Excerpts from R.Ron's text :..."I'm talking
about the world of Nabokov controversies...I had just emerged from several years
of contention over the manuscript of Nabokov's last novel, The Original of
Laura...In the course of writing about it, I had changed my position on whether
Nabokov's burn order should be carried out at least twice...Though I must admit
that when it finally came out last fall, I was at least ambivalently pleased at
ending up in the Laura acknowledgments, despite ultimately opposing publication.
I spent a lot of time trying to get Dmitri Nabokov to make up his mind. I
deserved to be acknowledged. But things seemed to have settled down since the
book came out. Then, like I said, I found myself dragged back again....*
"...Mo Cohen, ...offered to show me a new Nabokovian objet d'art that
is likely to touch off the next big Nabokov controversy... in that it once again
tempts us into divining a dead author's intentions...I realized as he described
this unique object, part book, part artwork, part literary manifesto, that he
was talking about something more than some coffee-table-deluxe-edition-type
thing. With the publication of "Pale Fire" as a stand-alone poem, Mo was
throwing down the gauntlet, challenging the world's most avid Nabokov readers
and critics, telling them that for 50 years, most of them had gotten a central
aspect of, arguably, his greatest work flat wrong..."
"What gives the novel its postmodern, experimental look is that the
bulk of it, some 230 pages that follow the 999-line poem, is made up of
Kinbote's numbered and often long and meandering explicatory footnotes keyed to
the poem's lines... (and) there has been one persistent unresolved
schism...(centered) on the aesthetic status of the eponymous poem
within the novel... Maybe the poem wasn't meant as a pastiche, a parody...Once
it dawned on me that the poem might not be a carefully diminished version of
Nabokov's talents, but Nabokov writing at the peak of his powers in a unique
throwback form (the kind of heroic couplets Alexander Pope used in the 18th
century), I began to write essays that advanced this revisionist view of the
poem... it deserves to be stolen back from the thief Kinbote and looked at as a
pseudonymous work of Nabokov's that he had hidden inside the Russian doll
construction of the novel. That's the position taken by Mo Cohen in this new
edition, designed by the artist and illustrator Jean Holabird. That the poem
deserves to be read on its own terms, solus rex to use a Nabokovian phrase.
Standing regally alone. Allowed to convey its own meanings once it's left the
author's pen..."Pale Fire" freed! from the hackles of, or, if you prefer, the
delicately woven web of Pale Fire. "Pale Fire" free at last to be a poem on its
own...(and) the object has the blessing not only of Dmitri
Nabokov, the godfather, but of Brian Boyd, his consigliere, the world's foremost
Nabokov biographer. Boyd has contributed a long explicatory essay to the project
(for which he's general editor), and by doing so will make headlines (or
footnotes) among those who have been following Boyd's path in relation to "Pale
Fire." ...10 or so years ago, Brian Boyd, in a complete switcheroo that had
heads spinning ...wrote an entire book about who wrote the "Pale Fire" poem,
claiming it wasn't John Shade but rather the ghost of his dead daughter
Hazel...Now, in what appears to be another switch, Boyd seems—in the 30-page
essay that accompanies Mo Cohen's edition—to completely abandon his Hazel
Shade's shade theory of the poem's authorship**... Nabokov wrote the poem and
it's time to claim it for him... I don't want to downplay the two
essays in the booklet called "Pale Fire Reflections" that is included with the
two texts of the poem. I just couldn't find it at first. I was particularly
struck by the degree of erudition about contemporary American poetry that Gwynn
brought to his case that Nabokov meant "Pale Fire" to be a reproof to
over-casual, over-personal, over-trivial trends in American poetry. A reproof to
the belief that formal poetics could not capture deep feeling in traditional
verse forms. And that Nabokov had modeled John Shade on the well-known
traditionalist American poet Yvor Winters, who was a partisan of formal
poetics..."
...................................................................................................................................................................
* I suggest a return to Nab-L postings
in September,2009 to get the feel of RR's being "at least
ambivalently pleased..."
** - Brian Boyd's next L-posting reads: :"... I
just sent out the Slate essay by Ron Rosenbaum with an attached message limited
to 150 characters. If I'd had more space I would have attached this: "Ron
Rosenbaum on the forthcoming Ginkgo Pressedition of the poem "Pale Fire" on
Shade's own index cards, with essays by Consigliere Brian Boyd and R.S. Gwynn
and concept and illustrations by Jean Holabird." Rosenbaum is wrong
to imagine my essay repudiates my Pale Fire book. It just looks at a different
flank of the elephant, a different point of the starfish."