Subject
[NABOKOV-L] Naiman's paronomasia, allegories,
dead authors - and Pale Fire
dead authors - and Pale Fire
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Date
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If Naiman had started his book with the contents of Chapter 8 ("The Allegorial Poetics of The Defense") I might not have been as distraught as I was with his preceding exercises in paronomasia and general drift. His examination of Luzhin's intratextual author-character toils and altered dimensions (from flat into three-dimensional) is convincingly presented, to the point of inviting me into a backlook into its initial unchaste chapters.
Naiman holds that the "metafictive interpretive game" has not been exhausted (a caveat for those who thrive to see Nabokov as a philsopher of subjectivity, as an occult, a religious thinker, a moral prophet aso): "This is the first novel...where Nabokov begins to insist on the method of reading that will blatter be so closely tied to thematic issues of sexual perversity...its connotative tricks and literary allusions ...as a training ground for the perverse reader and as an arena where he can pursue authorized deconstructive readings without the attendant sexual anxieties that shadow and shape the interpretation of Nabokov's later work [...]My argument will be that the work is intended as an allegory about the relationship prevailing between author and character in all fiction." (181-2) For him, this novel's "central structural opposition" lies in "the conflict prevailing between registers of two and three dimensions." For him, "Luzhin suffers from the ultimate, allegorical character fault - the fault of being a character."(195) "Allegory is both the subject and the device of The Defense."(212).
Naiman describes various images that indicate autrhorial presence (in this novel and elsewhere): "depth, wind, shadow, the attribution of sensory stimuli to unseen source, and the sudden illumination or extinction of lightning on the book's 'set'."(199) Luzhin, as a two-dimensional being, may be "experiencing the third dimension - that of authorship - from the perspetive of the second and cand see only spectral shadows cast on his plane from above." (207).Later, we read that "the author and reader exist in a fourth dimension, the inhabitants of which enjoy a transtemporal position in relation to the events described in the text. In effect, the experience of reading outside a text is akin to having a divine rapport to time in which all events are contemporaneous" (215).
He quotes Bakthin (Art and Answerability) and I extract a set of lines from his quote about the hero who: "in respect to meaning, he must be dead for us, formally dead. In this sense we could say that death is the form of aesthetic consummation of an individual.", and Naiman adds: "A hero, Bakthin empashizes, is someone whose life has been put into a rythm."(209)
Saussurean signifiers (there are no fixed meanings to a word, for example) and the Freudian "unconscious", of course, interfere with a character's "meaning", closure, or "consummation" but Nabokov didn't take them into account when he fashioned, say "Pale Fire", its shadows, winds and Kinbote. And I couldn't help wondering, and sharing my initial conjectures with the List, if the entire issue of intra-extratextuality could not be profitably imported onto Kinbote and Shade's poem (I would be very interested in a special bibliography about that, if anyone could help give me access to it). Nabokov often referred to his poem, "Pale Fire", during interviews [in SO, I believe, he even informs us that he started to work on his poem in Montreux and to fashion Zembla in Nice (or the other way around)].
If we value Nabokov's/Shade poem as being "extra-textual" in relation to the novel that carries a similar title, then we could consider Kinbote as a character doing the opposite motion as the one Naiman has described for Luzhin. The latter wanted "out" - whereas we'd find that Kinbote mainly attempts to drag John Shade, and his production, "into a work of fiction," using Gradus (and his "rythmic advance") as his favorite instrument. This is why Shade must be succesfully "killed by Gradus" ( if we agree with Bakthin's theory that a hero, "in respect to meaning...must be dead for us, formally dead"). It is also interesting that we only learn about Kinbote's suicide extyra-textuality (also from Nabokov interviews). Anyway, that's as far as I can go with my rather dim reader's lights...
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Naiman holds that the "metafictive interpretive game" has not been exhausted (a caveat for those who thrive to see Nabokov as a philsopher of subjectivity, as an occult, a religious thinker, a moral prophet aso): "This is the first novel...where Nabokov begins to insist on the method of reading that will blatter be so closely tied to thematic issues of sexual perversity...its connotative tricks and literary allusions ...as a training ground for the perverse reader and as an arena where he can pursue authorized deconstructive readings without the attendant sexual anxieties that shadow and shape the interpretation of Nabokov's later work [...]My argument will be that the work is intended as an allegory about the relationship prevailing between author and character in all fiction." (181-2) For him, this novel's "central structural opposition" lies in "the conflict prevailing between registers of two and three dimensions." For him, "Luzhin suffers from the ultimate, allegorical character fault - the fault of being a character."(195) "Allegory is both the subject and the device of The Defense."(212).
Naiman describes various images that indicate autrhorial presence (in this novel and elsewhere): "depth, wind, shadow, the attribution of sensory stimuli to unseen source, and the sudden illumination or extinction of lightning on the book's 'set'."(199) Luzhin, as a two-dimensional being, may be "experiencing the third dimension - that of authorship - from the perspetive of the second and cand see only spectral shadows cast on his plane from above." (207).Later, we read that "the author and reader exist in a fourth dimension, the inhabitants of which enjoy a transtemporal position in relation to the events described in the text. In effect, the experience of reading outside a text is akin to having a divine rapport to time in which all events are contemporaneous" (215).
He quotes Bakthin (Art and Answerability) and I extract a set of lines from his quote about the hero who: "in respect to meaning, he must be dead for us, formally dead. In this sense we could say that death is the form of aesthetic consummation of an individual.", and Naiman adds: "A hero, Bakthin empashizes, is someone whose life has been put into a rythm."(209)
Saussurean signifiers (there are no fixed meanings to a word, for example) and the Freudian "unconscious", of course, interfere with a character's "meaning", closure, or "consummation" but Nabokov didn't take them into account when he fashioned, say "Pale Fire", its shadows, winds and Kinbote. And I couldn't help wondering, and sharing my initial conjectures with the List, if the entire issue of intra-extratextuality could not be profitably imported onto Kinbote and Shade's poem (I would be very interested in a special bibliography about that, if anyone could help give me access to it). Nabokov often referred to his poem, "Pale Fire", during interviews [in SO, I believe, he even informs us that he started to work on his poem in Montreux and to fashion Zembla in Nice (or the other way around)].
If we value Nabokov's/Shade poem as being "extra-textual" in relation to the novel that carries a similar title, then we could consider Kinbote as a character doing the opposite motion as the one Naiman has described for Luzhin. The latter wanted "out" - whereas we'd find that Kinbote mainly attempts to drag John Shade, and his production, "into a work of fiction," using Gradus (and his "rythmic advance") as his favorite instrument. This is why Shade must be succesfully "killed by Gradus" ( if we agree with Bakthin's theory that a hero, "in respect to meaning...must be dead for us, formally dead"). It is also interesting that we only learn about Kinbote's suicide extyra-textuality (also from Nabokov interviews). Anyway, that's as far as I can go with my rather dim reader's lights...
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/