NPPF Canto 1 "smudge of ashen fluff"

[jbor]

on 26/7/03 8:23 AM, Kevin Troy wrote:

> I think Rob has misunderstood Kinbote's use of "daily quota" -- if you
> look carefully of Kinbote's calendar in the foreward and consult the
> commentary, you'll see that Shade sometimes wrote a little more or less on
> a given day.  But granted, there is a sense of him plodding forward with
> iambic feet.  (And do see Kinbote's note to lines 17 and 29.)
> 
> If anything, I see Shade's workmanlike writing habits as poignant, a sign
> of his struggle to get the word out.  They're the "method B" he describes
> in the beginning of Canto Four.  ("Method A" reminds me a lot of the blind
> chess Luzhin enjoys so much in _The Defense_.)

My point here is that Shade's work habits, which are a prominent aspect of
the "plot" of the novel, betray quite a mechanical or production-line
approach to the craft. He's going to compose a "great" poem, and he's going
to write one card's worth (no more, no less) at each sitting, following that
set of balneary and self-preening routines he outlines at the start of Canto
Four. In terms of the erstwhile subject matter of the poem (epiphanic,
confessional, emotionally-harrowing), it all seems rather incongruous, quite
cold and premeditated, even exploitative. I'll see if the "Method A",
"Method B" and "I palpate/ Through strawberry-and-cream the gory mess/ And
find unchanged the patch of prickliness" stuff comes across as more poignant
second time around, but it did strike me as incredibly silly and
self-indulgent first time through.

I think that any presumption to measure the "quality" of a poem derives from
the "test tube and caliper" approach Malignd scorns, and it wasn't I who
framed the discussion in terms of whether or not Shade's 'Pale Fire' is a
"good quality" poem. In my opinion Nabokov's objectives in creating the poet
and composing his poem for him, were to satirise Shade, and to parody a
particular style of poetry. The contexts of the poem's composition and the
content and style of the poem itself (and the interrelationships between
these), as I read it, are what has left me with this overall impression.
That there are occasional moments when the poetry is "good" I haven't
denied, but these in combination with the laughably "bad" stuff actually
serve to make the entirety even more pathetic -- if not bathetic! -- than it
might have been if it were just consistently "bad".

best