Pale Fire Peoples!
Welcome to Week 5 and the final push. It’s been an action-packed week filled with revelations and disertations. Suicide? Prejudice? The Legend of Curdy Buff? It’s all in there. I enjoyed this week’s read and was surprised at points to find myself starting to become just a wee bit sympathetic with our narrator. Still, I will confess: Tout en ayant connaissance des traductions françaises de “John Donne” et d'”Andrew Marvell,” j’ai mis ma tête vers le bas, et ai pris un petit somme court. (What oh what did we ever do before we had the Babel Fish?)
Next week: We wrap! Let’s meet up on the far side of the index to compare closing thoughts. Speaking of which, a word to the wise — this last patch includes a few revelations. Folks are doing what they can to avoid full-on spoilers, but if you’re a bit behind this week’s target, you might want to skim these comments with caution.
Thanks all,
-CV
Immediately upon being dropped into the middle of the disaster that is my apartment, the kittens went to work creating a cleansing whirlwind that has gone a long way toward improving the quality of the local vibrations. I think that this kitten power should be harnessed on a larger scale. For instance, I suspect that if we took all of our nations’s unwanted kittens from the pound and airlifted them into Iraq, all our problems there would soon be over.
Meanwhile, things are finally moving along next door, though in a typically strange way. One night I got up about 3 am to go to the bathroom and saw a guy with an orange vest and a clipboard wandering around the parking lot. Friday morning I awoke suddenly at 2:25 am, remembering that I had left my laptop in plain sight on the passenger seat of my car. When I went out to get it a different guy was out there pushing one of those measuring wheels on a stick. This really happened, I swear.
Today some workmen are building wooden frames around the dirt triangles. One can only hope that some kind of landscaping action is going to happen in the near future. If not, well…I’m pretty sure I know where I can get more kittens.
yay, babel fish! i didn’t know of it. maintenant je l’emploierai tout le temps…et il prouvera très ennuyant! heh heh.
as for kinbote–i’ve been feeling not just sympathy but affection for him. his delusions are far more beautiful than the poem he’d hoped would enshrine them. of course, i’m still behind on the reading, so maybe he’ll soon be doing something so annoying or despicable that i will dislike him again. [cap’n–thanks for the website; i’m trying not to read anything there until i finish the book, but the site looks like a good one.]
really? i don’t feel sympathy. i get angry at him. i don’t want to give stuff away, but he’s a freak, man, and not everything is about him and his imaginary damn country!
I agree that Kinbote is clearly way over the top in his interpretation, but he so wants to tell the story of his country. At first, I found myself going back to the poem to see if his interpretation made sense. Now I know it doesn’t, and I don’t care.
i think cecil vortex is selling my e-mail address.
I definitely prefer the poen to the commentary. Kinbote is a super-bright but super-obnoxious and delusional (or pretending to be delusional?) character who hijacks Shade’s poem as a means of self-promotion. The commentary started to get a little boring, once its nature became apparent, although Nabokov’s wit and incredible dexterity with the language made it very readable. I’ve finished it, but will wait to talk about the ending.
A good thing to say to those who might be frustrated in the later portions of the book–commentary around lines 400 to 600–is, be patient. In a sudden rush at the end, the narrator acknowledges your frustrations, both within the story and outside it in the real world. (Nabokov’s points about old Russian scholars and works of fiction with unusual structures are exceptional metalanguage.)
Cecil rules that it’s not a spoiler now to say that yes, Kinbote is the King. The rollover from third person to first person takes place, without remark, in the first paragraph about the King’s arrival in the U.S. (commentary to line 691, about Shade’s heart attack).
This doesn’t answer whether the King–and indeed, all of Zembla–is real or imaginary. Kinbote covers the possibilities eventually (real or imagined Shade? real or imagined King? real or imaged assassin?), and his special commentary is reserved for the question of why Pale Fire has so little to do with Zembla (and his commentary with Pale Fire). So hang in there.
I read PF about 20 years ago. I finished rereading it on the plane last Friday and realized I had completely forgotten how… lucid?… it gets toward the end. (That seems a strange word to use for Kinbote…)
I have to disagree with electrix; “super-obnoxious and delusional” are, to me, mutually exclusive here. Kinbote can only be hijacking the poem, and therefore obnoxious, if you believe he’s sane. (I’ve hung around far too many people with low social skills, first among geeks and more recently by working with retarded children. Others may find lack of social fluency obnoxious, but I’m inured.)
One of the miracles of Nabokov’s work is that the poem is written so well, but not any better. It is just good enough to be taken seriously, to be worthy of commentary, to be interesting in its own right–but not well enough to create a consensus that it should have stood alone, without Kinbote surrounding it; not well enough to draw real comparisons with Frost. And I have no doubt that N could have made it that good, but knew better.
RaptorMage wrote:
“One of the miracles of Nabokov’s work is that the poem is written so well, but not any better. It is just good enough to be taken seriously, to be worthy of commentary, to be interesting in its own right–but not well enough to create a consensus that it should have stood alone, without Kinbote surrounding it; not well enough to draw real comparisons with Frost. And I have no doubt that N could have made it that good, but knew better.”
Wow — beautifully put. I couldn’t quite put into words how reading the poem felt to me, but that’s it exactly.
I finally hit p. 150 today–what am I, like a week behind? I’m starting to enjoy the book more now, with all the intrigue about the flight of the king.
Also, I’ve updated the Pale Fire vocab wiki. (It seems that the site was down most of last week.) It’s at: http://palefire.swiki.net.
One thing I find as I search for some items which seem to be Nabokovisms, is that I find critical works that appear to contain spoilers–some look pretty interesting, but I avert my eyes lest there be spoilers. They make me want to rush throught the book, so I can go back to read these essays and see what I’ve missed!
I finished last night and finally read the Rorty intro this morning. It is good to its word about containing spoilers and should be avoided until the whole work is under your belt. I would suggest that we throw in some time to read and discuss it after we all close the book itself.
Dr. V wrote:
“I would suggest that we throw in some time to read [the intro] and discuss it after we all close the book itself.”
That’s an excellent idea. I was thinking of adding a week to go back and re-read Kinbote’s opener & the poem itself — I’ve certainly been wanting to sort of loop around. Let’s add one more week — a victory lap of sorts — and cover the intro then too for folks what have that edition.
For those of us without the Rorty intro, maybe it would make sense to expand the discussion to include the academic Pale Fire industry (as we’ve haphazardly encountered it online)?
Dumpster said:
“For those of us without the Rorty intro, maybe it would make sense to expand the discussion to include the academic Pale Fire industry (as we’ve haphazardly encountered it online)?”
Sounds like an excellent plan….
i’m moving to zembla, the women there sound hot.
For most of the book I was disinclined to believe that Kinbote was delusional, that Zembla was not a real place (in the fictional world of this novel), that there was no Charles Xavier Vseslav, that Kinbote had not made a daring escape and reemerged in American academia. How disappointing to find out that Kinbote was simply insane! I wanted the story of a poet and a crazy king, dammit! But at the end I decided that if Kinbote invented Zembla and Gradus and King Charles, which it seems clear he did, then he also invented Shade and Wordsmith U. and New Wye — in short that he’s the creator, the author, of this entire fictional world. Which, I guess, makes it all OK again. Or something.
bonnie b’s note made me curious, and i went looking for background. turns out there’s been a raging debate, starting in 1967, on the subject–did kinbote create shade or did shade create kinbote or were they both “real”? nabokov’s biographer (brian boyd) suggests a fourth tantalizing possibility. i won’t spoil it for you or do it an injustice by trying to paraphrase it here. if you’re curious, the lengthy article is an excellent read, for this theory as well as for the hints at things missed (which for me could fill zembla at least twice over although i know you all didn’t miss a beat):
http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/boydpf1.htm
this is fun.