On Jan 16, 2010, at 10:46 PM, Stan Kelly-Bootle wrote:
My judgment is ... (unpopular with many Nabokovians) that Shade is a lousy poet, presented as such via brilliantly-balanced but mean-low-down parody by VN.
I think that that's the point.
Pale Fire, the poem is an ironic piece, but the feelings of pathos and tragedy bleed through the irony.
I love you when you’re standing on the lawn
Peering at something in a tree: “It’s gone.
It was so small. It might come back” (all this
Voiced in a whisper softer than a kiss).
I love you when you call me to admire
A jet’s pink trail above the sunset fire.
I love you when you’re humming as you pack
A suitcase or the farcical car sack
With round-trip zipper. And I love you most
When with a pensive nod you greet her ghost
And hold her first toy on your palm, or look
At a postcard from her, found in a book.
This stanza begins with extraordinary insipidness; an adolescent-like use of parallelism,
and the common affectation of poetry as pretty language embodied in the line:
Voiced in a whisper softer than a kiss
But this is its ironic charm...
Moreover there is a lot that distinguishes the passage from what
might have been published in a 1959 edition of Seventeen magazine.
To be noted is the break up of the line via Sybil's short sentences
which impart great rhythm to the passage. It sounds well.
To me this remarkable feel for rhythm within the confines of the heroic couplet,
distinguishes Shade/Nabokov as great poet: a fine sense of rhythm that is
used to lead into, set up, and close, the short episodes.
the farcical car sack / With round-trip zipper.
The description of the piece of luggage as farcical, is odd, and amusing;
and that humor is reinforced by the extra emphasis imparted
by the spondaic rhythm of the last three words.
Moreover all the references to planes and travel serve as a background to
the piece's theme of departure.
And then the surprising swerve at the end meant to pull the reader into the narrative.
Does it do that? When you first read it did you want to know what happened to the Shades?
A sense of engagement is surely to be valued in verse. Shade seems to be doing his job.
Shade/VN uses stock situations, phrases, and symbols but certainly not toward common ends.
And the hallucinogenic compounding of Hazel's last night with the television programming
has to be considered daring. PF, as a poem, pretty much succeeds or fails based on
the reader's reaction to that device.
But the very act of writing a thousand line narrative poem in
an age old form is daring. Shade/VN risks a lot on that ground alone, and it's to be expected
that many modern readers should find PF, the poem, ineffectual by reason of antique form alone,
a quaint anachronism. But many readers, perhaps a trend even, find Shakespeare and Chaucer
useless for the same reason. If one can find traditional form effective in Shakespeare,
who sprinkled heroic couplets throughout the plays, as a closing device,
but also wrote in it extensively in Romeo and Juliet, and Midsummer,
why should it be considered ineffectual in modern use.
(The hopelessly archaic Ruy Lopes, the Spanish,
was nevertheless Fischer's favorite opening.
Long live the preterists!)
(I have trouble, as you can see, distinguishing Shade from VN. They both have dewlaps,
but also a lot of common interests, traditional/metric poetry, butterflies, nature in general, chess, a wife they dote on,
and especially a lot of common aversions, as in Canto 4.)
As you say there is a balancing going on through out all of Pale Fire, the poem,
between irony and parody on one side and pathos and authentic emotion on the other.
VN/Shade wants the reader to be moved by Hazel's suicide, but not too moved, not to tears,
and so the humorously unlikely place names, Exe to Wye, are mentioned right in the middle
of the pathetic climax. Very Shakespearean I'd say. I pray you, remember the porter.