NPPF - preliminary

[Burns, Erik]

Foax:

worth remembering throughout this that _Pale Fire_ was heavily influenced by
VN's sudden burst of fame & notoriety after _Lolita_ ("It was a year of
Tempests: Hurricane/Lolita swept from Florida to Maine." (Canto iii,
679-80)) and that arguably the two books have an awful lot in common. I
think you could even make a case that in broad brushstrokes the "plots" map
over each other ... in _Lolita_ it's Humbert Humbert chasing Quilty because
of Lolita; in _Pale Fire_ it's Gradus chasing Kinbote because of Shade (or
Kinbote chasing Shade because of Gradus - these being almost interchangeable
and confused because of poor Kinbote's confusion). Key to this is Hazel, the
focus of the poem, Shade's horrible loss - who is most certainly the
inverted doppleganger of the nymph Lolita ("But let's be fair: while
children of her age/Were cast as elves and fairies on the stage/That _she'd_
helped paint for the school pantomime,/My gentle girl appeared as Mother
Time,/A bent charwoman with slop pail and broom," (Canto ii, 309-13)), in
this case appearing in the same kind of school play were Quilty made his
move.

And, of course, "Haze, L." would be how Lolita would be listed on roll call,
if they used her nickname and not dolorous Dolores.

When we get there, this might be worth discussing; is the untimely death of
Hazel a rewriting of the _Lolita_ story down a different path, the
now-excluded "middle" of a young girl resulting in murderous psychosis even
worse than Humbert's? (Humbert's killing of Quilty is vengeance and
punishment (he cannot really see his own horribleness - that's his
sickness - but he can see it in others and act); the murder in _Pale Fire_
is of a different motivation altogether (one I assume will be fully aired
here)).

Coincidentally (and on the topic of dedications), Alfred Appel's (now
there's a Nabokovian name) _The Annotated Lolita_ (1970?) is very similar to
_Pale Fire_ in format, with Appel's Preface & Introduction (plus a selected
bibilography, checklist of VN's writing and some _Lolita_ criticism),
followed by _Lolita_ and then Appel's notes. Right before the novel starts,
Appel has knowingly interleaved a page-length chunk of _Pale Fire_ (ending
"...for better or for worse, it is the commentator who has the last word.")

*ALL* of this - including Appel's critical apparatus, gets the _Lolita_
dedication ("To Véra", natch) ahead of it ... raising the question, of
course, of *who* is doing the dedicating, and what is being dedicated.
Indeed, what is part of the text and what isn't?

etb