Today I started rereading Pale Fire.
A lot of Nabokov's novels start with author's notes warning the reader not to apply the theories of Freud (identified as "the witch doctor from Vienna" or some such) to the book. This always seemed a little weak to me. If you've written a compelling work, you needn't fear fashionable critical theories. You can wait them out until they're no longer fashionable.
Pale Fire has no such warning. You could read that as a sign that Nabokov was really in the zone with this one, which he was. What it does have is an epigraph from James Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson, which sets the tone and gets you scratching your head. But I repeat myself.
John Shade, the author of the 999-line poem within a novel, does in one stanza provide a list of things he hates: aside from Freud and Marx, there's also jazz. The same things Nabokov hated, in other words. For all that, there's a certain irony between the real author and the fictional one. Charles Kinbote, another fictional author providing commentary on the poem, is a whole kettle of fish in himself.
2 comments:
A very long time ago I read Lolita because Humbert Humbert's obsession was a sensation at the time. Little did I know there was a real child behind that story which might interest you.
https://www.cbc.ca/radio/sunday/the-sunday-edition-september-9-2018-1.4806985/the-forgotten-real-life-story-behind-lolita-1.4807124
But I can see the point in your affection for Pale Fire. I haven't read the book but this afternoon I read the wonderful 999-line poem that's the centrepiece of the novel, the poem itself is moving and quite beautiful, even in rhymed heroic couplets. I doubt I'll read the rest but the images and the essentially sad story of the poem were good enough for me.
Right from the beginning:
I was the shadow of the waxwing slain
By the false azure in the windowpane;
I was the smudge of ashen fluff - and I
Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky.
And from the inside, too, I'd duplicate
Myself, my lamp, an apple on a plate:
Uncurtaining the night, I'd let dark glass
Hang all the furniture above the grass,
And how delightful when a fall of snow
Covered my glimpse of lawn and reached up so
As to make chair and bed exactly stand
Upon that snow, out in that crystal land!
I can't imagine how the story must evolve with the commentary.. maybe I'll go back to it later on. It's interesting that English was his second language.
I'd heard/read that Lolita was based on a real case, but that was a rather harrowing read. The only good news for Sally Horner, it seems, was that she lived just long enough to start living a normal life again before her accidental death.
Ah yes, the heroic couplets. That part of the book is very hard to imagine someone doing now. Almost no one is comfortable enough with iambic pentameter to go on at that length. Speaking of length, you'll notice that 999 is an odd number. This causes some speculation.
He has an impressive body of work in English considering it wasn't his first language. The Polish-born author Joseph Conrad also only learned English later in life.
Post a Comment