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THOUGHTS: on the ending of Pale Fire, the poem.
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I'm afraid that this posting is likely to be similar to some of my
others, late and overlong. Hopefully it won't bore.
An earlier posting of mine, THOUGHTS: the need for climax in Canto 4,
tried, mainly, to make the point that Shade's Litany of Loathes should
be read with manic rage, and thus serve as an emotional climax to the
poem. Kinbote, in his commentary to the opening lines of Canto 4 is a
bit equivocal on this point.
Actually, the promise made in these four lines will not be really kept
except for the repetition of their incantatory rhythm in lines 915 and
923-924 (leading to the savage attack in 925-930). The poet like a
fiery rooster seems to flap his wings in a preparatory burst of would-
be inspiration, but the sun does not rise. Instead of the wild poetry
promised here, we get a jest or two, a bit of satire, and at the end
of the canto, a wonderful radiance of tenderness and repose.
Thus it could be said that Kinbote finds Canto 4, on the whole, anti-
climatic; yet singles out Shade's Litany of Loathes (lines 925-930) as
a savage attack. This is the passage that I maintain should be read
with great animation, and thus serve as a climax, albeit satiric and
ironic; and is supportive of the notion that Shade is mad. In gliding
over this Kinbote may be forced by VN to diminish how passionate Shade
becomes so as not to reveal too greatly this discoverable joke.
But most of the list seemed to prefer to move on to the end of the
poem and discuss its significance, namely the fact that it doesn't end
in a complete couplet, and that the last line rhymes with the first.
Kinbote, of course, points this out in his foreword:
Nay, I shall even assert (as our shadows still walk without us) that
there remained to be written only one line of the poem (namely verse
1000) which would have been identical to line 1 and would have
completed the symmetry of the structure, with its two identical
central parts, solid and ample, forming together with the shorter
flanks twin wings of five hundred verses each, and damn that music.
Knowing Shade's combinatorial turn of mind and subtle sense of
harmonic balance, I cannot imagine that he intended to deform the
faces of his crystal by meddling with its predictable growth. And if
all this were not enough--and it is, it is enough--I have had the
dramatic occasion of hearing my poor friend's own voice proclaim on
the evening of July 21 the end, or almost the end, of his labors. (See
my note to line 991.)
The most relevant part of that note is:
"Well," I said, "has the muse been kind to you?"
"Very kind," he replied, slightly bowing his hand-propped head:
"Exceptionally kind and gentle. In fact, I have here [indicating a
huge pregnant envelope near him on the oilcloth] practically the
entire product. A few trifles to settle and [suddenly striking the
table with his fist] I've swung it, by God."
This seems to leave the matter largely up in the air. Kinbote is, as
usual, useful, or unreliable, or ironic, depending upon VN's mood or
needs; or the reader's.
Gwynn stands Kinbote's symmetry argument on its head, arguing the poem
is more symmetric without line 1000, and marks Hazel's death, line
500, as the center piece of the poem.
Stadlen doesn't seem to feel that the fact that the last line of the
poem rhymes with the first draws the reader's attention to the first
line, thus making the poem circular.
Gwynn goes on to say the ending signifies a lack of conclusiveness as
regards Shade's investigations of an afterlife.
Stadlen agrees with Gwynn that it's for the reader to complete the
couplet, [as] he or she is so inclined.
Friedman agrees with Kinbote that the poem is incomplete, but for him
Shade's death and survival renders it sensible in a way that it
otherwise is not.
Johnson, agreeing with Gwynn, says the missing final line (1000) ...
mark[s] the ultimate indeterminacy of the afterlife issue?
Pierce writes that the missing last line function[s] to allow...
Kinbote a "way in."
Haan writes ... Pierce's observation of the "missing" line as
Kinbote's "way in" neatly compensates [complements?] the added escape
square which affords Kinbote a "way out": ... Iris Acht (d. 1888), ...
seen as ... Iris Eight, i.e., i8 (or eye-8), in chess notation
referring to a square just off the 8x8 board (which only goes up to h8);
I guess I would say I find the final line(s) even more anti-climatic
than most members of the list do. All this seems like much ado about,
well, literally, nothing; and perhaps a gambit set for the reader who
seeks some higher meaning in VN's confection.
I, like Pierce, see mainly functionalism, but not as a way of allowing
Kinbote in. Kinbote's been in since the first page of his foreword. I
don't see that having the first line repeated at the end of the poem
renders Kinbote, and his continuance in his commentary, in any
significant way foreclosed, or even awkward. The story goes on pretty
much the same in either case.
First let me say I find the poem ending half-closed; for only half of
a couplet is present. Yet there is in Shade's pronouncements about
Hazel's survival, and about the structure of the universe, a
definitiveness that sounds like a life's summation, and hence a
premonition of doom, and thus a sense of semantic closure, and
therefore half-closed.
I see three functional objectives that the ambiguous, half-closed,
ending fulfills: closure, continuance, circularity.
Closure: the desire for the poem to end in a way that sounds complete
when recited. This assumes that VN intended the poem as a stand-alone
piece worthy of recital. For those who find the poem merely a plot
device and not worth reciting, this function presumably rings a little
hollow.
Continuance: the desire for the poem to serve as an introduction to
Kinbote's commentary read consecutively, as most readers probably do,
as a regular novel.
Circularity: the desire, as in Joyce's Finnegans Wake, for the reader
to return to the beginning of the work again, or at least consider
doing so.
Repeating line 1 as line 1,000 renders the poem's sense of closure
more complete, and may make its seem less attached to the following
commentary. This doesn't change things much as regards closure or
continuance.
But repeating the line significantly affects the poem's sense of
formal circularity. The reader has considerably less reason to
consider returning to the start of the poem and rereading (which is
probably more of a gesture than an actual practice).
So what is lost in this?
Shade's life, all said, is an experience; so the progress made from
line 1 to line 999 surely accounts for something.
The reader may be back at square one, but his understanding is surely
different.
For the reader who believes that Shade metamorphoses into Kinbote,
though, something special is lost. For that reader can imagine, in
reading the poem a second time, that it is not Shade but Kinbote who,
having just inherited the set of index cards from the disposed Shade,
is now saying the poem for the first time, and beginning to form his
eccentric explications of its sometimes ambiguous content.
And indeed Kinbote can, in his own way, identify with the opening
line, I was the shadow of the waxwing slain; as Kinbote can be viewed
as Shade's shadow.
Commodiously yours,
–GSL
ps:
I like Haan's discovery: Iris Acht = I8?!
Wikipedia <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess_notation> gives that
algebraic chess notation has been in use in some regions since the
early 1800s[,] Descriptive chess notation, English notation or English
descriptive notation...[u]ntil the 1970s, at least in English-speaking
countries.
I8, of course, would be algebraic notation.
Most readers, even those who were chess players, would probably never
of made Haan's discovery in 1962, but that doesn't mean that this
wasn't VN's intent. I suspect it was. Nevertheless it would be
interesting to know if the chess problems VN composed [while in
Germany] were set down in algebraic or descriptive notation.
Perhaps some better-off member of the list might bid on the set of
sketches of these chess problems that have only just recently been put
up for auction at Christie's, and thus help clarify this issue. Such
an investment would surely be better than wasting one's money on stocks.
–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
pps:
For those interested in a summary of the last-line correspondence:
On May 5, 2010, at 10:59 PM, R S Gwynn wrote:
> As I've said before, the omission of the last line by Shade (and the
> "last" line is probably the first) is part of the poem's clearly
> symmetrical structure. Leaving off this line this would make line
> 500 the central line of 999 (only in a poem with an odd number of
> lines can there be a central line). This line the marks Hazel's
> death, and Hazel's death is clearly the "center" of the poem.
On May 8, 2010, at 1:31 AM, Anthony Stadlen wrote:
> This is a non-sequitur. It answers the questions "Why would there
> have been a line 1000?" and "Why would line 1000 have been the last
> line?" It does not answer my question: << Why, why, why "presumably
> a repetition of the first line at the end"? >>
>
> The poem appears symmetrical in certain respects. This no more
> proves line 1000 = line 1 than that line 999 = line 2. And the poem
> is not obviously circular or cyclical like Finnegans Wake.
>
> As I said: << We have only Kinbote's word for it. Why should we
> accept it? He doesn't even claim Shade told him there would be such
> a repetition. As I pointed out last time round, the poem would read
> very oddly if it did in fact end with the first line. Was my
> instigation of the Great Competition on NABOKV-L to compose a last
> (not equal to first) line all in vain? >>
>
> Perhaps the line would have been a despairing glance into the Abyss:
On May 8, 2010, at 2:25 PM, R S Gwynn wrote:
> ... I think that JS fully intended to end at 999. It's for the
> reader to complete the couplet, if he or she is so inclined. it
> would have been easy enough for JS to write the line if he'd wanted
> to. Kinbote's supposition is as good as anyone's, as the choice of
> rhyme does send us back to the beginning. I frankly think that all
> of JS's musings about the afterlife have brought him no resolution,
> only a "faint hope." Thus, let the poem end without conclusion or
> say, essentially, "back to square one."
On May 8, 2010, at 6:36 PM, Anthony Stadlen wrote:
> In a message dated 08/05/2010 21:29:30 GMT Daylight Time, Rsgwynn1@CS.COM
> writes:
> It's for the reader to complete the couplet, if he or she is so
> inclined
> This was one of the possibilities I suggested, and indeed it was why
> I suggested the Great Competition. It could be JS's or VN's intention.
On May 10, 2010, at 6:18 PM, Jerry Friedman wrote:
> Absolutely His God died young. He would have liked some kind of
> certainty, but what he found instead was a faint hope, described as
> such in a very deliberate anticlimax. But he started with nothing
> but the skepticism and atheism of most intellectuals of his time
> (and probably ours still). Reaching a reasonable certainty would
> feel tremendous.
> To join the discussion of the last line, I think the simplest
> explanation is that at the time of Shade's death, he doesn't know
> what it is yet. Presumably he wants to go back to the waxwing
> slain, but the precise wording is one of the details (maybe the only
> one) that Kinbote tells us Shade hasn't settled yet. Then after he
> dies but survives, the original line makes sense it couldn't have in
> any other sequence of events: he became the part that lived on, flew
> on.
On May 12, 2010, at 10:27 PM, Don Johnson wrote:
> ... Does it not seem apropos, that the missing final line (1000) is
> intended to mark the ultimate indeterminacy of the afterlife
> issue? ... a fitting conclusion, no?
On May 14, 2010, at 7:17 AM, Anthony Stadlen wrote:
> That is indeed what I have been trying to suggest.
On May 14, 2010, at 1:57 PM, Kerri Pierce wrote:
> ... I believe you also have to look at the function the missing last
> line fulfills in the novel as a whole... it allows Kinbote a "way in."
On May 22, 2010, at 6:02 PM, Dave Haan wrote:
> Kerri Pierce's observation of the "missing" line as Kinbote's "way
> in" neatly compensates the added escape square which affords Kinbote
> a "way out": King Alfin's old flame Iris Acht (d. 1888), may be seen
> as translating to Iris Eight, i.e., i8 (or eye-8), in chess notation
> referring to a square just off the 8x8 board (which only goes up to
> h8); her irisated photograph hangs above the trapdoor escape that
> King Charles/Kinbote ("a king-in-the-corner waiter of the solus rex
> type") uses to evade capture.
>
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others, late and overlong. Hopefully it won't bore.
An earlier posting of mine, THOUGHTS: the need for climax in Canto 4,
tried, mainly, to make the point that Shade's Litany of Loathes should
be read with manic rage, and thus serve as an emotional climax to the
poem. Kinbote, in his commentary to the opening lines of Canto 4 is a
bit equivocal on this point.
Actually, the promise made in these four lines will not be really kept
except for the repetition of their incantatory rhythm in lines 915 and
923-924 (leading to the savage attack in 925-930). The poet like a
fiery rooster seems to flap his wings in a preparatory burst of would-
be inspiration, but the sun does not rise. Instead of the wild poetry
promised here, we get a jest or two, a bit of satire, and at the end
of the canto, a wonderful radiance of tenderness and repose.
Thus it could be said that Kinbote finds Canto 4, on the whole, anti-
climatic; yet singles out Shade's Litany of Loathes (lines 925-930) as
a savage attack. This is the passage that I maintain should be read
with great animation, and thus serve as a climax, albeit satiric and
ironic; and is supportive of the notion that Shade is mad. In gliding
over this Kinbote may be forced by VN to diminish how passionate Shade
becomes so as not to reveal too greatly this discoverable joke.
But most of the list seemed to prefer to move on to the end of the
poem and discuss its significance, namely the fact that it doesn't end
in a complete couplet, and that the last line rhymes with the first.
Kinbote, of course, points this out in his foreword:
Nay, I shall even assert (as our shadows still walk without us) that
there remained to be written only one line of the poem (namely verse
1000) which would have been identical to line 1 and would have
completed the symmetry of the structure, with its two identical
central parts, solid and ample, forming together with the shorter
flanks twin wings of five hundred verses each, and damn that music.
Knowing Shade's combinatorial turn of mind and subtle sense of
harmonic balance, I cannot imagine that he intended to deform the
faces of his crystal by meddling with its predictable growth. And if
all this were not enough--and it is, it is enough--I have had the
dramatic occasion of hearing my poor friend's own voice proclaim on
the evening of July 21 the end, or almost the end, of his labors. (See
my note to line 991.)
The most relevant part of that note is:
"Well," I said, "has the muse been kind to you?"
"Very kind," he replied, slightly bowing his hand-propped head:
"Exceptionally kind and gentle. In fact, I have here [indicating a
huge pregnant envelope near him on the oilcloth] practically the
entire product. A few trifles to settle and [suddenly striking the
table with his fist] I've swung it, by God."
This seems to leave the matter largely up in the air. Kinbote is, as
usual, useful, or unreliable, or ironic, depending upon VN's mood or
needs; or the reader's.
Gwynn stands Kinbote's symmetry argument on its head, arguing the poem
is more symmetric without line 1000, and marks Hazel's death, line
500, as the center piece of the poem.
Stadlen doesn't seem to feel that the fact that the last line of the
poem rhymes with the first draws the reader's attention to the first
line, thus making the poem circular.
Gwynn goes on to say the ending signifies a lack of conclusiveness as
regards Shade's investigations of an afterlife.
Stadlen agrees with Gwynn that it's for the reader to complete the
couplet, [as] he or she is so inclined.
Friedman agrees with Kinbote that the poem is incomplete, but for him
Shade's death and survival renders it sensible in a way that it
otherwise is not.
Johnson, agreeing with Gwynn, says the missing final line (1000) ...
mark[s] the ultimate indeterminacy of the afterlife issue?
Pierce writes that the missing last line function[s] to allow...
Kinbote a "way in."
Haan writes ... Pierce's observation of the "missing" line as
Kinbote's "way in" neatly compensates [complements?] the added escape
square which affords Kinbote a "way out": ... Iris Acht (d. 1888), ...
seen as ... Iris Eight, i.e., i8 (or eye-8), in chess notation
referring to a square just off the 8x8 board (which only goes up to h8);
I guess I would say I find the final line(s) even more anti-climatic
than most members of the list do. All this seems like much ado about,
well, literally, nothing; and perhaps a gambit set for the reader who
seeks some higher meaning in VN's confection.
I, like Pierce, see mainly functionalism, but not as a way of allowing
Kinbote in. Kinbote's been in since the first page of his foreword. I
don't see that having the first line repeated at the end of the poem
renders Kinbote, and his continuance in his commentary, in any
significant way foreclosed, or even awkward. The story goes on pretty
much the same in either case.
First let me say I find the poem ending half-closed; for only half of
a couplet is present. Yet there is in Shade's pronouncements about
Hazel's survival, and about the structure of the universe, a
definitiveness that sounds like a life's summation, and hence a
premonition of doom, and thus a sense of semantic closure, and
therefore half-closed.
I see three functional objectives that the ambiguous, half-closed,
ending fulfills: closure, continuance, circularity.
Closure: the desire for the poem to end in a way that sounds complete
when recited. This assumes that VN intended the poem as a stand-alone
piece worthy of recital. For those who find the poem merely a plot
device and not worth reciting, this function presumably rings a little
hollow.
Continuance: the desire for the poem to serve as an introduction to
Kinbote's commentary read consecutively, as most readers probably do,
as a regular novel.
Circularity: the desire, as in Joyce's Finnegans Wake, for the reader
to return to the beginning of the work again, or at least consider
doing so.
Repeating line 1 as line 1,000 renders the poem's sense of closure
more complete, and may make its seem less attached to the following
commentary. This doesn't change things much as regards closure or
continuance.
But repeating the line significantly affects the poem's sense of
formal circularity. The reader has considerably less reason to
consider returning to the start of the poem and rereading (which is
probably more of a gesture than an actual practice).
So what is lost in this?
Shade's life, all said, is an experience; so the progress made from
line 1 to line 999 surely accounts for something.
The reader may be back at square one, but his understanding is surely
different.
For the reader who believes that Shade metamorphoses into Kinbote,
though, something special is lost. For that reader can imagine, in
reading the poem a second time, that it is not Shade but Kinbote who,
having just inherited the set of index cards from the disposed Shade,
is now saying the poem for the first time, and beginning to form his
eccentric explications of its sometimes ambiguous content.
And indeed Kinbote can, in his own way, identify with the opening
line, I was the shadow of the waxwing slain; as Kinbote can be viewed
as Shade's shadow.
Commodiously yours,
–GSL
ps:
I like Haan's discovery: Iris Acht = I8?!
Wikipedia <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess_notation> gives that
algebraic chess notation has been in use in some regions since the
early 1800s[,] Descriptive chess notation, English notation or English
descriptive notation...[u]ntil the 1970s, at least in English-speaking
countries.
I8, of course, would be algebraic notation.
Most readers, even those who were chess players, would probably never
of made Haan's discovery in 1962, but that doesn't mean that this
wasn't VN's intent. I suspect it was. Nevertheless it would be
interesting to know if the chess problems VN composed [while in
Germany] were set down in algebraic or descriptive notation.
Perhaps some better-off member of the list might bid on the set of
sketches of these chess problems that have only just recently been put
up for auction at Christie's, and thus help clarify this issue. Such
an investment would surely be better than wasting one's money on stocks.
–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
pps:
For those interested in a summary of the last-line correspondence:
On May 5, 2010, at 10:59 PM, R S Gwynn wrote:
> As I've said before, the omission of the last line by Shade (and the
> "last" line is probably the first) is part of the poem's clearly
> symmetrical structure. Leaving off this line this would make line
> 500 the central line of 999 (only in a poem with an odd number of
> lines can there be a central line). This line the marks Hazel's
> death, and Hazel's death is clearly the "center" of the poem.
On May 8, 2010, at 1:31 AM, Anthony Stadlen wrote:
> This is a non-sequitur. It answers the questions "Why would there
> have been a line 1000?" and "Why would line 1000 have been the last
> line?" It does not answer my question: << Why, why, why "presumably
> a repetition of the first line at the end"? >>
>
> The poem appears symmetrical in certain respects. This no more
> proves line 1000 = line 1 than that line 999 = line 2. And the poem
> is not obviously circular or cyclical like Finnegans Wake.
>
> As I said: << We have only Kinbote's word for it. Why should we
> accept it? He doesn't even claim Shade told him there would be such
> a repetition. As I pointed out last time round, the poem would read
> very oddly if it did in fact end with the first line. Was my
> instigation of the Great Competition on NABOKV-L to compose a last
> (not equal to first) line all in vain? >>
>
> Perhaps the line would have been a despairing glance into the Abyss:
On May 8, 2010, at 2:25 PM, R S Gwynn wrote:
> ... I think that JS fully intended to end at 999. It's for the
> reader to complete the couplet, if he or she is so inclined. it
> would have been easy enough for JS to write the line if he'd wanted
> to. Kinbote's supposition is as good as anyone's, as the choice of
> rhyme does send us back to the beginning. I frankly think that all
> of JS's musings about the afterlife have brought him no resolution,
> only a "faint hope." Thus, let the poem end without conclusion or
> say, essentially, "back to square one."
On May 8, 2010, at 6:36 PM, Anthony Stadlen wrote:
> In a message dated 08/05/2010 21:29:30 GMT Daylight Time, Rsgwynn1@CS.COM
> writes:
> It's for the reader to complete the couplet, if he or she is so
> inclined
> This was one of the possibilities I suggested, and indeed it was why
> I suggested the Great Competition. It could be JS's or VN's intention.
On May 10, 2010, at 6:18 PM, Jerry Friedman wrote:
> Absolutely His God died young. He would have liked some kind of
> certainty, but what he found instead was a faint hope, described as
> such in a very deliberate anticlimax. But he started with nothing
> but the skepticism and atheism of most intellectuals of his time
> (and probably ours still). Reaching a reasonable certainty would
> feel tremendous.
> To join the discussion of the last line, I think the simplest
> explanation is that at the time of Shade's death, he doesn't know
> what it is yet. Presumably he wants to go back to the waxwing
> slain, but the precise wording is one of the details (maybe the only
> one) that Kinbote tells us Shade hasn't settled yet. Then after he
> dies but survives, the original line makes sense it couldn't have in
> any other sequence of events: he became the part that lived on, flew
> on.
On May 12, 2010, at 10:27 PM, Don Johnson wrote:
> ... Does it not seem apropos, that the missing final line (1000) is
> intended to mark the ultimate indeterminacy of the afterlife
> issue? ... a fitting conclusion, no?
On May 14, 2010, at 7:17 AM, Anthony Stadlen wrote:
> That is indeed what I have been trying to suggest.
On May 14, 2010, at 1:57 PM, Kerri Pierce wrote:
> ... I believe you also have to look at the function the missing last
> line fulfills in the novel as a whole... it allows Kinbote a "way in."
On May 22, 2010, at 6:02 PM, Dave Haan wrote:
> Kerri Pierce's observation of the "missing" line as Kinbote's "way
> in" neatly compensates the added escape square which affords Kinbote
> a "way out": King Alfin's old flame Iris Acht (d. 1888), may be seen
> as translating to Iris Eight, i.e., i8 (or eye-8), in chess notation
> referring to a square just off the 8x8 board (which only goes up to
> h8); her irisated photograph hangs above the trapdoor escape that
> King Charles/Kinbote ("a king-in-the-corner waiter of the solus rex
> type") uses to evade capture.
>
Search archive with Google:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
Visit "Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
Manage subscription options: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/