NPPF Comm 2: My bedroom, part 2

[Jasper Fidget]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-pynchon-l at waste.org [mailto:owner-pynchon-l at waste.org] On
> Behalf Of Terrance
> Sent: Wednesday, September 03, 2003 11:38 AM
> Cc: pynchon-l at waste.org
> Subject: Re: NPPF Comm 2: My bedroom, part 2
> 
> 

> 
> Taught us?
> 
> Yes, Pale Fire is about teaching.
> Yes, it really is. Nabokov was a teacher.
>  Lots of his characters are too.
> 
> Teach Karlik!
> 
> Ridiculous? A man of such wealth, teach boys to write and read?
> 
> Ah, I'm quite sure Nab had a soft spot in his heart fro Jimmy Joyce.
> 
> 
> Reading the commentary I'm reminded of the ridiculous  arguments that
> men like T.S. Eliot got into over Hamlet. Eliot sounds rather ridiculous
> insisting that everything is About the  "Objective Correlative."
> 
> Line 962
> Help me, Will. Pale Fire.
> 
> My reader must make their own research.
> 
> Read Shakespeare!
> 
> Poor man, he's only got a Zemblan copy of Timon in his "cave."
> 
> The translator spent half a century on Will's works.
> 
> He was a pioneer, a veterano de la jungla, but he lived too much in the
> world of books and not enough in the world of boys. Writers, Nabokov
> teaches in his lectures, need a library, a cave, but they need, less
> they start doing battle with windmills, to see the world, pluck its figs
> and peaches, and not keep constantly mediating in the tower of yellow
> ivory--which was also John Shade's mistake in a way.


Oh so Vineland is about work and Pale Fire is about teaching, is that it?
Just kidding, I happen to like this reading a lot -- Pale Fire as an opaque
lesson plan.  The thing that most attracts me to Pale Fire (and other books
of similar density) is the almost archeological process the reader must (or
at least may) go through in order to fully engage with it.  Look at the
tangents that PF opens: Shakespeare, Romanticism, old English literature and
history, mythology (Greek, Roman, Norse, Celtic), folklore, language, etc
etc.  One learns far more than what's contained in the text itself, some of
which might never have been encountered otherwise.  Not text, but texture.

Jasper