Pale Fire Peoples!
Welcome to Week 4! A nice long flight yesterday and some quality Father’s Day reading time has me nearly caught up. It seems like once I hit the King’s escape, things really started to move.
I was struck this week by two stylistic features this book has in common with Gravity’s Rainbow (perhaps they define the Cornell School): a predeliction for silly names (Gahr?!) and a love for the tangential detail, though where N. spins them out like playful fractals that go on a sentence or three or four, Pynchon was laying down dense-packed multi-paged tangents designed to re-, de-, and cross- wire our brains. (I ‘spose ya could argue that the whole commentary is like a 200+-page tangential detail, so mebbe Nabokov wins that battle after all.)
In related news, I’ve begun to read certain Kinbote passages with the voice of Dr. Evil. (“Physically, he was a sickly bald-headed man resembling a pallid gland.”) Next week: We’ve got just two weeks to go (can ya believe that?). To keep them roughly even, this week will be a little on the short side. Let’s meet back up round about the “anonymous bard of the twelfth century,” which is to say, right after the commentary on Lines 681, also known as page 188 in the Everyman’s Library.
16 comments for “The Pale Fire Deathmarch, Week 4”
So-Called Bill
June 21, 2005 at 12:43 pm
The good news is, the noisy workmen are little to be seen these days. The bad news is, their giant orange cherry-picker lurks around the corner like a sleeping dinosaur, forcing me to drink more whiskey than usual to calm my nerves. And the refuse-attracting dirt triangles continue to wreak havoc with the local chi to such an extent that I am considering bringing in the heavy artillery–yes, that’s right: kittens.
First – Happy birthday Cecil.
Now, an attempt at Heroic couplets.
Three days away vacationing in Door
My Nabokov still had some shocks in store
“Frost at Midnight” evoked by his waxwing
And danger does pursue the Zemblan king.
Now my commentary. I’m on my last day in Wisconsin’s Door county as I write this. But my first thought on this section is on line 131’s “shadow of the waxwing slain.” Something about the line and the commentary made me think of Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight” (The frost performs it’s secrert ministry…) . The key to that poem is its triple time frame – the speaker in the present in the Lake Country remembers his past in London and projects a future for the baby boy he is holding. I keep finding myself wondering if I am over-reading, and Nabokov keeps leaving me just enough hints to make me think I am not reading closely enough.
cecil–here’s a birthday present (one of the loveliest phrases i’ve seen yet): “A fire of larch roots crackled in the stove, and all the shadows of his lost kingdom gathered to play around his rocking chair…”
hey — thanks for the birthday wishes. I’ve been on the road (posting this week’s entry remotely) and I’ve really enjoyed reading the comments from this different time-zone.
Also: I think Bonnie said it best when she said “crapula.”
And lastly: So-called Bill — kittens?! Was that a metaphor or…?
I am hideously behind so all you on-time people can answer my questions. I just finished the passage after line 130 during the rebellion. And I am wondering if Kinbote tells us at some point how he knows all this stuff. Was he with the King in the passage? Or even the “flashback” of when the King was merely a prince and went down the same passage with his young “friend”. Is Kinbote making it all up or is he told about all this by the King himself? Who’s point-of-view is this?
My other question is to all the gay references. Kinbote is pretty out about his sexuality so why does he make some of the references less than appealing. There are several references to whimpering pages and taking liberties, etc. Is this Kinbote’s take on sexuality or is there a more literary meaning that I am too dumb to pick up on? (Hence the reason I do not use my real name!!) Is it that royalty have always done what they please and be damn all if you don’t like it?
I promise to be caught up by the end of the week! Happy birthday CV!!
Disa wrote:
“…I am wondering if Kinbote tells us at some point how he knows all this stuff.”
He hasn’t yet, at least not where I’m at — but that’s one of the things we’ve been watching for closely in the Vortex household. At one point I believe Kinbote says that, like Charlie X, he’s the son of the King. It got us thinking that — if we read that right — Kinbote’s identity is likely to become a central twist.
I get the idea that Kinbote is the king. This seems to be an unavoidable conclusion (or assumption). He hasn’t said so, at least far–though he seems to hint. There’s this passage for e.g. on p. 99 (EL):
“This detailed recollection, whose structure and maculation have taken some time to describe in this note, skimmed through the King’s memory in one instant. Certain creatures of the past, and this was one of them, may lie dormant for thirty years as this one had, while their natural habitat undergoes calamitous alterations.”
There’s no other way Kinbote could know stuff, (mental stuff like this, sexual stuff like the Prince & Oleg in the bath), in such detail. Unless he’s omniscient, or psychotic & just making shit up. Either way, beside being unreliable, he’s also a pretty unsavory narrator. It seems like he has a relentless need to have his story told. (For affirmation?) So after being frustrated by Shade, he tells it himself, third-person. Anyway, that’s my speculation. (I’m only on p. 123.) I’m sure there’s some twists up the road, especially with Gradus on his way, regicide in mind. If Kinbote is the king, how is it that Shade gets killed instead?
I’m going to be very frank here. I’m behind by about fifty pages, I’m lost as to how the King’s story and Shade connect at all, and I find Kinbote at times so annoying that I actually have to put the book down. There. I’ve said it.
Regarding Kinbote being the king, or not: In a fairly early comment, to Line 71, Kinbote “slips” and refers to King Alfin, the father of King Charles II, as “my father.” Seems to me Kinbote isn’t really trying to hide his “real” identity. Davidg noted Kinbote’s omniscience when it comes to the King, but what’s weird is how Kinbote also knows details about Gradus’s doings and thoughts (see, for example, the commentary to lines 403-404). Hmmm?
Whoops! In my comment about K’s knowledge of Gradus, I meant to refer to the commentary to line 408. Which I notice now provides a clue to how K knows so much about Gradus’s doings — because Gradus told him (“as he was to tell me later”).
Here are a few much-earlier notes I didn’t get a chance to post much earlier (numbers are “commentary on line X”):
80: How weird it was to encounter the sculptor “Arnor” after the recent Lord of the Rings high.
85: The data on Pope Pius X are real-world accurate, despite Kinbote’s sitting in a motel with no references at hand. I consider this a slip by Nabokov.
130: I absolutely love the word “knickknackatory”.
131-132: How seriously can you take an assassin who models after Mary Poppins?
240: “The sea gulls of 1933 are all dead, of course.” Yes, but like everything under the sun they’re being revived on Broadway next year.
Belated BDay greeting CV & if I get a chance I’ll see your reading. A little post to bookfriends out there: Please watch Jeopardy! on Wednesday the 29th, 7:00 pm (here in the Bay Area; may be on another time elsewhere) and look for a guy in a green suit and odd beard. That’ll be the Captain himself.
Onto book stuff, I feel like there’s some very good commentary, like Dr. Vitz & Raptor Mage, e.g., who have opinios of each trick nabokov is pulling. Then other folks, like me, who are sort of along for the ride, and letting the words & referrents slide by. I’m certainly enjoying it, but I’m missing so much.
I know for Gravity’s Rainbow I read the book with a laptop in hand to help me with each bump, and even though I picked up a mere fraction of Pynchoniana, it was enough to feel in the know. Here I’ve avoided looking items up, both for time, quantity, and the feeling that I should know this stuff myself. I’ve decided that I’m going to re-read it from the beginning after this march is done, and try to tie down whatever I can at that point.
On the other hand, for those who want to attack it more thoroughly now, I found a good site: http://importantwork.com/text/palefire/ (Check out the list this was published to!) I found this site by searching for the words Grimpen, Chtonic & Sempiternal. I had thought these were all words used in “The Hounds of the Baskervilles,” having read it recently knowing Grimpen was in there, thought chtonic was, etc. There’s even a Holmes reference earlier in the book. But apparently the three words are from T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets: http://www.tristan.icom43.net/quartets/
(Y’know I’m just realizing it’s a big-ass pain knowing that in the Everyman book there’s an introduction which says in big red letters DO NOT READ! Does it mean that all of the answers we’re looking for are written down in the book, wrapped in ribbon, but we can’t touch it? Are we not supposed to research any of this outside? It’s really colored the whole experience. Aggh! Well at least it’s not that huge a book that we won’t be done soon.)
Onto some of this weeks notes, I thinks others have made it clear that Kinbote is, or thinks he is, King Charles. Some sites I’ve peeked at say he may really be someone named Botkin, but so far I haven’t seen anything that leads me down that path. I also was thrown off by Kinbote’s knowledge of Gradus’s thoughts. It led me down the path that K is making it all up out of whole cloth, which he may be.
As far as the other question, why does he make his homosexual experiences so off-putting. My thought thad been that Nabokov might have been operating under the idea of “the self-hating queer,” which was so popular in the 1950s. I mean it was classified as a mental disorder until the 1970s. I’m not sure of his understanding & experience with homosexuals, but perhaps like Humbert Humbert (and I only say this from watching James Mason in Lolita, not from the book) he considered all of these sexual “deviants” to be insane in one sort or another. Dunno, but worth exploring.
I am surprised at how fascinating I’m finding Kinbote’s narration, even though I dislike the jerk. In notes to 403-404 he dismisses Shade’s section about Hazel on technical grounds without seeing the slightest bit of emotion in it. Yet he condemns every little slight he feels upon himself. I’m not sure what the system of government in Zembla is supposed to be, and I’ve assumed that the country’s takeover was yet another communist coup, with some event at a glass factory as the spark for workeres to rise up. But he seems to feel that it was about him, with the extremeists against the karlists.
Question for anyone: What’s this with the Shadows? Odon vs. Nodo, Gradus the Gray, Ombre for Shadow (it isn’t. For odd parallels to PF see this unrelated site: http://www.worldwidewords.org/weirdwords/ww-omb1.htm), and of course John Shade.
Cheers to all
Like Captain Marsupial, I’ve also stopped looking up new vocabulary in favor a straight read-through, not least because MW11 has such a low hit-rate for the arcana.
I don’t think I’m giving anything away at this point by suggesting that his “memory” of being the exiled king of the imaginary land of Zembla is Kinbote’s elaborate delusion. But as Bonnie B. points out, he also seems to have firsthand knowledge of Gradus’ subjective experience. Gradus is perhaps also a delusion, a projected anti-self opposite to the king.
Of course, that doesn’t explain who Kinbote actually is. He certainly seems to be European, sharing (with Pnin and Humbert Humbert, IIRC) Nabokov’s own polysyllabic disdain for mid-Century US civilization as well as his sense of exile. In that respect, Nabokov has put a good deal of himself into his insanely Unreliable Narrator.
So is the portrayal ultimately homophobic? I dunno. Certainly Nabokov was of his time, and in creating a comic character he drew on the assumption that it’s inherently funny for anyone to think that sexuality like Kinbote’s is “normal.” But I think he also invested a measure of sympathy in his portrayal of the exuberant brio of Kinbote’s sexuality and madness. Or maybe it’s just respect for his character’s life force, which runs to ping-pong doubles matches with identical twins.
The good news is, the noisy workmen are little to be seen these days. The bad news is, their giant orange cherry-picker lurks around the corner like a sleeping dinosaur, forcing me to drink more whiskey than usual to calm my nerves. And the refuse-attracting dirt triangles continue to wreak havoc with the local chi to such an extent that I am considering bringing in the heavy artillery–yes, that’s right: kittens.
Oh yeah, I almost forgot, it’s Cecil’s birthday today, so everybody please join me in raising a toast to our beloved leader.
Happy Birthday, CV!
First – Happy birthday Cecil.
Now, an attempt at Heroic couplets.
Three days away vacationing in Door
My Nabokov still had some shocks in store
“Frost at Midnight” evoked by his waxwing
And danger does pursue the Zemblan king.
Now my commentary. I’m on my last day in Wisconsin’s Door county as I write this. But my first thought on this section is on line 131’s “shadow of the waxwing slain.” Something about the line and the commentary made me think of Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight” (The frost performs it’s secrert ministry…) . The key to that poem is its triple time frame – the speaker in the present in the Lake Country remembers his past in London and projects a future for the baby boy he is holding. I keep finding myself wondering if I am over-reading, and Nabokov keeps leaving me just enough hints to make me think I am not reading closely enough.
Considering changing my user-name to orbicle-of-jasp.
cecil–here’s a birthday present (one of the loveliest phrases i’ve seen yet): “A fire of larch roots crackled in the stove, and all the shadows of his lost kingdom gathered to play around his rocking chair…”
hey — thanks for the birthday wishes. I’ve been on the road (posting this week’s entry remotely) and I’ve really enjoyed reading the comments from this different time-zone.
Also: I think Bonnie said it best when she said “crapula.”
And lastly: So-called Bill — kittens?! Was that a metaphor or…?
I am hideously behind so all you on-time people can answer my questions. I just finished the passage after line 130 during the rebellion. And I am wondering if Kinbote tells us at some point how he knows all this stuff. Was he with the King in the passage? Or even the “flashback” of when the King was merely a prince and went down the same passage with his young “friend”. Is Kinbote making it all up or is he told about all this by the King himself? Who’s point-of-view is this?
My other question is to all the gay references. Kinbote is pretty out about his sexuality so why does he make some of the references less than appealing. There are several references to whimpering pages and taking liberties, etc. Is this Kinbote’s take on sexuality or is there a more literary meaning that I am too dumb to pick up on? (Hence the reason I do not use my real name!!) Is it that royalty have always done what they please and be damn all if you don’t like it?
I promise to be caught up by the end of the week! Happy birthday CV!!
Disa wrote:
“…I am wondering if Kinbote tells us at some point how he knows all this stuff.”
He hasn’t yet, at least not where I’m at — but that’s one of the things we’ve been watching for closely in the Vortex household. At one point I believe Kinbote says that, like Charlie X, he’s the son of the King. It got us thinking that — if we read that right — Kinbote’s identity is likely to become a central twist.
I get the idea that Kinbote is the king. This seems to be an unavoidable conclusion (or assumption). He hasn’t said so, at least far–though he seems to hint. There’s this passage for e.g. on p. 99 (EL):
“This detailed recollection, whose structure and maculation have taken some time to describe in this note, skimmed through the King’s memory in one instant. Certain creatures of the past, and this was one of them, may lie dormant for thirty years as this one had, while their natural habitat undergoes calamitous alterations.”
There’s no other way Kinbote could know stuff, (mental stuff like this, sexual stuff like the Prince & Oleg in the bath), in such detail. Unless he’s omniscient, or psychotic & just making shit up. Either way, beside being unreliable, he’s also a pretty unsavory narrator. It seems like he has a relentless need to have his story told. (For affirmation?) So after being frustrated by Shade, he tells it himself, third-person. Anyway, that’s my speculation. (I’m only on p. 123.) I’m sure there’s some twists up the road, especially with Gradus on his way, regicide in mind. If Kinbote is the king, how is it that Shade gets killed instead?
I’m going to be very frank here. I’m behind by about fifty pages, I’m lost as to how the King’s story and Shade connect at all, and I find Kinbote at times so annoying that I actually have to put the book down. There. I’ve said it.
Regarding Kinbote being the king, or not: In a fairly early comment, to Line 71, Kinbote “slips” and refers to King Alfin, the father of King Charles II, as “my father.” Seems to me Kinbote isn’t really trying to hide his “real” identity. Davidg noted Kinbote’s omniscience when it comes to the King, but what’s weird is how Kinbote also knows details about Gradus’s doings and thoughts (see, for example, the commentary to lines 403-404). Hmmm?
Whoops! In my comment about K’s knowledge of Gradus, I meant to refer to the commentary to line 408. Which I notice now provides a clue to how K knows so much about Gradus’s doings — because Gradus told him (“as he was to tell me later”).
Here are a few much-earlier notes I didn’t get a chance to post much earlier (numbers are “commentary on line X”):
80: How weird it was to encounter the sculptor “Arnor” after the recent Lord of the Rings high.
85: The data on Pope Pius X are real-world accurate, despite Kinbote’s sitting in a motel with no references at hand. I consider this a slip by Nabokov.
130: I absolutely love the word “knickknackatory”.
131-132: How seriously can you take an assassin who models after Mary Poppins?
240: “The sea gulls of 1933 are all dead, of course.” Yes, but like everything under the sun they’re being revived on Broadway next year.
Belated BDay greeting CV & if I get a chance I’ll see your reading. A little post to bookfriends out there: Please watch Jeopardy! on Wednesday the 29th, 7:00 pm (here in the Bay Area; may be on another time elsewhere) and look for a guy in a green suit and odd beard. That’ll be the Captain himself.
Onto book stuff, I feel like there’s some very good commentary, like Dr. Vitz & Raptor Mage, e.g., who have opinios of each trick nabokov is pulling. Then other folks, like me, who are sort of along for the ride, and letting the words & referrents slide by. I’m certainly enjoying it, but I’m missing so much.
I know for Gravity’s Rainbow I read the book with a laptop in hand to help me with each bump, and even though I picked up a mere fraction of Pynchoniana, it was enough to feel in the know. Here I’ve avoided looking items up, both for time, quantity, and the feeling that I should know this stuff myself. I’ve decided that I’m going to re-read it from the beginning after this march is done, and try to tie down whatever I can at that point.
On the other hand, for those who want to attack it more thoroughly now, I found a good site: http://importantwork.com/text/palefire/ (Check out the list this was published to!) I found this site by searching for the words Grimpen, Chtonic & Sempiternal. I had thought these were all words used in “The Hounds of the Baskervilles,” having read it recently knowing Grimpen was in there, thought chtonic was, etc. There’s even a Holmes reference earlier in the book. But apparently the three words are from T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets: http://www.tristan.icom43.net/quartets/
(Y’know I’m just realizing it’s a big-ass pain knowing that in the Everyman book there’s an introduction which says in big red letters DO NOT READ! Does it mean that all of the answers we’re looking for are written down in the book, wrapped in ribbon, but we can’t touch it? Are we not supposed to research any of this outside? It’s really colored the whole experience. Aggh! Well at least it’s not that huge a book that we won’t be done soon.)
Onto some of this weeks notes, I thinks others have made it clear that Kinbote is, or thinks he is, King Charles. Some sites I’ve peeked at say he may really be someone named Botkin, but so far I haven’t seen anything that leads me down that path. I also was thrown off by Kinbote’s knowledge of Gradus’s thoughts. It led me down the path that K is making it all up out of whole cloth, which he may be.
As far as the other question, why does he make his homosexual experiences so off-putting. My thought thad been that Nabokov might have been operating under the idea of “the self-hating queer,” which was so popular in the 1950s. I mean it was classified as a mental disorder until the 1970s. I’m not sure of his understanding & experience with homosexuals, but perhaps like Humbert Humbert (and I only say this from watching James Mason in Lolita, not from the book) he considered all of these sexual “deviants” to be insane in one sort or another. Dunno, but worth exploring.
I am surprised at how fascinating I’m finding Kinbote’s narration, even though I dislike the jerk. In notes to 403-404 he dismisses Shade’s section about Hazel on technical grounds without seeing the slightest bit of emotion in it. Yet he condemns every little slight he feels upon himself. I’m not sure what the system of government in Zembla is supposed to be, and I’ve assumed that the country’s takeover was yet another communist coup, with some event at a glass factory as the spark for workeres to rise up. But he seems to feel that it was about him, with the extremeists against the karlists.
Question for anyone: What’s this with the Shadows? Odon vs. Nodo, Gradus the Gray, Ombre for Shadow (it isn’t. For odd parallels to PF see this unrelated site: http://www.worldwidewords.org/weirdwords/ww-omb1.htm), and of course John Shade.
Cheers to all
Like Captain Marsupial, I’ve also stopped looking up new vocabulary in favor a straight read-through, not least because MW11 has such a low hit-rate for the arcana.
I don’t think I’m giving anything away at this point by suggesting that his “memory” of being the exiled king of the imaginary land of Zembla is Kinbote’s elaborate delusion. But as Bonnie B. points out, he also seems to have firsthand knowledge of Gradus’ subjective experience. Gradus is perhaps also a delusion, a projected anti-self opposite to the king.
Of course, that doesn’t explain who Kinbote actually is. He certainly seems to be European, sharing (with Pnin and Humbert Humbert, IIRC) Nabokov’s own polysyllabic disdain for mid-Century US civilization as well as his sense of exile. In that respect, Nabokov has put a good deal of himself into his insanely Unreliable Narrator.
So is the portrayal ultimately homophobic? I dunno. Certainly Nabokov was of his time, and in creating a comic character he drew on the assumption that it’s inherently funny for anyone to think that sexuality like Kinbote’s is “normal.” But I think he also invested a measure of sympathy in his portrayal of the exuberant brio of Kinbote’s sexuality and madness. Or maybe it’s just respect for his character’s life force, which runs to ping-pong doubles matches with identical twins.