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VNBIB: Reading Voices & Transegmental Drift in PF
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Dear list,
I recently happened upon a fascinating analysis of John Shade's verse (and
other things PF) in a chapter (titled "Rhyme's Treason") from Garrett
Stewart's book Reading Voices (U of California, 1990). Stewart focuses on a
concept that he calls "transegmental drift," where, by either elision or
liaison, adjacent phonemes blend into one another. So, for example, Shade
rhymes "mirrors smiled" with "shadows mild." The former works by elision,
where we turn the two S sounds into one (so the ear cannot tell if it is
hearing "mirror smiled" or "mirrors smiled"). The latter case works by
liaison, where the sibilant may be shifted by the ear to the beginning of
"mild," to make "smiled." Some other examples of transegmentals from "PF"
given by Stewart:
dance / its stance (elision)
no doubt / left out (liaison)
stress / woman's dress (liaison)
other men die but I / Am not another; therefore I'll not die (elision)
that rapt / trapped (liaison)
A few choice excerpts:
"In Pale Fire Shade and Kinbote . . . seem ultimately to converge-at least
to the extent that each aestheticizes the verbal accident, the happy fault,
the balletic slip."
"There is a weird fatalism as well as whimsy at work, which turns reading
itself into a kind of paranoia. It is apprehensiveness curiously matched by
Kinbote's replotting of the poetic text as his own prolonged flight from
death into textual immortality. To submit to the text as an occasion of
paranoia is no longer to trust your senses. Words can't be relied on to
stay in the scripted place. Their constituent phonemes may at any moment
contract new allegiances, forge new words, or if not words, then
unprocessed but palpable new sound configurations that subtend or overarch
the lexical boundary without stabilizing any alternative phrase."
After addressing drift in "PF," the poem, he analyzes Hazel's barn message,
with its many "variable intervals" between lexical units. An excerpt from
that section:
"[T]he lake in which Hazel dies is located (by way of an aural rebus) in
the alphabetic void-not even a functioning lexical gap-between the towns of
'Exe' and 'Wye' (l. 490) when pronounced as the phonetic names of adjacent
alphabetical characters. The 'variable interval' guiding Kinbote's
researches into the ghost's code is thus in and of itself the clue to
Hazel's fate, and precisely in its semantic contingency, its nonsignifying
mobility. The 'certain sounds and lights' that the young girl tried to
parse into an articulate message, calling up perhaps the auditory and
visual collaboration of ordinary language, thereby offers a clue to the
textual allegory of her end. She has suffered a vanishing into and between
script, a death by letters-merely because of their phonemic and graphic
constituents, shifting and imponderable as they may be. The clue was there
in the alphabetic code itself. Suicide or not, her death as represented is
made to depend on the sheer accident of the alphabetic code itself."
The larger chapter, by the way, includes discussion of similar moves in
Hopkins, Joyce, and others.
Matt Roth
[EDNOTE. Before this message could be forwarded, Matt added the following
postscript. -- SES]
In my post below, I should have said that the ear cannot decide between
"mirrors smiled," "mirror smiled," or "mirrors mild."
Matt Roth
Search archive with Google:
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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/
I recently happened upon a fascinating analysis of John Shade's verse (and
other things PF) in a chapter (titled "Rhyme's Treason") from Garrett
Stewart's book Reading Voices (U of California, 1990). Stewart focuses on a
concept that he calls "transegmental drift," where, by either elision or
liaison, adjacent phonemes blend into one another. So, for example, Shade
rhymes "mirrors smiled" with "shadows mild." The former works by elision,
where we turn the two S sounds into one (so the ear cannot tell if it is
hearing "mirror smiled" or "mirrors smiled"). The latter case works by
liaison, where the sibilant may be shifted by the ear to the beginning of
"mild," to make "smiled." Some other examples of transegmentals from "PF"
given by Stewart:
dance / its stance (elision)
no doubt / left out (liaison)
stress / woman's dress (liaison)
other men die but I / Am not another; therefore I'll not die (elision)
that rapt / trapped (liaison)
A few choice excerpts:
"In Pale Fire Shade and Kinbote . . . seem ultimately to converge-at least
to the extent that each aestheticizes the verbal accident, the happy fault,
the balletic slip."
"There is a weird fatalism as well as whimsy at work, which turns reading
itself into a kind of paranoia. It is apprehensiveness curiously matched by
Kinbote's replotting of the poetic text as his own prolonged flight from
death into textual immortality. To submit to the text as an occasion of
paranoia is no longer to trust your senses. Words can't be relied on to
stay in the scripted place. Their constituent phonemes may at any moment
contract new allegiances, forge new words, or if not words, then
unprocessed but palpable new sound configurations that subtend or overarch
the lexical boundary without stabilizing any alternative phrase."
After addressing drift in "PF," the poem, he analyzes Hazel's barn message,
with its many "variable intervals" between lexical units. An excerpt from
that section:
"[T]he lake in which Hazel dies is located (by way of an aural rebus) in
the alphabetic void-not even a functioning lexical gap-between the towns of
'Exe' and 'Wye' (l. 490) when pronounced as the phonetic names of adjacent
alphabetical characters. The 'variable interval' guiding Kinbote's
researches into the ghost's code is thus in and of itself the clue to
Hazel's fate, and precisely in its semantic contingency, its nonsignifying
mobility. The 'certain sounds and lights' that the young girl tried to
parse into an articulate message, calling up perhaps the auditory and
visual collaboration of ordinary language, thereby offers a clue to the
textual allegory of her end. She has suffered a vanishing into and between
script, a death by letters-merely because of their phonemic and graphic
constituents, shifting and imponderable as they may be. The clue was there
in the alphabetic code itself. Suicide or not, her death as represented is
made to depend on the sheer accident of the alphabetic code itself."
The larger chapter, by the way, includes discussion of similar moves in
Hopkins, Joyce, and others.
Matt Roth
[EDNOTE. Before this message could be forwarded, Matt added the following
postscript. -- SES]
In my post below, I should have said that the ear cannot decide between
"mirrors smiled," "mirror smiled," or "mirrors mild."
Matt Roth
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/