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R: [NABOKV-L] Pale Fire & scholarship
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Charles writes:-
-The strictness of the sonnet form necessarily requires it to be carefully worked over-
Depends on which language one is writing in, and what form of the sonnet one is writing in. Rhyme-rich continental languages suffer much less from this formal difficulty than rhyme-poor English, particularly in modern times. Yet whatever the linguistic tradition, the difficulty is in the first quatrain. If that comes out, experience will tell the poet that the rest will fall, without conscious design, neatly into place.
----- Original Message -----
From: Chaswe@AOL.COM
To: NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU
Sent: Sunday, October 29, 2006 9:31 PM
Subject: Re: [NABOKV-L] Pale Fire & scholarship
Dear all and sundry,
Oof. Or ouf. The list postings these days are dumped in a clump, making them hard to cope with. I’ll just pick a few burrs out of my hair.
A few years ago Auberon Waugh (RIP) selected Pale Fire as his novel of the century. No doubt he had many reasons, but the one that struck me most was that he perceived it as a gigantic and hilarious send-up of the literary scholarship business.
Here’s one way of looking at it. Kinbote is a frustrated poet trying to be a scholar. Shade is a career academic, trying to be a poet. Poets are mad. Scholars are sane. It’s exceedingly rare for the two to meet on the same ground. No great poets have been scholars; no great scholars have been poets. Pale Fire, the poem, is ingeniously versified prose. Pale Fire, the book, is inspired poetry in scholarly footnote form.
Stan Kelly-Bootle’s observation: “All is CONtext!” is stimulating. I’d been musing for a couple of days that in my posting of 27/10 I’d written: “Yeats also has a poem on the scholar/artist conflic” ---- after noticing that I’d dropped a t off the last word. What might a scholar logically deduce from this harebreath slip, hardly Freudian but just possibly Nabokovian. Was this an instance of Yoko Ono’s entertaining shortening of “conceptual art” into “con-art”, merged with “flic”, a Parisian copper, or perhaps “flic[k]”, a series of static images designed to produce the illusion of motion?
Brian Boyd’s reaction has me baffled. “By your standards Shakespeare's sonnets would not be poetry either, since some of those have very much been worried into being (take sonnet
104, for instance). You might try broadening your tastes.”
Whether sonnet 104 was worried into existence or not, having now read it carefully, it strikes me as poetry of a much higher order than Pale Fire, the poem. I don’t find it all that easy to grasp what Frost was getting at, but I suppose it must have something to do with the initial “wild” creative impulse. I would suggest that this impulse is not the same for scholars or academics as for poets. Poets have the advantage, since without them scholars would have nothing to talk about. They also benefit from living outside the box, whereas career-minded academics are obliged to publish or perish. VN strongly resembles Falstaff in that respect: not only witty in himself, but the cause of wit in others.
Besides which, I don’t follow the logic whereby because some sonnets may have been produced solely by perspiration, the others are also without inspiration. The strictness of the sonnet form necessarily requires it to be carefully worked over. Are we not talking in antitheses here? I hope I’m understanding Brian’s last sentence in the spirit in which it was intended, but as a European, though in a minority of one, I do find it rather Antipodean. Being naturally humble, however, I’m always doing my best to broaden my tastes.
Charles
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-The strictness of the sonnet form necessarily requires it to be carefully worked over-
Depends on which language one is writing in, and what form of the sonnet one is writing in. Rhyme-rich continental languages suffer much less from this formal difficulty than rhyme-poor English, particularly in modern times. Yet whatever the linguistic tradition, the difficulty is in the first quatrain. If that comes out, experience will tell the poet that the rest will fall, without conscious design, neatly into place.
----- Original Message -----
From: Chaswe@AOL.COM
To: NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU
Sent: Sunday, October 29, 2006 9:31 PM
Subject: Re: [NABOKV-L] Pale Fire & scholarship
Dear all and sundry,
Oof. Or ouf. The list postings these days are dumped in a clump, making them hard to cope with. I’ll just pick a few burrs out of my hair.
A few years ago Auberon Waugh (RIP) selected Pale Fire as his novel of the century. No doubt he had many reasons, but the one that struck me most was that he perceived it as a gigantic and hilarious send-up of the literary scholarship business.
Here’s one way of looking at it. Kinbote is a frustrated poet trying to be a scholar. Shade is a career academic, trying to be a poet. Poets are mad. Scholars are sane. It’s exceedingly rare for the two to meet on the same ground. No great poets have been scholars; no great scholars have been poets. Pale Fire, the poem, is ingeniously versified prose. Pale Fire, the book, is inspired poetry in scholarly footnote form.
Stan Kelly-Bootle’s observation: “All is CONtext!” is stimulating. I’d been musing for a couple of days that in my posting of 27/10 I’d written: “Yeats also has a poem on the scholar/artist conflic” ---- after noticing that I’d dropped a t off the last word. What might a scholar logically deduce from this harebreath slip, hardly Freudian but just possibly Nabokovian. Was this an instance of Yoko Ono’s entertaining shortening of “conceptual art” into “con-art”, merged with “flic”, a Parisian copper, or perhaps “flic[k]”, a series of static images designed to produce the illusion of motion?
Brian Boyd’s reaction has me baffled. “By your standards Shakespeare's sonnets would not be poetry either, since some of those have very much been worried into being (take sonnet
104, for instance). You might try broadening your tastes.”
Whether sonnet 104 was worried into existence or not, having now read it carefully, it strikes me as poetry of a much higher order than Pale Fire, the poem. I don’t find it all that easy to grasp what Frost was getting at, but I suppose it must have something to do with the initial “wild” creative impulse. I would suggest that this impulse is not the same for scholars or academics as for poets. Poets have the advantage, since without them scholars would have nothing to talk about. They also benefit from living outside the box, whereas career-minded academics are obliged to publish or perish. VN strongly resembles Falstaff in that respect: not only witty in himself, but the cause of wit in others.
Besides which, I don’t follow the logic whereby because some sonnets may have been produced solely by perspiration, the others are also without inspiration. The strictness of the sonnet form necessarily requires it to be carefully worked over. Are we not talking in antitheses here? I hope I’m understanding Brian’s last sentence in the spirit in which it was intended, but as a European, though in a minority of one, I do find it rather Antipodean. Being naturally humble, however, I’m always doing my best to broaden my tastes.
Charles
Search the Nabokv-L archive at UCSB
Contact the Editors
All private editorial communications, without exception, are read by both co-editors.
Visit Zembla
View Nabokv-L Policies
Search the archive: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/archives/nabokv-l.html
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