Subject
THOUGHTS: Bobolinks and apophenia
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Joseph Aisenberg responds to Jerry Friedman:
Actually, I, Aisenberg, had really two separate tracks in my argument. I never denied that Nabokov tried to put the ghost of aunt Maude into the novel. If I did, I should have known better. What I wanted, or want to suggest is a little different. Frst, I wish to question the artistic effectiveness of Nabokov's use of this kind of ghost. I want to say that his way of hiding the ghost in the machine, Aunt Maude's junky message, is a sort of mealy mouthed, pale, watery, withered, and to my reading, very very bland and uninteresting sort of ghost, even though it contains an important, yet ultimately useless warning to Shade. Now maybe this really represents Nabokov's view of otherworldly beings, his actual experience, and this was just the most naturalistic way he could find to dramatize the subject, but to me it seems like he didn't have the courage to make the ghost more overt because he was afraid it would seem cheesy and mistakenly, in my opinion, believed that mystified ideas which one either has to infer or decode will magically make them deeper and more acceptable. My second point, which has so far not been taken up, is that even Vera Nabokov's sworn testimony on the subject still doesn't make the ghost of Aunt Maude an unproblematic fact. She remains as unsure as ever because of Nabokov's way of a layering everything through first person accounts. As I pointed out before, even in The Vane Sisters the ghost is uncertain. In fact I've always been convinced, due to the story's ultra contrived structure, that the narrator must be a liar who planted the ghost in the text himself and merely pretends not to know it's there. I think this is one of the limitations that crops up in Nabokov's way of deliberately foregrounding the subjective nature of narrative--occasionally he forgets the full implications of this and obscurities abound, as evidenced by the fact that even a bunch of Nabokov geeks like us can't decide what Pale Fire is really all about. I believe my version of the book covers all the bases pretty well though: as Life must be lived the ghostly realm, though possibly extant, can't help us live it. The best we can do are peceive patterns that can't be fully interpreted, only felt. If we could reread life like a book or somehow get outside the goldfish bowl, as we all eventually shall, then perhpas the meaning of the otherworld would be, well, fully meaningful. Kinbote's need to take Shade's poem echoes Shade's need to find life after death, only Kinbote doesn't have Shade's sense to keep what's in his head in its correct space, his head or on the page, and so plunges into folly and bad behavior which gets him nowhere he could recognize. Thus while Nabokov has planted his ghost--again, in a manner so forced and contrived that this must be what's behind so many readers need to make Shade and Kinbote one and the same person, beyond their identy as Nabokovian projections--I think skepticism about these little ghosts remains a stronger strain than the hidden confirmation.
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Actually, I, Aisenberg, had really two separate tracks in my argument. I never denied that Nabokov tried to put the ghost of aunt Maude into the novel. If I did, I should have known better. What I wanted, or want to suggest is a little different. Frst, I wish to question the artistic effectiveness of Nabokov's use of this kind of ghost. I want to say that his way of hiding the ghost in the machine, Aunt Maude's junky message, is a sort of mealy mouthed, pale, watery, withered, and to my reading, very very bland and uninteresting sort of ghost, even though it contains an important, yet ultimately useless warning to Shade. Now maybe this really represents Nabokov's view of otherworldly beings, his actual experience, and this was just the most naturalistic way he could find to dramatize the subject, but to me it seems like he didn't have the courage to make the ghost more overt because he was afraid it would seem cheesy and mistakenly, in my opinion, believed that mystified ideas which one either has to infer or decode will magically make them deeper and more acceptable. My second point, which has so far not been taken up, is that even Vera Nabokov's sworn testimony on the subject still doesn't make the ghost of Aunt Maude an unproblematic fact. She remains as unsure as ever because of Nabokov's way of a layering everything through first person accounts. As I pointed out before, even in The Vane Sisters the ghost is uncertain. In fact I've always been convinced, due to the story's ultra contrived structure, that the narrator must be a liar who planted the ghost in the text himself and merely pretends not to know it's there. I think this is one of the limitations that crops up in Nabokov's way of deliberately foregrounding the subjective nature of narrative--occasionally he forgets the full implications of this and obscurities abound, as evidenced by the fact that even a bunch of Nabokov geeks like us can't decide what Pale Fire is really all about. I believe my version of the book covers all the bases pretty well though: as Life must be lived the ghostly realm, though possibly extant, can't help us live it. The best we can do are peceive patterns that can't be fully interpreted, only felt. If we could reread life like a book or somehow get outside the goldfish bowl, as we all eventually shall, then perhpas the meaning of the otherworld would be, well, fully meaningful. Kinbote's need to take Shade's poem echoes Shade's need to find life after death, only Kinbote doesn't have Shade's sense to keep what's in his head in its correct space, his head or on the page, and so plunges into folly and bad behavior which gets him nowhere he could recognize. Thus while Nabokov has planted his ghost--again, in a manner so forced and contrived that this must be what's behind so many readers need to make Shade and Kinbote one and the same person, beyond their identy as Nabokovian projections--I think skepticism about these little ghosts remains a stronger strain than the hidden confirmation.
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/