NPPF - preliminary

[Burns, Erik]

Foax:

malignd wrote:

>There are some interesting things in your post, but I find things to
>question, one being what do you mean by "influence"?   Pale Fire followed
Lolita and
>Nabokov is playful in referring to Lolita in Pale Fire (and I never noticed
the
>Haze, L connection, although I feel certain VN did), but I can't quite see
>the "influence" in the relationship between the two books.

I realize I'm out on a limb here, but bear with me while I saw a bit more.
Here's my idea: that what "influenced" VN was the uproar over _Lolita_, not
the book per se. (I think it's tautological to say an author influences
himself.) It seems to me (and I may be one of the few people who read _Pale
Fire_ before reading _Lolita_) that _PF_ is a response to the uproar - a
similar story, but "safely" told (the troublesome young woman remains the
focus, but is dead early on, not to mention the hilarious academic drag it
gets dressed up in). VN's final joke, of course, being that in a world
without your nymphet (that is, a world with Haze-L absent) you nevertheless
get your mania, murder and mayhem. Kinbote is, like Humbert, a weird
European washed up on the shores of small-town American academe. In
Humbert's case, Lolita leads him astray; in Kinbote's it's "Pale Fire," (the
poem) and his own delusions. Shade is like Charlotte: in the way. (I've
always thought one of literature most shocking murders - and I deliberately
mean here the murder of a character by the author - is the death of
Charlotte Haze. So convenient! Breathtaking. It still gives me the willies
to think of it.)

Of course, by making the object of Kinbote's affection a poem (or even more
abstractly, his delusions), VN also makes the retroactive point (operative,
too, in _Lolita_ but overrun by the uproar) that this is all about
Lo-lo-logophilia, not paedophilia.

Of course, this analysis pends on VN's thinking and the effects of the real
world on his writing, a no-no in some circles. But at the same time there is
the _Eugene Onegin_ translation/annotation and the obvious fact that this
shaped the structure, themes and method of _Pale Fire_.

as for this:

>This seems to me simply wrong; in any case it doesn't easily scan.   It's
>difficult to see Gradus as other than a figment of Kinbote's imaginings.
Jack
>Grey, who kills Shade, has nothing to do with either Kinbote or Shade
(prior to
>killing Shade, of course); he mistakes Shade for Judge Goldsworth and kills
>him out of that mistake.

That is a *very* literal reading and it depends on who you're trusting at
this point. One thing I like about _Pale Fire_ is that I am never exactly
sure what happens at the end, who kills, and why. By the end I don't trust
any of them, including the apparently reliable narrator who attempts to
correct Kinbote's errors throughout. And so I can't (and deliberately don't
want) to trust this reading either. (Though I accept it is the one that
makes the most *sense,* whatever that means in this novel.)

etb