How to Blight a Pale Fire (NPPF Host List)
Terrance
lycidas2 at earthlink.net
Fri Jun 13 15:35:57 CDT 2003
Bekah wrote:
I'll just have to be
> careful about spoilers.
>
> Bekah
In London's "To Build A Fire" the protagonist (a man) lacks personal
experience
traveling in the Yukon terrain. An old-timer warns the man about the
harsh realities of the Klondike. The confident main character thinks of
the old-timer at Sulfur Creek as "womanish" (though he never calls the
man an orifice, it's implied by the way the man squats when he talks
about fishing).
Along the trail, "the man" falls into a hidden spring and attempts to
build a fire to dry his socks and warm himself.
The story is built around "the man" and the fire. Simple enough.
Pale Fire is a bit more schizoid. It's not quite a postmodern text. It's
sort of a bridge from the modern to the postmodern. A bit like Eliot's
Waste Land it has notes or commentary. A parody of such commentaries.
It pushes Virginia Woolf's envelop under a hot lamp where the sealing
wax melts into the shadows of modernism's waxwing trapped on the other
side of Alice's looking glass. The text doesn't want to be read from
page one to the end. In "The Art of Literature and CommonSense" Nabokov
tells us why. The text wants to spoil any attempt to read the book in
any conventional way. Being postmodern readers this is not a big shock
to us. However, if one is hosting commentary of Canto II and the
commentary directs the reader to cantos I and III what is the host going
to do?
"(I suggest omitting this little chapter altogether. Ada's note.)"
Ardorously,
V.
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