Pale Fire Peoples!
Looks like we’re off to an excellent start. Lotsa folks on the march, with fully 20 posts so far on last week’s thread, including an excellent bit o’ background on the Zemlya of it all, filed just last night by so-called “Cort.” Good stuff!
This week is a bit of a paradox. We’ve now read the poem, so this would be an appropriate week for commentary on the poem before we read the, er, commmentary. On the poem. It’s sorta like a thin crack into which our world may whisper out. So, you know, stay frosty out there.
Me, I was surprised by how flat-out funny the foreword was — with occasional fore-shades of my beloved “Cruel Shoes” — and then again at how sad the poem sometimes dips, especially Canto 2, as Other Dan noted in last week’s thread. It’s a regular Pale Fire Emotional Death Roller Coaster March is what it is.
What’d you think?
Next week: Let’s dive into to the madness of King Kinbote and then meet up at page 105 in the Everyman’s Library, which is to say, the end of the comentary on Lines 130, in other words somewheres round about a passing reference to “the interesting note to Line 149.”
ok, is it flat-out plain that Shade is a parody of Robert Frost or is it more subtile than that? F’rinstance, is he kinda Robert Lowell too and/or any other number of new england poesiasts?
I’d been wondering about that, too. Not specifically about Frost and/or Lowell, but whether Shade was a parody of a specific poet or of midcentury academic poets in general. There are two aspects to this: the persona of the poet, and the poem itself. Conceivably, those could parody two different poets.
Oh, it’s Frost all right. It’s not a roman-a-clef copy, but even beyond the overall down-home tone of the poem, there are too many specific signals for Shade to be anyone else: key details in the poem (“funnybone”), the caricature (shock of white hair), and the biography (pointing out those parallels might be a spoiler, so I won’t).
The two moved in the same academic circles. Nabokov stayed in one of Frost’s former homes during a sabbatical and wrote about it later. Frost’s first published poem was “My Butterfly”, which is perhaps the ultimate Nabokov connection.
I’m glad I read the poem in its entirety before moving on to the commentary. After the homophobically portrayed Kinbote’s foreword, I was expecting something pompous, obscure and/or heavy-handededly satirical. I was knocked over by the sadness of the poem. I’m not that familiar with Frost, so I’ll take everyone’s word for it that the poem is a Frost parody. The description of the daughter’s suicide in Canto Two is devastating, and I found it interesting that Kinbote, addressing either the reader or some unknown companion, refers to Canto Two as “your favorite.” It becomes clear that the misogynistic Kinbote may not be the best commentator for a poem with this subject matter. The foreword hints that not only will Kinbote’s commentary be self-absorbed, but that he has some sort of dark secret that Shade and a couple of others knew about or suspected. Also, he refers to conversations with the “jailed killer.” Will Kinbote himself turn out to be Shade’s or someone else’s murderer?
A thought on literary reference – Thomas Carlyle!
His major work “Sartor Resartus” (The Tailor Retailored) is part literary parody, part biography, part philosophy. It is constructed in three basic sections. 1) The narrator tells how he came to find the work of Diogenes Teufelsdreck (God born devil feces). 2) the biography of Teufelsdreck (btw – spelling from memory, most likely incorrectly). 3) Reaction and response to his philosophy of transcendentalism.
Canto 3 certainly felt like an attempt to get beyond simple Judeo-Christian religious philosophy, but I’m still too early in the work to feel like I know what to watch for. The thing I keep noticing is the word “vulgar.” Knowing Nabokov, I’m sure he wants us to think “profane” and “ordinary/common” and the same time.
This guy sure loves his word games. I’m feeling a little trapped between Method A, Method B, the Exe, the Wye, and Mrs. Z.
I’m enjoying it much more than I thought I would. The foreword cracked me up. I was no English major, and am only peripherally familiar with Frost et al., but I can feel the parody in the poem, and it’s funny, when I expected it to be arrogant and annoying in that postmodern kind of way. You know what I’m talking about.
What shocked me is how much I *like* the poem, in spite of, or probably because of, its maudlinness. “And I’ll turn down eternity unless / The melancholy and the tenderness / Of mortal life; the passion and the pain; The claret taillight of that dwindling plane / Off Hesperus; your gesture of dismay / On running out of cigarettes; the way / You smile at dogs; the trail of silver slime / Snails leave on flagstones; this good ink, this rhyme, / This index card, this slender rubber band / Which always forms, when dropped, an ampersand, / Are found in Heaven by the newlydead / Stored in its strongholds through the years.”
That slays me.
Bonnie B. wrote: “That slays me.”
That’s my take so far just about exactly — surprised how much I’m enjoying the whole thing. The poem had me going back and forth. At points I thought it was sort of a self-mocking thing and then just like you, there were other points were it seemed like great stuff in its own right…. Just starting the commentary, first 8 pages or so, and I find myself underlining every 8th line just because the writing’s so much fun.
yeah, i too like that you can’t fully convince yourself of the poem’s worth or lack of it. nabokov is so masterful that there’s no way he’d just crap out some doggerel and then make fun of it. the poem is as valid as anything in the “real” world that it suggests.
the name, Shade, too – mighty suggestive of all kinds of things.
This type of work is a big change of gears for me, and I am finding it hard to get into. I am looking forword to getting to the commentary of the poem.
I am chugging along, altho woefully behind. Someone kills herself? Jeez. I thought the foreword was pretty funny, and am caught by the images of landscape (“we are most artistically caged”). Also liked “Pass thru its shade where gently seems to sway/The phantom of my little daughter’s swing”–did not remember until that point that “Shade” is another word for ghost. Who’s Robert Frost?
One almost gets the impression that Nabokov wrote the poem first, but was too insecure (Nabokov insecure? Maybe not.) to present it on its own, settling on writing a “novel” around it. So far, I like the poem a lot more than the self-absorbed rantings and hidden agenda of Kinbote.
barbara–i’m behind too. but here’s a quick aside–see bite-sized and slightly gossipy frost bio at
http://www.poetrybranchingout.org/poet.php?poet_name=Robert_Frost::Robert_Pinsky
The guys working on the building next door keep waking me up at 7 AM with the noise of their power tools, yet they never seem to make any progress.
i’m not sure that this is a ‘deathmarch’. i’m sailing through and it’s much easier to skip sentances that don’t agree with than the previous deathmarch. i’m stratigically stopping at certain points to savor the book. kind of like scratching off one box on a lottery ticket at a time. i hope i win.
I admit this is a reread for me, although at least 12 years have gone by. And it is a much different poem for me now. I am much more affected this time around. I remembered his daughter’s suicide but forgot Shade’s meloncoly and touching thoughts for his wife. I don’t think I could really grasp some of the things he writes about as a “youth”. There are moments in the poem where I just stopped and savored the feelings I had for his words. Having said that, it is not the best poem I have ever read! Maybe that just speaks to the prose snob in me….
Favorite passage is in canto 3 lines 806-15. Seems to sum things up for me:
But all at once it dawned on me that this
Was the real point, the contrapuntal theme;
Just this; not text, but texture; not the dream
But topsy-turvical coincidence,
Not flimsy nonsense, but a web of sense.
Yes! It sufficed that I in life could find
Some kind of link-and-bobolink, some kind
Of correlated pattern in the game,
Plexed artistry, and something of the same
Pleasure in it as they who played it found.
First of all he uses some kick-ass good words. Who last used turvical or bobolink??
And really isn’t this about making sense of the “game” or deathmarch so to speak with Nabokov.
I admit I have read a bit further and can see Kinbote is playing along on his own but I will stop there and post again next week on my thoughts of old Kinbote.
I always get confused as to which week we’re commenting about. I guess ’cause I’m commenting on Monday about last week’s items.
I wish I had read the poem first, by itself without Kinbote preface. Not that I’m sure I would/could have made it through. (Thanks to Cort for setting up the wikiword site: http://palefire.swiki.net/1) and once I read it, I wish I had time to re-read it before the commentaries. The most I could get back to was the preface, which reminded me how nuts CK is. I really hope to get back to re-read the poem in it’s entirety at some point so I’m not sucked completely into CK’s madness.
I’ve talked to a Russian friend of mine about Kinbote’s name, and found the roots of it inside the commentary, so i won’t go into it. But I’m going to bug her about other Russisms.
One thing noticed in some of the place names: Zembla, New Wye, Exe, Yewshade. . . those were the only ones I noticed, though we have the wonderful US states of Appalachia, and Utana, and the town of Cedarn. Don’t know if it adds up to anything.
Actually, to take credit where credit is, due, I set up the Pale Fire wiki. I usually keep a list of words as I’m reading anyway, and since I always have an internet-connected laptop or desktop around, it just made sense to share it with myself & incidentally & happily, others. I’m glad others find it useful.
(I’m kind of a word nut, but I don’t heed L. Ron Hubbard’s warning that the cause of insanity or whatever cause by passing a word you don’t understand. I find context is usually enough to understand while reading, and interrupting to look up a word is more detrimental to comprehension. Unless it’s really not clear, I normally look up words for a chapter or section when I’m finished.)
However, I’ve been really busy this past week and have fallen behind. If anyone wants to post words in the meantime, feel free. (You have to register with swiki.net, but all they ask for is name, password & email. They don’t check them, so it can whatever you want.) Or I’ll get to it when I get to it…
@D
Oh, by the way, Capt., I didn’t notice who I was responding to here at first. I did notice that you contributed definitions for the last batch of words I put last week. Thanks!
Yes, thank YOU davidg for setting up the page. I added some word defs to the page last week so perhaps my handle showed up there somehow (?). Anyway, I was wondering if anyone in there (my computer) would be interested in writing some commentary in heroic couplets. Someone adds a line or couplet or two or three, someone adds to that, etc., and we end up with…an exquisite commentary corpse, quite possibly the blue and bloated kind, but who cares. I’ve never set up a wiki page myself, but I’d be willing to try if there’s an interest (all helpful pointers gratefully accepted).
…and don’t be put off by “commentary” in my last post. “Frothy blather” might closer to what I have in mind…
Need to chime in about the daughter’s suicide and about the extent to which the poem is a parody of a particular poet. The first thing I thought of when I started reading the poem was Nabakov’s childhhood reminiscence in Speak, Memory (gorgeous). The sense impressions and references to color (“Retake the falling snow: each drifting flake/Shapeless and slow, unsteady and opaque/A dull dark white against the day’s pale white/And abstract larches in the neutral light” & “All colors made me happy: even gray/My eyes were such that literally they took photographs.”) are very similar. And so I posit: could it be that Shade is the vulnerable, mock-poet inside every writer including Nabakov? In anyone who picks up a pen to write and unintentionally creates an ugly child who cannot survive in the world? Isn’t that our greatest fear when we produce? That it will be an aberation? A funny looking animal that will be cast as the ogress in the school play? An – oh my gosh – feeble Frankenstein? I do get the feeling – and I’m riffing here – that Nabakov saw many people in Shade including himself.
Oh and I agree this doesn’t feel like a deathmarch – I’m humming along though am behind anyway.