-------- Original Message --------
--- jansymello <jansy@AETERN.US> wrote:
> But first, I must
> apologise to CK and Matt, and concede them their point. I
separated a
> cartload of books and could not find one small example of another
poet's
> inclusion of a self-addressed "note for further use" in a poem.
Sorry, I was too late! By the way, I should have included the
date of "The Book of Ephraim": 1976.
This device is an example of what Barthes called "anti-paralypsis":
talking about something by saying you're going to talk about it.
(From Barthes's piece on Fourier, the socialist not the
mathematician.) I feel sure that it must have been used in
"experimental" fiction, but that only example I can think of is a
science-fiction story by Barry Malzberg, "A Galaxy Called Rome",
which describes a story he was thinking about writing.
> As SS
> has pointed out, VN's lines fit in so well that I experienced a
"déjÃ
> vu/lu"), instead of recognizing their originality. Second: In an
old
> posting I mentioned a link bt. one of Kinbote's explanations in the
> foreword and this "note to himself".
...
> SS: One may notice though that he replaced "commentary" by
> "footnotes"...
>
> JM: Well done, SS, to call our attention to the substitution of
> "commentary" and "footnotes"! Thanks...
Agreed.
> To facilitate this notice to the List I here copied Kinbote's Lines
> 939-940:
> Man’s life, etc....If I correctly understand the sense of this
> succinct observation, our poet suggests here that human life is
but a
> series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece.
>
> Now I think we could place these lines closer to the other ones
with
> their "disjointed notes" to see what comes out of that!
> Instead of poetry divinely terse,/ Disjointed notes, Insomnia’s
mean
> verse!/ Life is a message scribbled in the dark. Anonymous./
Espied on a
> pine’s bark...
I finally believe you--it was very slow of me not to see that
"Disjointed notes, insomnia's mean verse" is a description of the
whole book, just as "Man's life as commentary..." is, though the
former is self-depreciating.
Sergei put his finger on my interpretation of the book--We are
its otherworld, so what is ours? (It's pretty much what
Alexandrov said about /Invitation/; I don't know why he didn't
apply it to /Pale Fire/. But if I try to understand why
Shade wrote it and why he put it there, other than a vague
connection to the afterlife, I still find it very puzzling.
Jerry Friedman