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Oct. 7th, 2011 01:19 pmI read some Pale Fire literary criticism yesterday and it made me frustrated. The critic insisted on the holistic integrity of the poem "Pale Fire" and John Shade as a character, and seemed unable to contemplate the idea that Shade himself might be the elaborate invention of Charles X, Kinbote, Botkin, Nabokov, or someone else entirely! Kinbote, he wrote, was obviously unreliable, possibly mad, and certainly distorting his relationship with Shade. But he claimed Shade had a testimony of his own in the presence of his poem, which spoke in spite of Kinbote's efforts to manipulate it.
And I just don't understand how you can take that prehistoric a critical approach to a work like Pale Fire.
Both Shade and his critic are Nabokovian inventions, which means they both have no life outside the book, no external verification of their truth. If this were truly a critical edition of a poem by a successful American poet, we could prove Shade's significance by perusing the library for editions of his other books. Instead, we only have Kinbote's attestations to the existence of Shade's book on Pope, his three volumes of verse, his assorted shorter publications. And Kinbote is demonstrably unreliable- he has endnotes which barefacedly state facts that I can externally prove are wrong.
As I mentioned in my last post, if this were really the critical edition of a narrative poem, I would probably read it for the sheer trainwreckiness. That fact makes me ask a lot of questions about the literary merit of the story. Would I still read a trainwreckily inept literary critic if he wasn't real? Well, apparently the answer is yes. Apparently my fascination with hilariously bad literary criticism is driven by something like the RPF impulse, where I treat real people as characters and consume their stories as if they were fictional.
I think that's what makes Pale Fire so endlessly fascinating: its immersiveness. It's entirely constructed like a piece of RPF. It's a significant refinement of realist storytelling, because if you consider it, a novel is an essentially unrealistic thing. Nobody's real life is told in the form of an arbitrarily styled longform narrative. The lives of people are told in history books, in biographies, in the footnotes of critical editions of poems... Nabokov stays true to that. Pale Fire could be a real object in a way that David Copperfield, perhaps, couldn't.
But of course, with that reality comes the friction and uncertainty of real life. The difference between 'ideal gases' and 'real gases', for example, is that the properties of ideal gases can be exactly calculated, while real gases require endless approximation. So Pale Fire isn't just a brilliant poem, supposed written by a brilliant poet and annotated by a brilliant critic. That isn't how reality works. Instead, we have an imperfect poet who befriends an imperfect critic, both of whose stories are so mired in uncertainty and misdirection as to be nearly unintelligible.
And I just don't understand how you can take that prehistoric a critical approach to a work like Pale Fire.
Both Shade and his critic are Nabokovian inventions, which means they both have no life outside the book, no external verification of their truth. If this were truly a critical edition of a poem by a successful American poet, we could prove Shade's significance by perusing the library for editions of his other books. Instead, we only have Kinbote's attestations to the existence of Shade's book on Pope, his three volumes of verse, his assorted shorter publications. And Kinbote is demonstrably unreliable- he has endnotes which barefacedly state facts that I can externally prove are wrong.
As I mentioned in my last post, if this were really the critical edition of a narrative poem, I would probably read it for the sheer trainwreckiness. That fact makes me ask a lot of questions about the literary merit of the story. Would I still read a trainwreckily inept literary critic if he wasn't real? Well, apparently the answer is yes. Apparently my fascination with hilariously bad literary criticism is driven by something like the RPF impulse, where I treat real people as characters and consume their stories as if they were fictional.
I think that's what makes Pale Fire so endlessly fascinating: its immersiveness. It's entirely constructed like a piece of RPF. It's a significant refinement of realist storytelling, because if you consider it, a novel is an essentially unrealistic thing. Nobody's real life is told in the form of an arbitrarily styled longform narrative. The lives of people are told in history books, in biographies, in the footnotes of critical editions of poems... Nabokov stays true to that. Pale Fire could be a real object in a way that David Copperfield, perhaps, couldn't.
But of course, with that reality comes the friction and uncertainty of real life. The difference between 'ideal gases' and 'real gases', for example, is that the properties of ideal gases can be exactly calculated, while real gases require endless approximation. So Pale Fire isn't just a brilliant poem, supposed written by a brilliant poet and annotated by a brilliant critic. That isn't how reality works. Instead, we have an imperfect poet who befriends an imperfect critic, both of whose stories are so mired in uncertainty and misdirection as to be nearly unintelligible.