On Jan 22, 2010, at 12:04 PM, R S Gwynn wrote:
Here's a passage from William Monroe's Zembla essay on "Pale Fire":
Nabokov himself calls attention to the humorous potential of rhyme in his Notes on Prosody, part of his scholarly apparatus originally attached toEugene Onegin. His depreciation of "fancy rhymes" in English poetry is invaluable for an analysis of Shade's poem. "In English," Nabokov says, "fancy rhymes or split rhymes are merely the jester bells of facetious verselets, incompatible with serious poetry." Hinting at what he means by "fancy rhymes," Nabokov says that "the Englishman Byron cannot get away with 'gay dens'--'maidens.'"26 And as the following selected rhymes indicate, Nabokov has undermined "Pale Fire's" elegiac serious-ness by his exotic rhyme pairs:
stillicide / nether side (ll. 35-36) always well / her niece Adele (ll. 83-84) my Triassic; green / Upper Pleistocene (ll. 153-54) Age of Stone / my funnybone. (ll. 155-56) would debate / Poetry on Channel 8. (ll. 411-12) Maybe, Rabelais: / I.P.H., a lay (ll. 501-502) the big G / peripheral debris (ll. 549-50) in that state / hallucinate (ll. 723-24) the gory mess / of prickliness (ll. 905-906) does require / Will! Pale Fire. (ll. 961-62)
All of these examples rhyme a monosyllable with a polysyllable--the very combination that Nabokov says "Byron cannot get away with." A couple of them even carry the rhyme to an extra syllable in an adjacent word: "Rabelais / a lay"; "gory mess / prickliness." Such examples are only a selection of the "jester bells" to be found throughout "Pale Fire," and it is certain that Nabokov meant them facetiously. To my mind, it is just as certain that Nabokov's Shade is unaware of their parodic jangling. His aesthetic limitations are also evinced by the obtrusiveness of the rhymes, for, as Leigh Hunt wrote in Imagination and Fancy, the mastery of rhyme "consists in never writing it for its own sake, or at least never appearing to do so."
I wholly agree with the [general] argument
that a humorous effect occurs when more
than one syllable rhymes, (although I'm not
sure why some pairs are in the list, nevertheless
I am grateful for your bringing it to my attention).
Focusing on these jingly effects,
it's understandable one might recoil.
The problem is whether this effect which is
incompatible with serious verse
can nevertheless be used to create
a broadly ironic work; (we do recognize
the value of ironic works..Ovid, Cervantes...)
and whether such an ironic piece
is capable of expressing and evoking
pathos.
How ironic can it get before
destroying the possibility of pathos?
Are there some general rules that may be gleaned
from Pale Fire regarding irony
and pathos?
Pale Fire, the poem's, an experiment
in the mixing of irony and grief;
whose success, VN himself appears,
at times, to be unsure-of.
it is just as certain that Nabokov's Shade is unaware of their parodic jangling.
This is the question: does Shade know he's being ironic
in using these rhymes and trite banalities?
With regards to the multi-syllabic rhyming,
on purely logical grounds, it would seem
impossible for Shade not to be aware
of the occurrence of these humorous, ironic rhymes.
On the other hand using these devices
while writing about his daughter's death, might seem
rather odd, cold, even narcissistic.
It's possible that Shade only knows an ironic mode,
and that when his daughter dies he eulogizes her
the best way he knows how, in irony, and humor,
and, grotesquely, with some double rhymes.
The salient point is this: does this form
of rhyming occur at moments of great pathos?
if not then perhaps they don't, "puncture the pathetic".
I think, perusing the list, we see they don't.
They might then be seen as a conceit,
a clever trick, a brilliance.
Actually, it's not that strange to see
irony show up at a death scene,
or humor at funerals. Recall Mercutio's
"ask for me to-morrow, and you shall find me a grave man".
This arguably intensifies the sadness:
marking his bravery while facing death,
reminding of the wit soon to be lost.
The symbols of beauty and sensuality
that flit across the Shade's new TV screen,
banal as TV is, from its start,
provide a sharpened, contrasting odd foil
to Hazel's end, and thus in fact should be
felt as intensifying, not deflating.
Indeed one can ask whether the effect
isn't overdone, too many ironic
commercials.
I think these things are better dealt-with from
the bottom-up, by close examining
key passages to see what various kinds
of irony there are, how they affect
the on-going pathetic narrative.
And then from there attempt to make
an assessment as to the poem's real worth,
taken as a whole; and how dependent
upon Kinbote's frame, that value is.
I think the value of a poem to be
most reliably adduced by a
close inspection of the poem itself.
Inference from other sources may
be useful, but not as satisfying
as direct textual analysis;
for both the writer and the reader too.
The question then that chiefly interests me
is whether Pale Fire, the poem can be
performed and seen as entertaining?
This is a more useful, specific meaning
of the oft-heard phrase: "does the poem work?";
which, in turn is, at least to me,
roughly equivalent to: "is it good?"
To me,
Pale Fire's an enormous anomaly,
a long narrative poem appearing at
a time when the tradition of reciting
metric verse, mostly had dried up.
And along comes Pale Fire:
an anomalous enormity.