NPPF Canto 1: 1-4 some random notes

[Otto]

----- Original Message -----
From: "s~Z" <keithsz at concentric.net>
To: "Pynchon-L" <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Friday, July 25, 2003 6:05 PM
Subject: Re: NPPF Canto 1: 1-4 some random notes

> >>> the poem achieves its greatness from the ways it is misinterpreted
> and mishandled by
> the commentator.  <<<
>
> Nabokov has written a poem, then made it incredibly difficult for any
> reader of the poem to read it on its own merits. Kinbote says he has
> the last word,
> and the assertion above agrees. Of course, even if we read it
> independently
> of Kinbote's offerings, we are then left with our own offerings. Our own
> forewords and commentaries. Does the poem achieve greatness from the ways
> we mishandle and misinterpret it? Is there any value in reading the poem
> and
> interpreting it without Kinbote's input? Someone down the street is making
> a terrible racket with one of those gas-powered edgers.
>

> Is there any value in reading the poem and
> interpreting it without Kinbote's input?

Yes and no.

Of course there's "the agnostic poet" (McCarthy, xvii) Shade's lifelong
quest for the unknown, the "Land behind the Veil" (750) that is told about
in the poem, his grief about Hazel's suicide. In the light of this search
his daughter's suicide bears an even bigger tragic, because she might have
found out the answers to his questions before him.

For me his idea:

I'm reasonably sure that we survive
and that my darling somewhere is alive
(978-98)

or the possibility of a "beyond" without a god (btw. which seems
to be the case in Pynchon's GR too) really is the
"Gist of the matter" (Comm. line 549), but as this last
sentence proves it's hard to avoid the "knowledge" from
the Commentary.

Hazel has committed suicide shortly after Shade had finished his
"book on Pope" (384), which, as we might assume, is the source
for Kinbote's Zembla. Mary McCarthy quotes the passage in her essay:

But where th' extreme of vice, was ne'er agreed:
Ask where's the north? at York, 'tis on the Tweed;
In Scotland, at the Orcades; and there,
At Greenland, Zembla, or the Lord knows where.
No creature owns it in the first degree,
But thinks his neighbour farther gone than he;

See the blind beggar dance, the cripple sing,
The sot a hero, lunatic a king;
The starving chemist in his golden views
Supremely blest, the poet in his muse.

That the title of Shade's book is "Supremely Blest"
we only know from the Commentary.

But it is good to read a little bit more around this part in Pope's
"An Essay on Man" which of course deals with Providence,
the monotheistic and Christian idea of God and Man in a universe
where everything is set up before, but "Heaven from all creatures
hides the book of Fate" (Epistle One) -- which Shade seems to
refuse in the poem (99-101; 167-172) and in his discussion with
Kinbote upon that topic (Commentary to line 549). He seems to
believe in some kind of eternity with the possibility of an afterlife,
some ghostly existence or of reincarnation that exceeds the Christian
belief.

Otto

"Nature does not know extinction; all it knows is transformation.
Everything science has taught me and continous to teach me,
strengthens my belief in the continuity of our
spiritual existence after death."
Wernher von Braun
(Gravity's Rainbow, p. 7)