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.