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Don't be terrified of Pale Fire

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Re: Don't be terrified of Pale Fire

#81

Post by nickdrozd »

At the end of the foreword, Kinbote says:

> Let me state that without my notes Shade's text simply has no human reality at all, since the human reality of such a poem as his ... has to depend entirely on the reality of its author and his surroundings, attachments and so forth, a reality that only my notes can provide. To this statement my dear poet would probably not have subscribed, but, for better or worse, it is the commentator who has the last word.

Final exam questions:

1. To what extent did Nabokov agree or disagree with this approach to literary criticism?

2. Did Nabokov personally identify more with Shade or with Kinbote?

Re: Don't be terrified of Pale Fire

#82

Post by mykowebhn »

gizmo wrote: post #77
mykowebhn wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just wanted to point out the logical gymnastics you just performed here: I find it true, thus it is true universally. Your initial premise: "I find that literature that requires work does not provide more food or insight into the human condition..." Your conclusion from this premise: "If complexity is not what makes the work valuable, what purpose does it serve?" And you answer your own question with a cynical take…

I made no such universal statement. Some people enjoy hard things simply because they are hard. My claim is that this can also result in people thinking some literature is better than it is, because people draw satisfaction from the effort itself.

Okay, I got that.

The point you might be missing is that some people might enjoy hard things not only because they are hard, but because only through their laborious efforts is the true brilliance of the work revealed.

Re: Don't be terrified of Pale Fire

#83

Post by 5040 »

vundercind wrote: post #39
Tycho wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 'hook' of Pale Fire is this: ostensibly you're reading a long-form poem with a foreword and footnotes and editing by a friend of the poet (a poet of some eminence), but it soon becomes apparent that the editor is trying to jam his own life story into those footnotes. If you like that idea, I think you'd like the book.

Other books I know of that play with part or all of the text itself being an artifact of the fiction: - The Third Policeman , Flann O’Brian. Fictional scholar of a fictional esoteric philosopher weaves his commentary on same philosopher into an account of his… journey. - If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler , Italo Calvino. You(!) embark on an adventure to find the book you believed you purchased, which was If on a Wint…

I'm reminded of Canada's first weird tale (probably), 'A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder' by James De Mille.

The narrative structure of Strange Manuscript is that of a story within a story. The frame story has four characters. Lord Featherstone, a British aristocrat, has fled the boredom of society to cruise the south seas in his yacht. He is accompanied by Dr. Congreve, a medical doctor who is knowledgeable in such fields as geography, botany, and paleontology; by Noel Oxenden, a Cambridge scholar who is an expert on philology; and by Otto Melick, "a littérateur from London". The four are becalmed in mid-Atlantic when they discover a copper cylinder containing a letter and a manuscript written on an unusual material which the doctor later identifies as papyrus. To while away the time, they take turns reading the manuscript aloud, pausing between turns to discuss its contents and debate its authenticity.

The author seems to have been a rather cool dude

Among the books from his library presented by the family to Dalhousie College are hymnologies of the Greek Church, a beautiful set of Euripides, works in modern Greek, Sanskrit, and Persian showing signs of use, as well as French, German and Italian classics with pencilled marginalia, all attesting the breadth of his intellectual interests. Since his death, his best book, A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder has been published by Harper's. It anticipates such romances as King Solomon's Mines, being a tale of wild adventures in an Antarctic Topsy-turveydom where lovers fly about on tame pterodactyls, and utter unselfishness is the chief aim in life of the highly civilised (but cannibal) inhabitants. [...] De Mille was a tall, handsome, dark man, an excellent teacher, a good conversationalist, best in monologue, an amateur musician, an adept at caricatures and comic verses; in short, a most unusual personality.

Re: Don't be terrified of Pale Fire

#84

Post by filleduchaos »

CydeWeys wrote: post #72
gizmo wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find that literature that requires work does not provide more food or insight into the human condition or a sense of wonder (or whichever benchmark you choose) than simpler and more accessible works. If complexity is not what makes the work valuable, what purpose does it serve? I posit that for some people complexity for the sake of complexity _is_ the appeal.

Off the top of my head, every book I can think of that provides deep insight into the human condition does require putting in some work. Let's take as an example "Night" by Elie Wiesel, a book that is written so simply it is typically assigned in middle school (that's when I read it). Well, it was assigned in school for a reason -- there's a lot of work to put in to learn more about the history of the Holocaust, conc…

Exactly - if a work really was so simple that it required no work to understand it, what insight could it possibly give into the human condition? Plenty of "simple" works are reliant on the reader already having done work to grasp it, from growing up in the right country/culture/subculture to learning the right things in school.

Re: Don't be terrified of Pale Fire

#85

Post by jjtheblunt »

OldGuyInTheClub wrote: post #70
jjtheblunt wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shatner moment?

Saturday Night Live sketch circa 1986. He's at a Star Trek convention in a small town and finally snaps at the trivia-mad, stalkerish fans telling them to "Get life, will you people?!"

We must be similar ages; i just happened not to see that one. Thanks

Re: Don't be terrified of Pale Fire

#86

Post by hawthorned7 »

glial wrote: post #17

I have not yet read Pale Fire, but I loved Lolita and hope to read it soon. Nabokov's writing is so rich, the writing itself (aside from the story!) is worth lingering over and savoring. I've only found a few other writers with a similar quality - Proust, Milton, perhaps Cormac McCarthy and Toni Morrison. Does anyone know of authors with a similar property? I'm not even sure what to call it, so it's difficult to sear…

[dead]

Re: Don't be terrified of Pale Fire

#87

Post by lukas099 »

vundercind wrote: post #39
Tycho wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 'hook' of Pale Fire is this: ostensibly you're reading a long-form poem with a foreword and footnotes and editing by a friend of the poet (a poet of some eminence), but it soon becomes apparent that the editor is trying to jam his own life story into those footnotes. If you like that idea, I think you'd like the book.

Other books I know of that play with part or all of the text itself being an artifact of the fiction: - The Third Policeman , Flann O’Brian. Fictional scholar of a fictional esoteric philosopher weaves his commentary on same philosopher into an account of his… journey. - If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler , Italo Calvino. You(!) embark on an adventure to find the book you believed you purchased, which was If on a Wint…

S. by Doug Dorst and J.J. Abrams is a book called Ship of Theseus with hand-written back and forth marginal notes from two college students who take turns borrowing it from a library. It comes with loose pieces of literature stuck in the pages. It's not on the literary level of Pale Fire or anything but it was definitely enjoyable.

Re: Don't be terrified of Pale Fire

#88

Post by xhkkffbf »

haroldp wrote: post #10

If you are going to read Pale Fire, get it on paper. I tried to read it on my Kindle and the UI is not up to task of lots of flipping back and forth between the poem and the prose sections.

Some readers say that paper sucks too. The right scheme is to get two copies that advance together. So they could be either Kindle or paper or a mixture.

Re: Don't be terrified of Pale Fire

#89

Post by emptybits »

gizmo wrote: post #32

When people recommend Russian literature I'm always curious what they think about the other great Russian literary works. Because I find unnecessary complexity unbearable. I have no desire to read literature with 100+ named characters, unreliable narrators and Escher-like chronology. For some people narrative complexity is a draw but if I can't put a book down and come back to it two weeks later without having to sta…

> I have no desire to read literature with 100+ named characters

Personal share ... I had the same hesitance about getting into Tolstoy. I read The Death Of Ivan Ilyich -- it's short and has few characters. Absolutely loved it. That sealed the deal so I'm working through Anna Karenina now. I'm reading the Rosamund Bartlett translation and it's just superb so I don't really care about the torrent of names and characters. It's worth it IMO.

Re: Don't be terrified of Pale Fire

#90

Post by sixo »

gizmo wrote: post #32

When people recommend Russian literature I'm always curious what they think about the other great Russian literary works. Because I find unnecessary complexity unbearable. I have no desire to read literature with 100+ named characters, unreliable narrators and Escher-like chronology. For some people narrative complexity is a draw but if I can't put a book down and come back to it two weeks later without having to sta…

There's a certain literary canon of "men of genius" and often Nabokov is recommended from this reference frame; people rightly react to its invocation. "Don't be terrified of Pale Fire" frames "Pale Fire" as an impenetrable manifestation of the essence of genius, implying that if you were at the right level you'd get it, but—condescendingly—it's still "okay" if you don't get it! That framing is nonsense. It's a thing that's fun for some people, and a certain kind of lit-bro mistakingly believes that what they like is what's genuinely Good and what every smart person should like. I expect your aversion is actually to that voice which takes for granted that "smart-sounding" is equivalent to literary merit for everyone else, too.

In fact, Pale Fire is quite a straightforward story, with a creative form with some puzzles to decipher if you feel like it. Or you can brush past them; the suspicious presence of contradictions is a delight in itself. It was fun for me at 22 but at 33 I would not go back and read it—I don't recall it being particularly deep, but it was a good time. I'm more interested in the other Russians now. Not that Nabokov, Tolstoy, or Dostoevsky have anything to do with each other. One would never think to group them at all if they hadn't written in the same language.

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