Mahmhoud Aliamer:When I initially split my PF into fourteen line segments, I had card 11 ending after "140 Tugged at by playful death, released again" as well, with Canto One ending with thirteen cards exactly, but it does seem to me that there is a double space between "bicycle tires" and "           a thread of subtle pain," which would necessitate that a line be skipped on the index card. That double space, which occurs in both of my Vintage International editions, does not seem to be present in the Everyman's Library 1992 edition of Pale Fire. If the double space is not considered, the first canto is thirteen index cards long. It seems to be more so a quirk of printing than a Nabokovian trick.

 

Jansy Mello: In his foreword, Charles Kinbote details: “writing out [...] the text of his poem, skipping a line to indicate double space, and always using a fresh card to begin a new canto.
This is an important remark. In the “facsimile” of the cards a line has not been skipped.  The “facsimile”, with its two different graphic presentations (booklet and cards), apparently shows an inconsistency or is “undecidable” when we keep following the information given by Kinbote. 

(Are we to trust CK????)

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JM (again):  Just to report an interesting VN coincidence. Just as I was opening today’s posting related to Mahmoud Aliamer’s query a flesh and blood postman rang twice and delivered a book that I’d ordered some time ago*.  I’ve only read the first paragraph of one of its chapters, by Brian McHale: “Affordances of Form in Stanzaic Narrative Poetry”:

In this paper I pursue some further aspects of a topic I addressed in “Beginning to Think about Narrative in Poetry.”  I argued there that poetry is crucially distinguished from other forms of verbal art by its foregrounding of segmentivity – the spacing of language. If this is so, then a priority for narratological approaches to poetry – qwhich I advocated in that paper – is analysis of the potential for interaction between poetry’s segmentation and the segmentation proper to narrative…”   

Seems inviting and disturbing (the entire collection of articles, I mean)!

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*Narrative, Interrupted- the Plotless, the Disturbing and the Trivial in Literature. Edited by Markku Lehtimäki, Laura Kartunen, Marioa Mäkelä.   2012Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin/Boston.  www.degruyter.com

 

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