NPPF - Preliminary - Pale Fire

[jbor]

on 9/7/03 4:05 PM, Mondegreen wrote:

> Regarding Shade, the poet: Brian Boyd is emphatic that Shade's Pale Fire is
> major stuff. 

In what sense? The poetry is Nabokov's, after all, and Shade is a fictional
character, as you acknowledge. Shade's life experiences, which provide him
with his poetic (and *emotional*) content, and his work habits, are also
fictitious. So there's an aesthetic buffer in place to begin with. The
alternation between metaphysical grandiosity and utter banality in the poem
strikes me as quite deliberately funny, but I have the feeling I'm laughing
at Shade rather than with him, and that he takes himself as a poet quite as
seriously as Kinbote does (eg. ll. 423-6). The very idea that a poet would
write a "daily quota" of lines on the topic of, among others, his own
daughter's suicide, is pretty appalling. Kinbote aside, there's an ironic
distance -- quite an expansive one imo -- between Shade and Nabokov as well.

> 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.

Yes, I don't think Shade ever recognises Hazel's sense of her parents'
disappointment as one of the factors behind her depression and suicide.

best