Jansy,
“The Shades were not a very passionate couple, at least so it seems to me. They kept separate rooms and Hazel was engendered after a long period of sterility, after a trip to Nice... The poem Pale Fire, itself, has no trace of eroticism, or sensuality.
The expression " a writer's grief" is a peculiar expression for a "father's grief": he was grieving for himself...
Hazel's experiences in the barn are quite childish: are these the ideal examples of her true "spirituality"? A beautiful ghost that arose from a metamorphosis similar to a butterfly's... would such an image really appeal to Nabokov if not in a parody?”
Excuse my responding to such a small portion of your comment. I am not qualified to deal with the rest since I haven’t done the required reading. I thought Levi-Strauss was the fellow who invented denim jeans but this seems not to be the case.
Isn’t the Shades’ passion referred to a number of times in the poem and even in CK’s commentary? Doesn’t the poem have a stanza mentioning how their mattress indicates how many times they have been conjoined there? Doesn’t Shade, in a semi-hysterical and self-infatuated way describe his earliest love for Sybil, his disbelief at this beauty loving him? Does Shade not refer to her lovingly as they grow older, as she calls his attention to fresh beauties in their yard, such as a bird or a jet stream across the sky? And how he lovingly observes her even as they prepare for a trip and she zips the farcical travel bag’s round-trip zipper?
I believe, in addition, that even Kinbote notates their going-to-bed practices, and spies on the way Shade, more often than not, treads his way to Sybil’s bed before going to his own (Nabokov, many times during his life with Vera, slept, or tried to, in a separate room, and I have heard that they were a pretty passionate couple, even though they had only one child.
Many children, today at least, are born after a long period of “sterility.” These so called periods of sterility (something about that term strikes me as inaccurate) often include an abundant and frequent amount of sexual activity.
So I guess I would have to say that the Pale Fire poem does have traces of eroticism, or sensuality. But nothing that would prevent its sale to the Saturday Evening Post of 1959. Aside from Henry Miller, not many sixty-one year old men seem able to throw down the old eroticism onto the page the way they could in their twenties. John Updike might have what it takes. ( IMO: The true sign when a male writer has finally thrown in the towel is when he starts rambling about eating or cooking.)
I agree that “a writer’s grief” in the context in which it occurs is a dead giveaway to Shade’s true self-centered nature. Wasn’t Frost kind of like this?
Hazel’s activities in the barn may have been childish, but no more childish, and perhaps less so, than the activities of a large number of adult spiritualists, many of them serious and sober individuals who had strong thoughts on the subject. To return to the point, although Hazel’s actions or activities may have been naïve, I don’t think they were childish. Great scientists have undertaken experiments that seemed ludicrous to their peers, and yet rendered valuable results. Hazels “true spirituality” had not time to mature and take form. She acted young because she was young, but to search for one’s spirituality by whatever clumsy means is not a mistake any more than falling down on the ice a dozen times when you’re learning to skate is a mistake. I heard an interesting (but too easy and too slogan-like) statement about spirituality versus religion the other day: Religion is for those who fear Hell; spirituality is for those who have been there.
I, too, reject the beautiful ghost that metamorphosis's into a butterfly. Too simple. I see the novel Pale Fire as an endless ring of life that, like an Escher design, may be drawn thin and nearly transparent at some points, and very thick at others. But it is irresolvable and too flexible to be breakable. It is not a “problem” to be solved, and it is perhaps the closest a work of fiction has ever come to describing how the patterns of human physical and spiritual life are justified, and will lcontinue endlessly while this world lasts.
Andrew Brown
On 11/8/06 2:18 PM, "jansymello" <jansy@AETERN.US> wrote:
The Shades were not a very passionate couple, at least so it seems to me. They kept separate rooms and Hazel was engendered after a long period of sterility, after a trip to Nice... The poem Pale Fire, itself, has no trace of eroticism, or sensuality.
The expression " a writer's grief" is a peculiar expression for a "father's grief": he was grieving for himself...
Hazel's experiences in the barn are quite childish: are these the ideal examples of her true "spirituality"? A beautiful ghost that arose from a metamorphosis similar to a butterfly's... would such an image really appeal to Nabokov if not in a parody?