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Re: thoughts: 4000 times
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Laurence Hochard: I wonder if anybody has ever noticed a slight inconsistency in Kinbote's account of his spying on the Shades.in his note to line 181:"On another trip to the bathroom one hour and a half later, at sunrise, I found the light transferred to the bedroom, and smiled indulgently, for, according to my deductions, only two nights had passed since the three-thousand-nine-hundred-ninety-ninth time - but no matter." He alludes to "At least / four thousand times your pillow has been creased / by our two heads (l 275/6)" of course, but at the time of his spying, he couldn't know since he hadn't read the poem and therefore, he can't have smiled indulgently; he can only do so in retrospect, when writing his commentary. Could the inconsistecy be deliberate, here as well as about Kinbote's birthdate? Did VN want to discreetly blur the time landmarks so as to maintain ambiguity as to the identity of the characters? Or are they simply mistakes?
Jansy Mello: I agree, Kinbote would've been able to smile indulgently only in retrospect. Poetic licence? As when Shade, in his poem, inserts details about a Red admiral which he could not have discerned at the time of his writing (he was murdered while this butterfly was hovering about him), but he was familiar enough with it to know these small dots, colorings and textures there and then.
In my opinion, the inconsistencies in the novel are deliberate distractions on Nabokov's part Also, it's too easy to blame the "unreliable narrator" and abandon a fixed point of reference to jump into the heracliean fire of ghostly interpretations. And yet, Nabokov seemed to fear that his cues would pass unnoticed (he often gave us a clue to get to his "plums").* Besides, even an "open novel" must have a point of departure, a navel that may serve as a guide. A living (or a dead) center towards which, like Ulysses, we return after an adventurous and delightful voyage.
Kinbote is extremely consistent when he gives us times and hours. You can compare various isolated informations and notice that, as complicated as they appear to be, they are correct. Some lead us to what must be an important year in the novel, 1915, here: "CX was 18 and Disa 5 in 1933"; " He saw nineteen-year-old Disa for the first time on the festive night of July the 5th, 1947." "Disa, Duchess of Payn... b. 1928..married 1949" (there are lots more). We still know nothing about Kinbote (only about Gradus and CX), but why not believe in him when he insists that he is CX, or when he states John Francis Shade (born July 5, 1898, died July 21, 1959)? *
From your comments about R.Alladaye's book, I got the impression that you were in favor of an approach to PF that would be different from the one suggested by R.A and by B.Boyd. It's as if you were stressing the point that anamorphosis has to be reflected back, with a minimum of distortion, to enable the spectator to access the original image or message - it's not simply an unstructured reversal. However, in both cases, it's also true that: "... even if the solution seems to me to be unsatisfactory, what findings along the way! how pleasurable the discovery of all the correspondences between text ad poem!"
Holbein's "skull" was an allegory, would VN have expanded so much on that?
I'm ready to agree with you that the "dead center of the book" may not be around line 500, but "if one looks for textual evidence, then the place to look for references to anamorphosis couldn't fail to be in K's note to lines 1-4 where he declares "The poem was begun at the dead center of the year, a few minutes after midnight July 1." because, by coincidence, I'd just realized its importance by setting it close to ""We place this fatidic moment at 0:05, July 2, 1959 - which happens to be also the date upon which an innocent poet penned the first lines of his last poem" (note to line 171)." Events conducive to Shade's death have been set in motion just then, at least in Kinbote's mind. And, I think, that's what "Pale Fire" is about i.e, what results from the author-reader relationship (not that we should neglect Nabokov's heroic feat that can stand alone by itself, inspite of all the dangers that I writer has to endure by the simple act of initiating a poem) - Heavens! I just realized that Nabokov died in July 2.(awesome)
........................................................................................................................................................
* - Perhaps the apparent discrepancy, related to the 16-year difference bt. CK and JS, will show us that, when the matter is "birthdays," a year refers to, for instance, "from July to July," or that there are different calendric or astronomic measures of time separating fictional New Wye from Onhava. Or else, indicate another mystery: why would Kinbote inform that he was born in 1914 and consistently indicate that his inventions date from 1915? Would he have been so precise and then make a slip right at the "clinching" moment, leaving no other clue?
.
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Jansy Mello: I agree, Kinbote would've been able to smile indulgently only in retrospect. Poetic licence? As when Shade, in his poem, inserts details about a Red admiral which he could not have discerned at the time of his writing (he was murdered while this butterfly was hovering about him), but he was familiar enough with it to know these small dots, colorings and textures there and then.
In my opinion, the inconsistencies in the novel are deliberate distractions on Nabokov's part Also, it's too easy to blame the "unreliable narrator" and abandon a fixed point of reference to jump into the heracliean fire of ghostly interpretations. And yet, Nabokov seemed to fear that his cues would pass unnoticed (he often gave us a clue to get to his "plums").* Besides, even an "open novel" must have a point of departure, a navel that may serve as a guide. A living (or a dead) center towards which, like Ulysses, we return after an adventurous and delightful voyage.
Kinbote is extremely consistent when he gives us times and hours. You can compare various isolated informations and notice that, as complicated as they appear to be, they are correct. Some lead us to what must be an important year in the novel, 1915, here: "CX was 18 and Disa 5 in 1933"; " He saw nineteen-year-old Disa for the first time on the festive night of July the 5th, 1947." "Disa, Duchess of Payn... b. 1928..married 1949" (there are lots more). We still know nothing about Kinbote (only about Gradus and CX), but why not believe in him when he insists that he is CX, or when he states John Francis Shade (born July 5, 1898, died July 21, 1959)? *
From your comments about R.Alladaye's book, I got the impression that you were in favor of an approach to PF that would be different from the one suggested by R.A and by B.Boyd. It's as if you were stressing the point that anamorphosis has to be reflected back, with a minimum of distortion, to enable the spectator to access the original image or message - it's not simply an unstructured reversal. However, in both cases, it's also true that: "... even if the solution seems to me to be unsatisfactory, what findings along the way! how pleasurable the discovery of all the correspondences between text ad poem!"
Holbein's "skull" was an allegory, would VN have expanded so much on that?
I'm ready to agree with you that the "dead center of the book" may not be around line 500, but "if one looks for textual evidence, then the place to look for references to anamorphosis couldn't fail to be in K's note to lines 1-4 where he declares "The poem was begun at the dead center of the year, a few minutes after midnight July 1." because, by coincidence, I'd just realized its importance by setting it close to ""We place this fatidic moment at 0:05, July 2, 1959 - which happens to be also the date upon which an innocent poet penned the first lines of his last poem" (note to line 171)." Events conducive to Shade's death have been set in motion just then, at least in Kinbote's mind. And, I think, that's what "Pale Fire" is about i.e, what results from the author-reader relationship (not that we should neglect Nabokov's heroic feat that can stand alone by itself, inspite of all the dangers that I writer has to endure by the simple act of initiating a poem) - Heavens! I just realized that Nabokov died in July 2.(awesome)
........................................................................................................................................................
* - Perhaps the apparent discrepancy, related to the 16-year difference bt. CK and JS, will show us that, when the matter is "birthdays," a year refers to, for instance, "from July to July," or that there are different calendric or astronomic measures of time separating fictional New Wye from Onhava. Or else, indicate another mystery: why would Kinbote inform that he was born in 1914 and consistently indicate that his inventions date from 1915? Would he have been so precise and then make a slip right at the "clinching" moment, leaving no other clue?
.
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/