Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

We're one week out, so we need to talk about reasons you NEED to read this book, because it's NOT always obvious. I avoided it myself at one point.

Day One:
It's not just a poem and commentary. Many people already know this, but since it's not immediately obvious, let me quote the wikipedia:

"Pale Fire (1962) is a novel by Vladimir Nabokov. The novel is presented as a 999-line poem titled "Pale Fire", written by the fictional John Shade, with a foreword and lengthy commentary by a neighbor and academic colleague of the poet, Charles Kinbote. Together these elements form a narrative in which both authors are central characters. Pale Fire has spawned a wide variety of interpretations and a large body of written criticism, which Pekka Tammi estimated in 1995 as over 80 studies."

I'll give you another reason today...a great many people consider Pale Fire not only his greatest work, but many even consider it one of the greatest English language novels of all time. Agree or disagree, let's get into it. We'll read and discuss as well as dig into references using some of the many resources available, which will either be available to you online, or quotes provided for you. There's a massive amount of room for interpretation, but many still hidden things to be dig up. In some ways, it's one of literature's greatest You-Be-The-Detective stories.

More reasons tomorrow...

Pretty persuasive Will. I might just change my mind and join in this read.

I'll have more reasons each day as we get closer, I'll sway you yet!

No to step on Will's thread, but I'd like to add that many (myself included) also consider it one of the cleverest and wittiest books ever written as well :-)

Nice job Will. I'm interested in hearing everyone's take on the poem itself.

I was intrigued by the formal aspects about Pale Fire, but it was when I read an article about it that quoted a bit from the poem that I knew I had to read this. Luckily we have an english copy at our university.

Day Two: Confusion

Ha, you thought I forgot to post, didn't you. No such luck.

Why confusion? because at the heart of this mystery of narration, the confusion of who is the subject, who is the principle of action of the work is a point of conflict, confusion, and debate which has stretched back to the publication of the book with little resolution. Often you'll see references to Brian Boyd, who has written on behalf of Nabokov's son on occasion, and has written a rather well known book we'll reference at times in the discussion entirely devoted to Pale Fire. However, did you know that Boyd actually had entirely different conclusions before changing his mind to the result he published in the book? Did you also know that he has changed his mind since? Possibly twice? Even amongst Nabokov scholars there is confusion, disagreement, constant debate, and that rarest of academic birds, changing of minds. To my mind, confusion is one of the greatest reasons to approach the book. Just who is speaking? Do they exist? Are they even sane? Ask 10 people, you'll get 11 answers.

Tomorrow, the hidden world of Pale Fire devotees.

This may influence me into joining the read as well. Thanks for the brilliant remarks.

Day Three: The Hidden World

So the hidden world of Pale Fire is present on a couple of levels. For one, it's present in the confusion I referenced yesterday over everything from the intent of the work, the subject and actors, to the interpretation of them by scholars with direct access to papers and family members. However, the author himself left clues both gentle and direct as to his intent. We'll try to examine those where available during the discussions.

Secondly, the debate since publication has proven so fun for readers and scholars that entire worlds of essays, books, papers, and websites have blossomed in the night to celebrate the novel, examine it, or use it as a jumping off point for new ideas.

For example, there's a site hosted by the University Libraries of the Pennsylvania State University, called "Zembla" (sound familiar?). On it's "about" page it states:

"Since its inception it has averaged 50,000 hits per year, and requests for the site's 19+ megabytes of materials consistently account for a large percentage of the hits to the University Libraries server each month.

I suspect these numbers are a little dated by now, but a perusal of the site will give the attentive searcher access to many critical writings on the author, a great many of which are directly on or involve Pale Fire. I have of course given enough clues to find the site with what I'd imagine would take very little effort. I also build and maintain a complete list of resources when the discussion begins for those who dislike searching for things.

Third, there is a hidden layer of information and references locked inside Pale Fire. Nabokov himself said it was his favorite book to write saying,

""It is jollier than the others," he said, "and it is full of plums that I keep hoping somebody will find."
- The New York Herald Tribune Books section, page two, 17 June 1962

These "plums" range across everything from who was the real life inspiration for some our principle characters, to references sprinkled throughout the work, to the title itself. We'll tease out many (possibly segregating the most intense reference examinations into special threads for those irritated by over-analysis!) and find answers where possible, and quite possibly even develop new theories using our collective literary hive-mind.

Come be a drone. We'll make honey.

Tomorrow: Just how are you supposed to read this thing anyway? (warning: it should come as no surprise that few agree on this either!)

Tasty teasing Will, tasty. I have read Pale Fire, and encourage those who haven't to pick up a copy. It's perhaps an amazing book in that as short as it is, the universe it opens is as expansive as anything out of larger meta-novels and Pomo works.

If I weren't reading Proust, I would be down with reading this again.

Give in to the urges, you know you want to. By the time the discussion opens, we'll suck you in. Even if you're already read it, join in for the new details and hidden gems, and just jump around your text for reference. After all, what makes this all so fun is our collective efforts of not only reading the work, but working collaboratively in examining ideas to reveal what we either couldn't develop alone, or at least to accelerate the process from years to days.

Will wrote: "Day Three: The Hidden World

So the hidden world of Pale Fire is present on a couple of levels. For one, it's present in the confusion I referenced yesterday over everything from the intent of the ..."

Looking forward to finding some of those jolly plums...

Day Four: Just how ARE you supposed to read this thing anyway?

A good question, and one I've thought a lot about lately. In the forward, we're instructed (by a narrator possibly unreliable) to read the forward, the commentary, the notes in order of reference, and quite possibly obtain two copies and slice one into bits... Hilarious, but frankly unreasonable for many. Plus, there's the issue of the narrator giving us these instructions having the best spirit of the effort in mind or not whilst giving us this advice.

An increasing number of fans support the reading of the poem alone, with some new editions going so far as to leave out the forward and commentary out entirely. While I do agree there IS evidence that Nabokov did intend for his poem to be able to stand on it's own, there isn't much to suggest he ever intended to divorce the poem from the commentary.

That leaves us with the great two options:
#1, to read in order of printing, that is, from front to back, skipping back frequently throughout the commentary for reference, and
#2, to read the commentary simultaneously with the poem.

Frankly, I sort of tried it both ways, and found the all-too-obvious #1 to still be the most pleasurable option. #2 made a sort of sense, but it made the poem lose luster, and it really IS worth reading by itself. In one online discussion, it was determined that the order of reading if you were to exactly follow the suggestions in the forward would look like:

Foreword, note991; line735; line86; note1-4; line181-182; note998 ; note12; note39-40; Timon of Athens, Act IV Sc 3; note962; note894; note17 and note29; note 596; note27; note34; note39; note42; note70; note149; note171; note79; note130; note47; note691; note49; note549; note57; note61; and so on

If any of you are going to do just that, you have my respect, and I'd love to hear how that works out for you, but I think I'll stick with cover-to-cover.

In planning the discussion, we decided to split the reading into three almost equal segments, which while having the disadvantage of refraining from much meta-literary work in the first week, allows us to both enjoy the poem by itself, whet our appetite for what is to come with the forward, and still have two fine weeks to dig in the rich earth of the commentary. Plums indeed.

Next: Why Pale Fire is the perfect novel of the Internet age (despite coming long before it), and why it will only continue to gain in fame.

Will wrote: "Day Four: Just how ARE you supposed to read this thing anyway?

A good question, and one I've thought a lot about lately. In the forward, we're instructed (by a narrator possibly unreliable) to rea..."

I wonder if Cortazar took inspiration from this for his Hopscotch book.

Do you have a link to the discussion that talks about the order if you follow the suggestions?

An excellent question, and one that actually occurred to me, so I was digging around to answer that question. Certainly some people in the Nabokov community feel so, and just as certainly Pale Fire was published the year before "Rayula".




which makes the point that Nabokov is mentioned in Rayula, which without checking, is a short passage where he is discussed by the Serpent Club. I could be mistaken though. (I see now a passage in another essay confirming this)

In "Around the Day in Eighty Worlds" however, the claim an entire chapter is devoted to is seems unfounded. I searched a HQ digital copy through Open Library and found a lone reference to either Pale Fire or Nabokov on pg. 205 which quotes directly from Pale Fire, and suggests (depending on how you read it) that it was both important, but perhaps simultaneous to his own realizations, in the manner of both admitting influence while at the same time dismissing it so common to notable writers. Personally, I suspect Pale Fire to have had a great deal of direct influence upon Cortázar's work.

An interesting essay on Hopscotch in which Pale Fire is directly referenced:

note #27 suggests further leads which enterprising fans of both authors might wish to follow.

P.S. Around the Day in Eighty Worlds is loaded with disturbing images of posed dolls...so thanks for that, Julio.

Will wrote: "the order of reading if you were to exactly follow the suggestions in the forward would look like:

Foreword, note991; line735 etc."

Not wanting to sound pedantic or anything, and it is just slightly off topic but it really has been jumping at me in this thread (and others) - why does everyone keep writing "forward" when the correct word is quite blatantly "foreword"?

Oh.... Well in my case it's apparently because I forgot how to spell, and nobody else was willing to help me out by pointing that out? Anyway, thanks, I'll do better.

Day Five: Pale Fire and the Interwebz(tm)

As those who read the Pale Fire wikipedia page () might have seen, Ted Nelson, the man who co-founded IBM as well as coined the term Hypertext (amongst other words more awkward and less pronounceable) used Pale Fire to demonstrate his new idea of what Hypertext is in 1969. However, it went poorly.
The web is of course written in HTML, for which the "H" stands for Hypertext, so we can be at least a little assured that the Internet and Pale Fire share some connections to begin with.

Annalisa Volpone in her article for Nabokov Online Journal "See The Web Of The World: (Hyper)textual plagiarism in Joyce's Finnigan's Wake and Nabokov's Pale Fire" () points out a few, including one related to exhortations made by the narrator in the Foreward (thank you Larou) to "cut-and-paste" parts of the poem.

The cultural stock of Pale Fire also seems to have risen over the years, perhaps (IMHO) due to the familiarity and comfort of the average reader has gained with the Internet, and hyper-textual language itself. Unlike a work Nabokov admired very much, Joyce's own Ulysses, the references in Pale Fire seem to be more than cultural touchstones and conversational asides, more than intellectual abstractions used as abbreviations, often times Pale Fire really does feel as though the references could use the dark blue most web browsers use for links to other pages. Indeed, rather than obscuring the meaning like some could argue Joyce was attempting to do, in order to provide the reader with a fun puzzle, Nabokov seems to want his reader to find the answer, but not until making us search for those "choice plums". Will Pale Fire's stock continue to rise? Time will tell, but to at least this observer, it seems likely.

Will wrote: "Day Five: Pale Fire and the Interwebz(tm)

As those who read the Pale Fire wikipedia page () might have seen, Ted Nelson, the man who co-founded IBM as well a..."

Did a quick skim of the Volpone paper. Looks very interesting and I'm pondering how to work "reamalgamerge" into daily speech, which will be a challenge given that everyone here speaks French.


FOREWORD ...just sayin'

I got a little behind yesterday, and didn't post the reason for that day, thanks to a encounter with a lovely bottle of single barrel bourbon amongst other things, but in a little over 12 hours or so I'll put up the first thread of the discussion. To finish this thread off, I'll leave you with one extra tidbit: Some suggest that the real life models used for John Shade as well as Lolita's much discussed protagonist Humbert Humbert might well have been met by our author at Stanford. Texas poet and scholar R. S. Gwynn suggest that Yvor Winters was the model for John Shade. Articles below... See you in the discussions!

By the way, I might as well mention that it has become apparent that publishing the poem separately from the commentary may be the dumbest publishing concept possible.

I could more readily accept a publication of Boccaccio's Decameron which contains the table of contents only, without the remaining text.

Only if you hate the poem. On the other hand, as someone who must write poetry as part of my work, I have to respect anyone who can write a 999-line poem using a strict 10 syllable line on EXACTLY what they intend it to be about. The edition you're referring to has other attractive features as well, containing a version written on individual cards as the poem was supposed to have been...and by the way has much to do with Nabokov's actual working methods, using cards as well.

But I like the table of contents in the Decameron (even if I did once write a spoof of it). I just wouldn't imagine that it had ever been intended as a stand alone piece.

The first chapter of Lolita is also good. But if it were published in a book of its own, I'd wonder why.

Here, though the poem on its own is not just something exerpted. It's virtually a denial of the poem's purpose, and a deliberate destruction of its intended context.

Zadignose wrote: "Here, though the poem on its own is not just something exerpted. It's virtually a denial of the poem's purpose, and a deliberate destruction of its intended context..."

The Nabokovians who look at the poem separately are doing so as an object of study. If I understand Will and the academics correctly, the poem is an outstanding achievement on its own, particularly since he chose a form that is essentially obsolete in 20th century poetry. And so, I don't think the purpose is to destroy the intended context, but to dig deeper into this aspect of Nabokov's work. Certainly its purpose for Nabokov was in the context of the novel, and if he wanted to publish it as a standalone poem, he might have done so.

Fair enough... but wacky all the same.

Zadignose wrote: "Fair enough... but wacky all the same."

Well, they are Yahoos academics, of course, hence the wackiness...

Even though Nabokov chose an older form for his poem, I still found it easy to read and understand as a narrative. Whether it should be read within the novel or on its own, it's still an admirable piece of writing.