NPPF - preliminary

[Otto]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Jasper Fidget" <jasper at hatguild.org>
To: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Tuesday, July 08, 2003 6:36 PM
Subject: RE: NPPF - preliminary
>

> According to Boyd, VN worked on _Eugene Onegin_ from 1949 to 1957, and its
> publication in 1964 was due to publishing problems.  I think there's
> definitely reason to believe this work influenced _Pale Fire_.
>

This is correct. Boyd says that Nabokov repeats in _PF_ the structure of his
work on Pushkin's _Onegin_: foreword, poem, commentary and index: "roughly
four times the size of _Pale Fire_ but in much the same proportions" (Brian
Boyd, 1999, p. 67). Boyd concludes that Nabokov "must have been attracted by
the technical challenge of telling a story, in fact several intertwined
stories, in such an uncompromising format as the
foreword-poem-commentary-index structure he had been working with for a
decade." It's an interesting information and example of how an author gets
his idea(s) for a novel. I agree to Boyd that _PF_ is kind of a "comic
nightmare of all that could go wrong in criticism" (ibid, p. 68). There's
seems to be some self-irony on Nabokov's side in this too. But this
structure follows what Barth calls the "conventional dramatic structure of
exposition, rising action, climax and dénouement" (Barth, _Chimera_, 1972,
p. 33). In using this, what seems to be an "uncompromising format" of a
critic and editor Nabokov is in fact very conventional and remains within
the dramatic frame of what every other storyteller does. Disguising the
novel as literary criticism and maintaining the novel-structure per se in
the same act is very well done, and I agree to Boyd too that it's no simple
satire on criticism but indeed a reflection on the history of literature
hidden in this:

"(...) on the shift from romance to realism, from the old kind of hero whose
glory the reader is invited to identify, the kings of immortal old tales
whom Kinbote craves to join, to the modern image of everyman as artist, the
suburban Shade, in the modest circumstances of the real, coping with courage
and self-control, with imagination, curiosity and tenderness, and kindness,
with the fact of his mortality and his losses past and still to come."
(Boyd, p. 70)

Otto