Andrea Pitzer: In a lightweight counterpoint to the meaty
Pale Fire discussion about Hazel Shade's influence on Kinbote and/or Shade, may
I introduce... the Zemblan pizza, in (and on) which all is not as it seems. From
the "Once I Metablog on Metafiction" site:
JM: Pitzer on Pizza?
The site opened onto "Zemblan Pizza
Rezembles Nabokov" from "Once I Metablog on
Metafiction."
I selected a few lines from
it:
"Who is real and what is fiction? ...Some interpreters of the novel
claim that the author of the poem, John Shade is also a figment of Kinbote’s
deranged imagination. Some say that Kinbote is an invention of John Shade. They
may interpret it as they wish and no one can stop them. Kinbote near the end of
the book says, “I may assume other disguises, other forms . . . I may turn up
yet, on another campus, as on old, happy, healthy, heterosexual Russian, a
writer in exile.” In other words, the fictional character may become the author,
Vladimir Nabokov, who created all of the characters and therefore himself[...]
We, the readers, rewrite poem, commentary and Nabokov’s novel as we read it.
Everything we read, everything we think, everything we experience, everything we
eat, must pass through a fantastical mirror of language that reacreates — and
distorts [...] "The sea’s a thief whose liquid surge resolves / The moon into
salt tears: the earth’s thief / That feeds and breeds by composture stolen /
From general excrement: each thing’s a thief.”// You are the thief, you, yes
you, the murderer of poets, the killer of authors, and once you have stolen this
poem, book and blogpost, you will make of them things that bare a rezemblance,
but are wholly new. It may not be a pizza, but it tastes
great."
Are we, all of
us, "thieves"? ( Leland de la Durantaye, apud Zimmer, believes "Pale Fire" is a
book about this thieving theme) I prefer to state the matter in a non
excremental or vegetarian way, but also inspired by other people's
customs. In Brazil, fresh left-overs, when transformed into dumplings
or fried rolls are named "Lavoisier rolls." It comes from a sentence
attributed to him (which, as I recently learned, is untrue because of
something related to entropy):
"In Nature
nothing is created, nothing is lost, everything is
transformed." Perhaps references and metamorphosis belong to the
creative surge while plagiarism sides with entropy...
However,
differently from the two inspired cooks, or the blogger, I think that there are
"true distortions" and "concave-convex circus-mirror distortions." There must be
a mountain peak where author and reader happily embrace (stealing an image
used by Nabkov).