Subject
Re: THOUGHTS re John Morris's thoughts on enjoyment and "reality"
in PF
in PF
From
Date
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[EDNOTE. Perhaps this post, which refers to several other recent exchanges on the topic of PF's coincidences and VN's intentions, represents a natural conclusion to this thread. However, I'll post any more that arrived within the last 24 hours. -- SES]
From Jerry Friedman:
> Matt Roth wrote:
>
> 2. We can say that they simply reveal VN's role as pattern-maker. In
> effect, all these coincidences are an analogy: Nabokov is to his
> fictional characters and worlds as the cosmic game-players ("promoting
> pawns / To ivory unicorns and ebon fauns") are to us.
Yes, yes! (Following Brian Boyd and Victoria Alexander, and I've
repeated this point here.)
> John Morris writes in response to Matt:
<snip>
> The problem, in brief, is how much narrative is actually left
> if neither Kinbote nor Zembla can be presumed to exist. We now have a
> narrator so unreliable that we either believe nothing he says, or
> selectively pick and choose which passages to accept or "correct" in
> order to support whatever theory we hold about the respective realities
> of Zembla and "Professor Kinbote" in the world of Pale Fire. Indeed,
> why should our radical Cartesian doubt stop with line 894, or
> interactions with New Wye residents?
It's not just Cartesian doubt--I think Nabokov encourages it.
The list of trees, the Zemblan /Timon/, the big trucks, the
coincidence of birthdates and the "slip" on birth years...
> This skeptical road, once embarked upon, has no self-evident
> terminus.
The terminus is to recognize that it's a work of fictional art--
which is, oddly considering your phrasing, self-evident.
> This is a tedious way to approach a novel.
But Nabokov encourages it often, with anagrammatic signatures
and "Antiterra" and all the rest. And it's explicit in
/Invitation to a Beheading/.
<snip>
> Can this really be the reading experience VN intended for us?
Yes, yes, yes!
Or at least it's the part I enjoyed the most. I think
/Pale Fire/ ends exactly the way /Invitation to a Beheading/
does, with the scenery rolled up, "If we shadows have offended..."
But more subtly, as this happens in the reader's or rereader's
mind rather than in the text, as Kinbote's unreliability,
various coincidences and patterns, and various discrepancies
show us the difficulty of finding any convincing "real story".
Furthermore, it ends this way for the same reason--to point
us to the Beyond.
This is what Matt said in the comments quoted at the beginning of
this post. One of Nabokov's points is that Someone is to us as VN
is to Shade and Kinbote--as Shade realizes. The reminders that the
book is "only" a fictional creation focus our attention on the
lower half of this analogy, which points us to the upper half.
For Brian, this is a relatively minor point, but I suggest it
looks more important if you consider the title. Why does Shade
call his poem "Pale Fire"? He sees it as the dim reflection of
the players above the stage who created his universe. Why does
Nabokov call his book /Pale Fire/? It's the dim reflection of
the blazing empyrean where our creators can be guessed at.
> Imagine you are describing this wonderful novel to someone who has
never>
> read it. Do you begin, "The main characters are John Shade, an aging
> poet,
> and a Russian madman named Botkin who makes up this place called Zembla
> - oh, and possibly Shade too; who knows?; he's crazy!" and then . . .?
> I'm not even sure how that sentence would end, and I'm quite sure
> that none of us would so describe Pale Fire.
When describing it, I've trailed off--"but you start to see that
there's a lot more to it than that."
> In VN's own occasional words about the
> book, he always adopted what we might call a "surface-level reliability"
> version; for instance, he speaks of "the day on which Kinbote committed
> suicide (and he certainly did, after putting the last touches to his
> edition
> of the poem)." That is, even though he elsewhere states that Kinbote is
> really Botkin, he sees no need to tack that on to this gloss of the
> book's denouement, or to question whether Kinbote really headed for
> the hills with Shade's text.
I don't mind concluding that "Kinbote is Botkin" and "Kinbote
commits suicide" are in the same category, both unreal. Botkin,
nikto.
> The story is about Charles Kinbote and John Shade, whatever
> else we may care to presume is "really" going on. V. Botkin isn't
> even a character in the book, in an important sense.
>
> Kinbote himself - irritating, pathetic, deluded, proud,
> ultimately lovable - and his forever unreachable Onhava are what this
> reader cherishes in the novel.
But the probably non-existence of Zembla doesn't stop you
from enjoying the more than half of the book that doesn't
"really happen".
I think Nabokov is smoothing the path to the conclusion I stated
above. If we can penetrate Kinbote's various deceptions, we
can penetrate the last deception, that something "really happened".
If we can enjoy scenes that that "didn't really happen" (and I
agree with Matt that we do), we can enjoy a novel that "didn't
really happen". And Shade's poem states explicitly where this
path takes us.
> It's all very well to say that K is "really"
> Botkin. This may be a case in which "reality" (which for VN was
> "an infinite succession of steps, levels of perception, false bottoms" )
> should remain a footnote, in a very small font.
This quotation can also suggest the Platonic and Gnostic idea
of universes above and below ours.
> Does this amount to "explaining less of the novel"? Yes,
> that worries me too. But it's a symptom of a deeper worry; to use Matt
> Roth's phrase, I worry about how V. Botkin can be "wedged into" any
> narratively satisfying scenario. I'll be interested to see what others
> think.
I don't think he really can, but I think that leads to what
VN had in mind, or at least to a way we can enjoy the book,
rather than something to be compacted into a footnote.
Jerry Friedman
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From Jerry Friedman:
> Matt Roth wrote:
>
> 2. We can say that they simply reveal VN's role as pattern-maker. In
> effect, all these coincidences are an analogy: Nabokov is to his
> fictional characters and worlds as the cosmic game-players ("promoting
> pawns / To ivory unicorns and ebon fauns") are to us.
Yes, yes! (Following Brian Boyd and Victoria Alexander, and I've
repeated this point here.)
> John Morris writes in response to Matt:
<snip>
> The problem, in brief, is how much narrative is actually left
> if neither Kinbote nor Zembla can be presumed to exist. We now have a
> narrator so unreliable that we either believe nothing he says, or
> selectively pick and choose which passages to accept or "correct" in
> order to support whatever theory we hold about the respective realities
> of Zembla and "Professor Kinbote" in the world of Pale Fire. Indeed,
> why should our radical Cartesian doubt stop with line 894, or
> interactions with New Wye residents?
It's not just Cartesian doubt--I think Nabokov encourages it.
The list of trees, the Zemblan /Timon/, the big trucks, the
coincidence of birthdates and the "slip" on birth years...
> This skeptical road, once embarked upon, has no self-evident
> terminus.
The terminus is to recognize that it's a work of fictional art--
which is, oddly considering your phrasing, self-evident.
> This is a tedious way to approach a novel.
But Nabokov encourages it often, with anagrammatic signatures
and "Antiterra" and all the rest. And it's explicit in
/Invitation to a Beheading/.
<snip>
> Can this really be the reading experience VN intended for us?
Yes, yes, yes!
Or at least it's the part I enjoyed the most. I think
/Pale Fire/ ends exactly the way /Invitation to a Beheading/
does, with the scenery rolled up, "If we shadows have offended..."
But more subtly, as this happens in the reader's or rereader's
mind rather than in the text, as Kinbote's unreliability,
various coincidences and patterns, and various discrepancies
show us the difficulty of finding any convincing "real story".
Furthermore, it ends this way for the same reason--to point
us to the Beyond.
This is what Matt said in the comments quoted at the beginning of
this post. One of Nabokov's points is that Someone is to us as VN
is to Shade and Kinbote--as Shade realizes. The reminders that the
book is "only" a fictional creation focus our attention on the
lower half of this analogy, which points us to the upper half.
For Brian, this is a relatively minor point, but I suggest it
looks more important if you consider the title. Why does Shade
call his poem "Pale Fire"? He sees it as the dim reflection of
the players above the stage who created his universe. Why does
Nabokov call his book /Pale Fire/? It's the dim reflection of
the blazing empyrean where our creators can be guessed at.
> Imagine you are describing this wonderful novel to someone who has
never>
> read it. Do you begin, "The main characters are John Shade, an aging
> poet,
> and a Russian madman named Botkin who makes up this place called Zembla
> - oh, and possibly Shade too; who knows?; he's crazy!" and then . . .?
> I'm not even sure how that sentence would end, and I'm quite sure
> that none of us would so describe Pale Fire.
When describing it, I've trailed off--"but you start to see that
there's a lot more to it than that."
> In VN's own occasional words about the
> book, he always adopted what we might call a "surface-level reliability"
> version; for instance, he speaks of "the day on which Kinbote committed
> suicide (and he certainly did, after putting the last touches to his
> edition
> of the poem)." That is, even though he elsewhere states that Kinbote is
> really Botkin, he sees no need to tack that on to this gloss of the
> book's denouement, or to question whether Kinbote really headed for
> the hills with Shade's text.
I don't mind concluding that "Kinbote is Botkin" and "Kinbote
commits suicide" are in the same category, both unreal. Botkin,
nikto.
> The story is about Charles Kinbote and John Shade, whatever
> else we may care to presume is "really" going on. V. Botkin isn't
> even a character in the book, in an important sense.
>
> Kinbote himself - irritating, pathetic, deluded, proud,
> ultimately lovable - and his forever unreachable Onhava are what this
> reader cherishes in the novel.
But the probably non-existence of Zembla doesn't stop you
from enjoying the more than half of the book that doesn't
"really happen".
I think Nabokov is smoothing the path to the conclusion I stated
above. If we can penetrate Kinbote's various deceptions, we
can penetrate the last deception, that something "really happened".
If we can enjoy scenes that that "didn't really happen" (and I
agree with Matt that we do), we can enjoy a novel that "didn't
really happen". And Shade's poem states explicitly where this
path takes us.
> It's all very well to say that K is "really"
> Botkin. This may be a case in which "reality" (which for VN was
> "an infinite succession of steps, levels of perception, false bottoms" )
> should remain a footnote, in a very small font.
This quotation can also suggest the Platonic and Gnostic idea
of universes above and below ours.
> Does this amount to "explaining less of the novel"? Yes,
> that worries me too. But it's a symptom of a deeper worry; to use Matt
> Roth's phrase, I worry about how V. Botkin can be "wedged into" any
> narratively satisfying scenario. I'll be interested to see what others
> think.
I don't think he really can, but I think that leads to what
VN had in mind, or at least to a way we can enjoy the book,
rather than something to be compacted into a footnote.
Jerry Friedman
Search the archive: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/archives/nabokv-l.html
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