NPPF - preliminary

[Mondegreen]

Regarding PF and Lolita: Lolita is about the passion aroused by a girl who
is described as an extraordinary beauty. Close to the center of Pale Fire
is a girl --Haze's shade-- who seems to have been exceptionally homely. The
man who perhaps projected such ideal beauty onto Haze was her stepfather.
In the case of Hazel, her father --who is also uncommonly homely-- is heavy
with the consciousness of her physical limitations.

Regarding the narrators of Proust and Nabokov: A superficial reading of
Lolita or Ada may lead lead to the mistaken identification of the repellant
narrators with the author--and to giving up on the books in disgust early
on. But Nabokov subtly distingushes and distances himself from Humbert
Humbert and Van Veen. In the Proust novel the narrator behaves beastly and
remorselessly to his lovers, and reveals himself to be subject to
preposterous social prejudices, even as he denys having any, but in
Proust's case I could find no ironic distinction drawn between author and
narrator. Eeyew, n'est-ce pas? How serious a flaw is this? --Grace Paley's
response to a complaint about the obnoxious aspect of Marcel was, Well at
last here is an author who writes truthfully about himself--and you don't
like him!

Regarding Shade, the poet: Brian Boyd is emphatic that Shade's Pale Fire is
major stuff. Certainly Nabokov's Shade's Pale Fire is a masterpiece, but I
find the author behind the author to be winking or smiling through the
lines, some of which have an apparently unconsciously droll --even if
simultaneously tragic-- ring, or at least a parodic character; homely lines
of a homely author. For example: a few lines after the extraordinarily
evocative line 57 "The phantom of my little daughter's swing," there is
"TV's huge paperclip"; line 76-78 "certain words...such as 'bad heart'
always to him refer, And 'cancer of the pancreas' to her" (true and
touching, but gulptious); and Nabokov's arch lines (beginning with 295)
that introduce the theme of Hazel's unattractiveness in the eyes of her
parents: "At first we'd smile and say: All little girls are plump'"
..."'That's the awkward age.'" ..."....'Less starch, more fruit!'" ...
"...that nice frail roommate, now a nun"  ..."almost fetching".  These sad,
laughable, impish lines, and John Shade's closeup focus on his daughter's
physical defects, her "swollen feet" and "psoriatic fingernails," (355) and
his readiness to share these minutae with the world, inform the reader that
for Shade this unattractiveness is integrally and inevitably linked to
unhappiness, Hazel's and his own. Does he ever inquire or --like David
Morris-- wonder if Hazel's misery might derive from any cause or causes
other than her bodily appearance? "She'd criticize Ferociously our
projects" (352), but I don't think Shade ever took the hint.

Re what David Morris was missing in Ada: There is at least the tragedy of
Ada's half-sister who suffers the karmic consequences of Van's and Ada's
passion.

Re <<I think in many ways the *idea* of PF is more attractive than the
actual novel itself.>> Here is a general idea: Brian Boyd remarked
somewhere I think something to the effect that no writer repays careful
reading more than Nabokov. Thank you Brian Boyd. The "actual novel itself"
is a work of great depth and mysterious beauty.

Mondegreen