NPPF comments on comments

[bekah]

Thanks Jasper, Ghetta and jbor for your input. Fascinating stuff. I 
was reading Boyd's book last night. He states in the intro that Pale 
Fire seems to unfold and unfold, revealing more and more, just like 
the universe.

 From Boyd:

"As a researcher into one particularly complex family of butterflies, 
the Blues, Nabokov had found dizzying degrees of difficulty in 
understanding their relationships and their evolution. In an 
interview two months after the publication of Pale Fire, he reflected 
that experience when he declared: 'You can get nearer and nearer, so 
to speak, to reality; but you can never get near enough because 
reality is an infinite succession of steps, levels of perception, 
false bottoms, and hence unquenchable, unattainable.'

"One of his greatest achievements as a writer was to invent a way to 
entice his readers to discover little by little the increasing 
complexity of the world of one of his  novels, to  lure them, as he 
felt lured by the mystery of the world around him, into trying to 
advance along that infinite succession of steps."

Bekah



At 9:59 PM +1000 10/24/03, jbor wrote:
>Kinbote's commentary to lines 385-6
>
>***
>
>"garland ... briefer than a girl's"
>
>Quoted from the last line of A.E. Housman's fine poem 'To An Athlete Dying
>Young', perhaps the most well-known of all the poems in his _A Shropshire
>Lad_ (1896).
>
>http://www.research.att.com/~jrex/faves/poems/athlete.html
>
>***
>
>     Jane said she had tried to talk to the Shades after the tragedy,
>     and later had written Sybil a long letter that was never
>     acknowledged. I said, displaying a bit of the slang I had
>     recently started to master: "You are telling me!"
>
>I think the idea Kinbote was trying to get across to Jane is that he can
>relate to her experience of Sybil not answering the calls or acknowledging
>the letter. His use of the colloquial expression is clumsy, and he phrases
>it in an awkward and inappropriately formal way, but I think the (perhaps
>self-conscious) joke is that, from the example given, he hadn't "started to
>master" the "slang" at all. But it's Sybil's rudeness he's emphasising.
>
>best