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Heath posted:An important thing to note about this book is that there is no one good way to read it. You can read the foreword, then the poem in its entirety and then read the commentary (which is how I did it,) or you can read the poem and refer to the commentary line by line, or read the poem first, and then the foreword, and then the commentary, etc. Each method is going to produce a very different interpretation of events as they proceed. The book is intricate and brilliant and I've never encountered another story quite like it. drat, I was hoping to get "first post, what order are we going to read the pages in?" The first time I read it, I read them more or less in order, I think; this time I think I'll read the poem first and then everything else in order.
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Aug 7, 2016 10:20
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blue squares posted:I wonder if the commentary, taken as a whole, is poking fun at lengthy critical examinations Gosh really? The thought had never crossed my mind. Zorodius posted:How do you guys like the poem itself? Not that much! As you say the rhythm slips - there's several lines ending with what should be unstressed syllables, etc - and the mixing of registers doesn't work for me like I feel it could in prose. And there's bits of the poem that just seemed to be rambling, to me; for instance that long digression on shaving. The stuff about Hazel, though, is brilliant and very painful. There's a lot that's interesting, though. Take the first four lines: Pale Fire 1-4 posted:I was the shadow of the waxwing slain The "reflected sky" is, literally, falsehood, delusion, the imagination. Is Shade saying his whole life was spent in the unreal world of imagination, rather than real life itself? I don't think so 100%, but it's at least partly true - he's a poet, after all. Maybe it's when Shade thinks he began to become a poet. Also, time seems to be "forking" here (line 404) - the real waxwing dies, but the Shade-waxwing lives on; so there's a connection to Hazel's death. Or maybe the Shade-waxwing is just that, a ghost. Something I don't have an opinion on is how unfinished "Pale Fire" is. The number of lines in each canto is symmetrical, assuming it's a 1000-line poem. On the other hand, the last line can't be the first, as it doesn't make sense by itself; and if Shade only had one more line to go, surely he would have written it, or at least jotted some notes, before knocking off for the night? The other big thing that struck me was the number of quotations and allusions in it, including the big one comparing Shade to Robert Frost. I think they're there partly to discuss what artistic creation actually is. The critical matter built on "Pale Fire" is a load of tosh, but "Pale Fire" itself, built on Shade's life, isn't. The one is parasitic, the other may be nurtured by other sources but is able to stand alone. Incidentally, at the end of Canto 3 (lines 806-29), Shade's vision of artistic design in the universe seems almost as if he realises he's a character in some other story. E: I just realised that Hazel is probably reading The Hound of the Baskervilles around line 370 
Safety Biscuits fucked around with this message at 05:25 on Aug 12, 2016 |
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Aug 12, 2016 05:16
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blue squares posted:I meant my more specific point about the narcissistic aspect of critical analysis. Of course it is satire. I think you're half right. Kinbote is partly showing off. But on the other hand, he misses tons of opportunities to do so and hardly mentions any of the clever references. It's more that he's so obsessed with Zembla he's unable to properly read or comment on the poem.
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Aug 12, 2016 13:07
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Zorodius posted:I feel certain that Line 1000 is exactly the same as Line 1. Yes, as you point out, that doesn't make sense: why not just scribble one more already-written line? But it's perfect poetic irony to snatch those mirrored death-words from his mouth, and Line 999 sets up exactly that rhyme. We agree it doesn't make sense (either narratively, or because line 1 is the first half of a couplet and has nothing to do with line 999) and the person advocating this idea is Kinbote, so... I don't see how it can be. Maybe, though, 999 is the last line? It would be pretty bathetic but Canto 4 is a let-down... Or maybe we just have no idea how much is missing. Kinbote mentions other professors in the Introduction saying we don't know how long it should have been, or how reliable the text is, so he raises the possibility that he's got things totally wrong even on a basic, literal level, never mind predicting how long it should be.
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Aug 14, 2016 08:23
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I've been trying to work out if we can work out where Zembla is, and I don't think it's possible to locate it on a map of this world. If it were it'd have to be a peninsula in the Baltic, not Novaya Zembla. Kinbote also presents it as picturesquely semi-Utopian and oddly untouched by the USSR until the 50s. It's populated only by loyal Karlists, evil Radicals, handsome boy-nymphets and slatternly hags - not real people at all, but the caricatures Kinbote gives us of the New Wye cast. He's clearly, to me, making it all up.Tree Goat posted:There is very much a narrative in the commentary, and it is almost entirely character-driven, and the emotional journeys of those characters is of central importance. I think us being glib earlier itt about the book's status as parody and/or puzzle box might give the impression that the central appeal of the book is as a serious of humorous vignettes with an optional mystery to solve and that is not a great place from which to go at Pale Fire, especially given what I know of your preferences from the TBB lit thread. Yeah, there's tons of story floating around in Pale Fire, but it is hidden to an extent - quite a large extent if you go with the "Shade's shade inspiring Kinbote" theory. And there's the raw emotion in Canto 2. On the other hand it offers plenty of intellectual amusement too. I'm not sure either is more central than the other. Seems appropriate in a centaur like this. blue squares posted:I liked Canto One a lot, which surprised me, because I typically don't go for poetry. The other three I mostly just sat through, thinking that once I got to the commentary the real fun would start. Why'd you like Canto 1 the most? I think Canto 2 is more interesting and emotionally effective. The very end is hard to read. Another little running joke I've noticed: Kinbote keeps loving up the phrase "pale fire". There's the "pale fire of the incinerator"* in the Introduction and the "translation" of Timon of Athens bit, but he also keeps using weak imitations of the phrase in the commentary; I've noticed two or three of them. Stuff like "weak illumination" or "watery glow", though I think I've made them up.
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Aug 19, 2016 14:28
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Enfys: you're correct.Groke posted:Yeah, except that Kinbote also says the northern coast is sometimes visited by "Eskimos" in traditional kayaks. Which is kind of impressive given that the Inuit never made it east of Greenland, but doubly impressive if in the Baltic. I'm leaning pretty heavily toward the "Kinbote is full of poo poo" theory. Oh, I forgot that bit. That's proof it's a load of rubbish. Thanks.
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Aug 20, 2016 02:56
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House Louse posted:E: I just realised that Hazel is probably reading The Hound of the Baskervilles around line 370 Oops. It's actually Four Quartets, but "Grimpen" is still a Hound of the Baskervilles reference. Zorodius posted:A man, unheedful of the butterfly— This assumes that Kinbote is being reliable with his editorship of the poem, which isn't settled - other professors describe it as "disjointed drafts" and Kinbote mentions that he nearly added some lines and deleted others to maintain the length (comments to line 596). It's a somewhat circular argument. However, even if we assume this, it's still not a great line because it doesn't stand alone. It's half a couplet. You could say: ...A gardener with a barrow goes by. I was the shadow of the waxwing slain By the false azure in the windowpane. Which would be, in my opinion, an inmprovement, but I'm not sure there's enough evidence to decide either way. Unrelatedly, I really like the idea that Shade's ghost helps Kinbote compose the commentary. It fits the ghost theme and it adds to the theme in "Pale Fire" of art surviving or transcending death. It's just that I don't think it makes sense for Shade to see Kinbote travesty his work, his memorial to his daughter, and inspire him to add a grotesque and diarrhoea-struck assassin coming to kill him. The characterisation doesn't make any sense at all. Nor is it similar to the way the barn ghost communicates, which is more like 19th century spiritualism than unconscious influence. I don't think Pale Fire is meant to show order and symmetry to its characters, but to its readers.
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Aug 25, 2016 06:13
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So blue squares, did you finish it? And why did you like Canto 1?Heath posted:I just finished We Have Always Lived in the Castle a few months ago and it was really good and very short. Even reading casually you can finish it in a day. It's not free, but it's not hard to find or expensive either. It's a good book and has some neat resonances with Pale Fire, cool. I was thinking an author's short stories - not a specific collection, just their stories in general - would be nice as it's as light as you want it to be, could provoke lots of discussion, and you don't have to find a specific book. Maybe Borges would be good.
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Aug 30, 2016 07:19
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Zorodius posted:I also meant to write something about narrator unreliability in Pale Fire. So, uh, if you're going to doubt one big thing in a story, where do you draw the line? How do you rule out something crazy like "Kinbote invented Shade"? This article: https://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/boydpf1.htm touches on that. His logic, for this particular example, is that Kinbote is too narcissistic and unable to empathise with other people to be able to write convincing characters. He disposes of "Shade invented Kinbote" with the argument that Shade would not have travestied his daughter's death in this way, although I think his argument winds up being self-defeating when he argues that Shade posthumously inspired Kinbote, which seems to do the same thing. In general, arguments like that seem to be arbitrarily declaring some part of the novel more reliable than the rest, which is pretty unsatisfying and boring. quote:Speaking of crazy: Nabokov really didn't show an accurate picture of mental illness, did he? Someone mentioned the unrealistic 1950s stereotype of a homosexual, and I think you could say the same for psychosis in Pale Fire. Hieronymous Alloy posted:In his Lectures on Literature, one of the things he talks about -- especially as regards to Jane Austen and Dickens -- is that he believed "great authors" create(d) their own reality within the world of their works; i.e., what matters isn't whether or not upper class British women of Austen's era acted and thought and behaved the way she describes them, but rather the fact that when you are reading an Austen novel, you are within Austen's reality. Mental illness can take many forms, so I'm less upset about that than the gay padeophile characterisation. It's not beautiful (I don't think you argued it was, HA) - it's just a cliché. As for a text creating its own reality - okay, but that reality must relate to this one.
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Sep 5, 2016 08:04
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