at the beginning of Canto Two: A cicada sings;
both link cicada to singing.
Shade is a poet, a kind of singer,
obsessed with his own immortality.
The EL appears and foretells that Shade will get his wish.
He gets a daughter, nine months later.
Progeny is a kind of immortality.
Half of your genetic code survives: a kind of soul.
But while the Shades presumably wanted a child,
(I think they were wedded thirteen years is it?)
Hazel herself though, isn't the immortality that the EL is granting.
Rather she is the means to literary fame (I use the term ovidian immortality).
Lafontaine was wrong:
Dead is the mandible, alive the song.
When Shade sees the ant and cicada tableau on the pine's trunk
he realizes that he is the cicada, he sings, and Hazel is the fated, gum-logged, ant.
His wish for immortality though still has been granted,
but through the gift of a theme and the experience of grief.
And so he sets out to compose Pale Fire.
When he announces near the beginning of Canto Two, A cicada sings,
is he referring to Hazel's soul, or to himself, who is about to start to sing his song in ernest,
in more detail?
Two interpretations; one obscuring the other.
It's Hazel's soul is more easily come-to. More of what the reader wants to think at this point.
Now consider: any line or passage wants some kind of meaning.
But usually just one suffices.
As he comes to the end of the composition,
and really throughout the story Shade gives signs that he believes himself to be immortal,
I am not another...
or guaranteed to be. This is particularly to be seen in the nail-pairing tableau
where he is pretending to Clotho, of the Greek trios of gods representing Fate,
or The Fates, The Moire. Shade either pretends, believes, anticipates
that his nail-paring affect the lives of each finger's associate.
Shade's life has been played-with. Now it's his turn.
Indeed this whole analysis might be termed a mythic reading of Pale Fire.
Shade's hubris is that he imagines himself to be a great artist deserving of immortality.
For his last year his life has been a forced reliving, and embellishing, of his daughter's death,
surely to memorialize her, but mostly to memorialize himself.
Eventually this drives Shade insane.
Very Greek!
Merry,
~/gsl
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