In a message dated 1/21/2010 1:41:01 PM Central Standard Time, jansy@AETERN.US writes:
John Morris: A final thought: Ever since I first read "Pale Fire" the novel... I've been fascinated to realize that there is immense disagreement about the merits of "Pale Fire" the poem...
JM: Nabokov has described John Shade as " the greatest fictional poet," etc. Perhaps John Shade was a "mask," because at first Nabokov wasn't sure about the merits of "Pale Fire" as an independent poem.
In Steve Blackwell´s Introduction ( to "The Quill and the Scalpel") he wrote:" "Rather than represent the professional voice of a scientist directly, by means of his lepidopterist character, Nabokov instead has the scientist's son Fyodor, a poet and budding novelist, re-create a vision of the Russian scientific texts indirectly, by means of fragments that have been translated into English and retranslated back into Russian, with the assistance of memory.Why all these layers of complexity?... The choice had two key benefits: it saved Nabokov from the need to set his scientific fancies in a form that might someday be mistaken as one of his actual scientific texts... Still more significantly, it suggests ...a scientific approach to nature that has been absorbed and intervowen with the very fabric of the artistic text itself, by means of the artist-son's consciousness and memory." Perhaps in the same way that, in the "Gift," Nabokov used a fictional character to distinguish his writings as a scientist from his work as a novelist, he could have used Shade to mediate, or rather, isolate his elaborate poetic experiment, in Pale Fire, from his other works as poet. This wouldn't mean that didn't consider his poem as not being up to his standards or unable to stand by itself bu,t perhaps, that it was a particularly ambitious project of his.
I cannot quote his exact words now but Nabokov often dismissed any "psychological intent" lurking behind his construction of a "character." He equally emphasized their role as his "galley slaves" and to serve his structural preferences.
Why cannot we consider that Hazel was mainly an element in his intended "pattern," one that led the reader, from an originally neurotic (psychotic?) young woman, who drowned herself, to the conjuring up of a kind of mystical "sea-change"? The pathos, the slime and the beauty are all there, rising from VN's words and music and images.
Nabokov has described John Shade as " the greatest fictional poet," etc. Perhaps John Shade was a "mask," because at first Nabokov wasn't sure about the merits of "Pale Fire" as an independent poem.
This raises a couple of interesting questions: (1) Was VN employing a similar strategy in TRLOSK by using a narrator who was admittedly no writer? Was this a clever way of "masking" VN's uncertainty about writing a novel in English for the first time? An uncertainly that is apparently laid to rest with that novel's final sentence. (2) One of the problems that besets any novelist who chooses to write about a poet is that he has either to provide examples of the poet's work or skirt the issue--put up or shut up. Nicholson Baker's recent novel The Anthologist does the latter; we learn a lot about Paul Chowder's ideas about poetry but don't get any examples of his work. This was also the case with Clay Reynolds's Ars Poetica of a few years back. Other than VN, the only case that comes to mind in which a novelist has performed the not incosiderable feat of the former and provided the actual poetry is that of Anthony Burgess, who was, of course, as good a poet as he was a writer of prose. There may be other examples, but none comes to mind.
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