Pale Fire Research Articles

The Difference of a Sibilant: A Note on Pale Fire, Canto Three

Taking as metaphor Nabokov's apothegm about the cosmic and comic side of things, we apply this to Canto Three of Pale Fire and come up with a surprise: Not only does our illusionist poke solemn fun at the absurdities of the Institute of Preparation for the Hereafter, as we'd expect. He also allows amid the particolored confetti some somber themes to unfold their black striations, and illuminate the dark design of the whole.

The Museum of What Happens

This essay reads James with and against Nabokov. Taking on what has been called James's unreadable novel, The Sacred Fount, Wood begins by asking quite plainly how do we read sentences of the sort offered by James in that experimental novel and by Nabokov in that tricksy experiment in form, Pale Fire. Beginning with the similarities between these two reading experiences, Wood argues that a too ready acceptance of irony—that modernist and post-modernist mode in which we have all been trained by the recent history of the novel—blinds us to the very oddness of James's narrator and to the delicate balance between suspicion and belief that James asks of us.

Playing at Birth: Samuel R. Delany's Dhalgren

A joycean tour de force of a novel, Dhalgren . . . stake[s] a better claim than anything else in this country in the last quarter-century (excepting only Gass's Omensetter's Luck and Nabokov's Pale Fire) to a permanent place as one of the enduring monuments of our national literature.—The Libertarian Review (blurb taken from the recent Vintage edition.) This reviewer has missed the point. Or, rather, this reviewer has missed one point of many in his reduction of Dhalgren to a national monument. To be fair, this reduction is the essence of the work of a traditional book review and of much intellectual work. While I do agree that Dhalgren is an "enduring monument of our national literature," I question the absence of scare quotes in the review. In the world of Dhalgren (and some would say, our world) adjectives—like "permanent" and "enduring"—and nouns—like "monument" and "nation"—can only be written under erasure. There is another reading of Delany's novel, a reading which interrupts any simple reduction to a patriotic monument, work of art, or tool of ego creation. Situating Dhalgren, published in 1975, in the context of the 1960's and early 1970's is difficult to resist. Indeed, Delany has admitted that the [End Page 172] "ruins and wrecks" of U.S. cities provided him with his essential material (Edelman). We also know from the same interview that Delany originally envisioned the novel as a series of five novels in which five dissimilar governments would be overthrown by a "group of people just exercising the wonderful world view of the flower children." For African-Americans, the 1960's and 1970's were a period of extreme poverty and racism, as well as a period of great change with so many migrating from the rural south to the industrial north (Zinn 458–459). During this period there were peaceful civil right marches, militant Black Panther actions, anti-war protests, prison riots, and assassinations. Exercising little hyperbole, Howard Zinn describes blacks as "engaging in wild insurrection in a hundred northern cities" in the late 1960's (450). Dhalgren's Bellona, named after the Roman goddess of war, feels like a city torn apart by a race riot, if not a coup d'état. All of which implies that while Delany's original conception altered significantly, his critique of extant political structures remains. Readers of Dhalgren in 1975 would have been incapable of understanding Bellona as anything other than a near analogue of cities recently torn asunder by urban riots. What follows, then, needs to be understood as involving an ethical critique of concrete political structures and as not simply concerned with the writing of the text before us because, as I will argue, the city along with every subjectival creation is a product of myth. Delany's text interrogates such monumental myths through a representation of the city (and thereby, the subject) as wounded and open to certain ethical possibilities. In its fragmentation Delany's text represents, internally and externally, subjectivity at its limit, which is to say, a "subjectivity" whose assimilative powers have been overwhelmed by the experience of the death of the other, exposing it to community. However, I read Dhalgren first as a way of thinking about how writing can mitigate against the monumentalism of the subject and the subject's myths that obsess after non-relation, eliding that birth or (communal) relation that comes from the outside and others. Dhalgren becomes above all a "novel" which plays at birth, at never getting beyond birth, always coming and never arriving at presence, and, hence, always remaining with others. Bellona defies description. Indeed, this city seems lost even to perception, "Very few suspect the existence of the city. It is as if not only the media but the laws of perspective themselves have redesigned knowledge [End Page 173] and perception to pass it by. Rumor says...

Nabokov at Cornell by Gavriel s> Shapiro (review)

330 SEER, 83, 2, 2005 Shapiro, Gavriel(ed.).Nabokov at Cornell. Cornell University Press,Ithaca, NY and London, 2003. xiv + 288 pp. Illustrations.Notes. $39.95: J26.95. NABOKOV AT CORNELL belongs to the numerous publications still being generated by Vladimir Nabokov's centenary in I999. The Cornell Nabokov Centenary Festival in September I998 celebrated the golden jubilee of the writer'sarrivalat the universityand was also the inauguralevent for the long line of festivals,conferencesand symposiathatwere to followin the centennial year. Gavriel Shapiro who organized the festival has now edited the proceedings in a collection which lists an impressive display of leading Nabokov specialists. In the preface, Shapiro remarksthat Nabokov might have been 'the last Renaissance man' a very apt description of the man who was a writer, lepidopterist,translatorandliterarycritic,whosepursuitsencompassedamong many others both classicalprosody and popular culture, the Dutch school of painting aswell as comic strips,the metaphysicaland the metafictional,and to whom a borderline between artand sciencewas utterlyforeign.It isone of the achievements of this collection to cover a wide range of Nabokov's interestsas well asuncoveringnew sourcesof inspirationforthewriter. The first two parts examine several of Nabokov's works in chronological order, using Brian Boyd's division of Nabokov's life into 'The Russian Years' and 'The American Years'. Vladimir Alexandrov follows up a fruitful argument which he has already advanced in his earlier Nabokov's Othenworld (Princeton,NJ, I99 I), examiningthepossibleinfluenceofthe Russianoccultist Petr Uspenskii on the development of Nabokov's metaphysics. D. Barton Johnson has very appropriatelytaken on the role of sleuth and reopened the files on Hermann Karlovich, tracking down striking parallels between sensationaltrialsof murdersand insurancefraudstersin I930s Berlinand the protagonist'scrimesin Otchaianie (Despair), which provesonce more Nabokov's talent of transforminglow-brow culturefor his own artisticpurposes.Marina Kanevskaya chooses a more theoretical approach and exposes Hermann's misapprehension of the mirror as a semiotic sign. Susan Sweeney finds an unexpected angle on Nabokov's stories of child abuse, analysingthe integration into the narrativeand the inversion of the fairy tale motif of enchanted slumberin Volshebnik (TheEnchanter) and Lolita. Sweeney's piece also preparesthe topic of the firstessay in the next section, the sufferingof children in Nabokov's fiction. In characteristicallyengaged fashion, Zoran Kuzmanovich does not shy away from sharing his personal reading experience of what must be the cruellest scene in the whole of Nabokov's oeuvre, the murder of David in Bend Sinister.It is the utter senselessness of David's violent death combined with the horrendously detailed depiction of his torture which removes any distance between the reader and the text or, in Kuzmanovich's words, which lets 'the story really [enter] us while denying us its sense' (p. 53). Dissatisfied with both metafictional and ethical readings of this passage, Kuzmanovich concludes that '[the torturein BendSinister] cannot [make sense], because it must not' (p. 57). Joanna Trzeciak looks at the related theme of parental pain in 'Signs and Symbols', examining the sharedsilence between the parentsas a theme which REVIEWS 331 is continued in the silence of the story'sopen ending, which thus, accordingto Trzeciak,rejectsstructuralistinterpretations. Ellen Pifer'sarticle on the film adaptationsof Lolitais a good illustrationof the collection's open-minded approach to Nabokov, which seeks to leave space for investigations that shift the focus away from Nabokov's texts on to wider related issues. Pifer offers a detailed and balanced comparison of Stanley Kubrick'sand Adrian Lyne's attempts to transposeNabokov's most famous novel on to the screen. While she uses this as a springboardto gain valuable insights into the more general relationship between literature and cinema, her conclusion that both versionsfail to renderNabokov's subtleand ambiguous masterpiece is somewhat problematic in its implication that the sole function of filmadaptationsis to serveas a tool forfaithfultranslation. Due to the gap of several years between the Cornell conference and the publication of its proceedings, Brian Boyd's contributionwhich identifiesthe otherworldlypresence of Shade'sdead daughterHazel in PaleFire,willby now be familiarto most Nabokovians as part of the thought-provokingargument fromhisNabokov's 'Pale Fire'.7heMagicofArtistic Discovegy (Princeton,NJ, I999). This section closes with CharlesNicol's interestingessaywhich examines the function of the telephone as the linkbetween Nabokov's initialprojectswhich were then merged into Adaand finds the importance of...

Burning the Aspern Papers (review)

"The Aspern Papers" is one of those rare works of fiction in which mysteries of scholarship dramatically reveal human character. Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire is another, along with A. S. Byatt's Possession. But James's novella remains the quintessential cautionary tale about literary motives, which turn out to be as dubious as motives in any profession. It is of course about much more as well. Like so much of James's writing, it is about Americans abroad and failures of affection in deeply damaged lives. One can see why John Drury chose James's story as a subject for his longer poem, the centerpiece of this solid new collection. This ambitious poem of more than four hundred lines re-imagines the dilemmas of James's characters and reminds me that, in such capable hands, verse is the perfect vehicle for dramatic narratives. James's tale is told by an unnamed scholar renting rooms from the Misses Bordereau, who "lived now in Venice in obscurity, on very small means, unvisited, unapproachable, in a dilapidated old palace on an out-of-the-way canal" (153). The elder of the two women, Juliana, was once beloved of Jeffrey Aspern, an American poet, while her niece and caretaker, Miss Tita (Tina in the New York Edition), remains a hopeless spinster. In James's realistic vision all human ideals succumb to expediency and passing time. In fact, he gives us an image of this in what amounts to pentameter—"The divine Juliana as a grinning skull"—that signals to a poet something of the lyrical shape of James's narratives (168). This one focuses on the duplicity of the narrator, his willingness to exploit the emotional desperation of the niece in order to get at the aunt's papers, including any letters from her deceased suitor. As it plays out, we never see the Aspern papers, at last discovering that Miss Tita has burned them, partly to get back at the narrator, who refused her proposal. [End Page 296] Drury's most daring move has been to give us Jeffrey Aspern's letters—in rhymed verse, no less—interspersed with the blank verse interior monologue of the woman who is destroying them. We are allowed, in other words, to "hear" two voices that no one will in fact ever hear. The poet's most intimate words are consumed by the fire, and the woman who destroys them will live on in utter neglect, "unheard" by any companion. It is a devastating conceit, and Drury handles it with deft restraint. While burning the letters, Miss Tina addresses her thoughts to the scholar who had sought them and had trifled with her affections: You wouldn't talk so foolishly to me if you could answer, looking up from reading. I'd love to watch you reading silently in this dark room. The paper isn't silent— it catches at the edges, and I hold on as long as I can, watch it burn, and drop it. (49) As she says, the paper isn't silent, but it's not just the crackling flames she means. It's also the voice she systematically burns, and this image of a soul's most intimate expression being ruthlessly eradicated is chilling to say the least. "Full many a flower is born to blush unseen," wrote Thomas Gray, "And waste its sweetness on the desert air" (540). The vision of private devastation in both James and Drury is far less serene. In Aspern's ardent verse epistles we have a voice that questions conventional scruples, desiring to know and be known. The attractive personality Drury conveys makes Tina's gesture even more appalling. Here is one in sonnet form: Getting lost is a solace of the blest, a sweet prerogative, through turning lanes and sudden bridges as I take the crest and look out at dark water, darkened panes. It matters little what had been my plans...

Discourse and Ideology in Nabokov’s Prose ed. by David H. J. Larmour (review)

560 Reviews Discourse and Ideology in Nabokov's Prose. Ed. by David H. J.Larmour. (Studies in Russian and European Literature, 8). London and New York: Routledge. 2002. ix+176 pp. $80. ISBN 0-415-28658-1. One of the best-known phrases by Nabokov, often reproduced in works about the author, is the intention of the protagonist of Nabokov's last Russian novel, The Gift, to write as ifon the brink of parody. Critics often tend to use this phrase to preface a discussion of Nabokov's own use of parody and puns. It is, however, predominantly the author as parodying, and inevitably controlling, that emerges, and much less at? tention is given to parodying Nabokov himself, i.e. using his own terms to destabilize the interpretation he wishes the reader to adopt. Nabokov is usually admired forhis trickstercommand rather than derided forit. Yet trickstercommand occupies a whole spectrum ranging from amusement to danger, and it is this spectrum that is addressed in this new collection of articles on Nabokov's writings. The introduction by David H. J. Larmour delineates the direction ofthe volume, and at the same time exposes the tension inherent in it. Larmour explains that at the hub of the book is the view that 'ideology is a web of discursive effects in the real world of the reader's lived experience' (p. 1). Such a statement assumes that reading is to be located outside the lived experience and, moreover, outside reality.The reality of reading is exiled to the margins of the reader's experience, yet the very fact that reading and text are emphasized throughout the volume assumes a preoccupation with a mental construct not less real than the extra-literary phenomenal world sur? rounding it. The attempt to encamp 'the discursive utterances and practices in and around' the text (p. 3, my emphasis) is initially marked as paradoxical when the tech? nique favoured is that of textual analysis, yet the reader is called upon to concentrate on the extra-textual. The emphasis on Nabokov's writing being anything other than ideologically naive is fully justified. Both in his fictional and non-fictional writings Nabokov has made his political and social views clear, and the volume's stress on the fact that such tendentiousness is of the same kind as other engaged forms of writing?socialist, metaphysical, queer?against which Nabokov had much to say is an important declaration. However, such a correction in the perception of Nabokov's views does not necessarily entail an ideological view of all of the aspects of his fictional writing. It is important to strike a balance between being awe-struck and dazzled by Nabokov's manipulative command so as to ignore logical and moral contradictions in his writing, and equating Nabokov's literary ceuvre with a political agenda. I would like to stress thatthe volume makes forfascinating reading, and mypolemics with it should, in fact, accentuate this. While not agreeing with quite a number of points made in the various chapters, I enjoyed reading and pondering upon them. The centrepiece of the volume is a pair of articles containing juxtaposed readings of Lolita, in which the tension I discuss here is apparent in its more glaring and exciting form. Elizabeth Pantoe accuses Lolita of being a text that, especially in the context of the classroom, constitutes an attack on victims of child molestation. Tony Moore claims that in spite of Humbert's attempt to control the narrative, he is not able to do so as the novel gives full narrative voice to Dolores. Both views are dramatically challenging and brilliantly argued. Other chapters emphasize the extra-literary ideo? logical context of Nabokov's writing: Galya Diment looks at the relationship between Nabokov and Wilson; Paul Ellen Miller studies classical dichotomies in the percep? tion of culture and gender and the way they are illustrated in Pale Fire; and D. Barton Johnson and Suellen Stringer-Hye portray the influence of Nabokov's writing on popular culture, especially in the US. The remaining chapters give prominence to a textual reading: Brian D. Walter looks at the duality of ideological opposition in Bend Sinister, Galina Rylkova delineates trances of Kuzmin...

SOCIAL UTOPIA: HANNAH ARENDT AND MARY McCARTHY'S THE OASIS

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Nicholas Spencer is an associate professor in the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He has published articles on twentieth-century American literature in Arizona Quarterly, Contemporary Literature Angelaki and other places. He is currently writing a book on the politics of space in twentieth-century American fiction. Notes 1 In an interview with Elisabeth Niebuhr, McCarthy states that even if her fiction “may have autobiographical elements in it that I'm conscious of, it has been conceived as a fiction, even a thing like The Oasis, that was supposed to have all these real people in it. The whole story is a complete fiction. Nothing of the kind ever happened; after all, it happens in the future” (8). The fictionality of The Oasis that McCarthy describes invites a theoretical analysis that differs from a perception of the novel as satirical autobiography. 2 McCarthy uses the economism of domesticity to expose the insubstantiality of Mac's theoretical opposition to Joe. Mac opposes Joe's hunting trip but realizes that the only sound basis of such an opposition would involve his taking “the last step” toward animal rights and vegetarianism (89). Unwilling to take this step, Mac cannot find any convincing reason to distinguish himself from Joe. 3 Wendy Martin argues that in McCarthy's fiction “marriage and friendship are constructs which barely conceal the predatory nature of social life” (194). The conflict between Katy and Preston exemplifies the “Hobbesian power struggle” that Martin describes. Arendt claims that “the nature of household rule” is characterized by a greater degree of inequality than is evident in political rule (Human 27). In Katy and Preston's case, the equality of the public domain is absent and social struggle becomes a public spectacle of household characteristics. 4 Arendt claims that Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor brings terror because he applies compassion en masse to the social population. In “America the Beautiful,” McCarthy also refers to the Grand Inquisitor, “who, desiring to make the Kingdom of God incarnate on earth, inaugurated the kingdom of the devil” (205). McCarthy makes this reference to illustrate the idea that mass consumerism might be designed to bring material benefit but actually creates homogeneity and meaninglessness. Since Arendt posits that the evils of mass society are linked to the pursuit of the social question, both writers' references to the Grand Inquisitor make essentially the same point. 5 As Margaret Canovan notes, Arendt's critique of the social question does not mean that she was hostile toward “authentic compassion” (170). As with so much of Arendt's discussion of the social, the problem involves the extension of a legitimate principle beyond the realm in which it is meaningful. For Canovan, Arendt only becomes critical of compassion “when it moves out of the sphere of direct, face-to-face personal relationships and becomes entangled with politics” (170). 6 Canovan explains why Arendt was critical of Marx's attempt to reduce politics to work: Work is a matter of transforming material in order to make something: domination, violence and the sacrifice of the means to the end are inherent in the activity of fabrication. When this model is applied to politics, which is concerned with dealings between plural persons, it is other people who become the material to be dealt with violently and sacrificed to the end that is to be achieved (73). 7 As Brightman argues, Arendt and McCarthy both abhorred the conformity and vulgarity that characterized midcentury American social life (Between viii). One of McCarthy's letters typifies the reasons why both writers were critical of mass society. Speaking of the political success of Richard Nixon, McCarthy is concerned that the “advertising techniques” and “reflexes” of “mass-conditioning” have extended from the social to the political sphere (Between 9, 10). As a result, the illusion of choice that is evident in consumer activity has eradicated the authentic “differences” of democratic politics. 8 The correspondence between Arendt and McCarthy shows evidence of these differing viewpoints. While McCarthy contrasts the “weird new civilization” and its “age of groupiness” with the beauty of Nabokov's Pale Fire (Brightman, Between 133), Arendt sees in Nabokov's novel the “vulgarity” that she dislikes in social discourse (136). For Arendt, the “grotesque posturing and arrogant acrobatics” of novels like Pale Fire and Günter Grass's The Tin Drum typify a despicable “genre of the displaced person” (140). Arendt's comments are consistent with her description of the novel as “the only entirely social art form” (Human 39). This difference of opinion suggests that McCarthy, more than Arendt, regarded fiction as a counterweight to the social realm that they both criticized.

Parasitism and Pale Fire 's Camouflage: the King-Bot, the Crown Jewels and the Man in the Brown Macintosh

Parasitism and Pale Fire 's Camouflage: the King-Bot, the Crown Jewels and the Man in the Brown Macintosh

Nabokov's Pale Fire: The Magic of Artistic Discovery (review)

Nabokov's Pale Fire: The Magic of Artistic Discovery (review)

"Playing a Game of Worlds": Postmodern Time and the Search for Individual Autonomy in Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire

This article enters the ongoing critical debate surrounding Pale Fire, as to whether the apparent structure of the novel can be taken at face value. Do the central characters, John Shade and Charles Kinbote, constitute separate voices within the novel, as poet and commentator respectively, or is one in fact the fictional creation of the other? Arguing that the dispute arises out of a set of critical assumptions that negate at least some of the possible implications of Nabokov's own views of art's purpose and function, the essay asserts that Nabokov's disbelief in objective reality renders the entire Shade/Kinbote debate irrelevant. By focusing upon the consequent challenges presented by radical subjectivity and linguistic indeterminacy in an always-fictional world, the essay suggests that Nabokov's art, rather than being diminished by an exploration of its relationships to post-structuralism, is in fact reaffirmed as a transcendent act of the human spirit.

Disturbing Design: Nabokov's Manipulation of the Detective Fiction Genre in Pale Fire and Despair

The Journal of Popular CultureVolume 36, Issue 3 p. 480-496 Disturbing Design: Nabokov's Manipulation of the Detective Fiction Genre in Pale Fire and Despair Helen Oakley, Helen OakleySearch for more papers by this author Helen Oakley, Helen OakleySearch for more papers by this author First published: 27 March 2003 https://doi.org/10.1111/1540-5931.00018Citations: 2AboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Citing Literature Volume36, Issue3January 2003Pages 480-496 RelatedInformation

Discourse and Ideology in Nabokov's Prose (review)

Reviewed by: Discourse and Ideology in Nabokov’s Prose Margarit Tadevosyan David H. J. Larmour, ed. Discourse and Ideology in Nabokov’s Prose. London and New York: Routledge, 2002. ix + 176 pp. Discourse and Ideology in Nabokov’s Prose, edited by David Larmour, is a collection of nine critical essays dealing with the interplay of “ideological structures” and “discursive . . . practices” (3) in Nabokov’s prose. As Larmour explains in the introduction to the volume, the essays share an attempt to shift the critical focus in Nabokov studies towards the Foucauldean “author-function.” [End Page 271] The book is divided into four thematically arranged parts: ideology, sexuality, Lolita, and Nabokov’s place in American pop culture. In her “The Nabokov-Wilson Debate: Art versus Social and Moral Responsibility,”Galya Diment offers an overview and an ideological analysis of the writers’ celebrated polemic and falling out. Diment attributes the disagreement to Wilson’s “ultimate Americanness” and Nabokov’s “ultimate Russianness,” terms that leave room for further definition and clarification. Her analysis suggests that their “Americanness” and “Russianness” are linked to Wilson’s and Nabokov’s conflicting views regarding literature as a social and moral phenomenon. Brian Walter also examines Nabokov’s derision of the “Literature of Ideas” (25) in “Two Organ-Grinders: Duality and Discontent in Bend Sinister.” He explores what he labels as the “odd” (25) position of Bend Sinister in Nabokov’s literary oeuvre and attributes it largely to the author’s discomfort with writing political novels. Walter makes a compelling argument that Nabokov officiously shapes the reader’s reception of the characters by abandoning his usual authorial indifference towards them. Walter’s discussion of “Nabokov’s difficulty” (38) in writing a novel that displays “the author’s own distaste for his rather simple political story” (39) might have been augmented by a comparative analysis of Invitation to a Beheading, a novel congruent to Bend Sinister in its political agenda. In “Okrylennyi Soglyadatay—The Winged Eavesdropper: Nabokov and Kuzmin,” Galina Rylkova convincingly argues that Nabokov’s “The Eye” is an appropriation of Mikhail Kuzmin’s Wings [Kryl’ia] transferred to the cultural context of the émigré Berlin of 1920s. Rylkova also suggests that Nabokov’s adaptation of Kuzmin’s novel is responsible for the succession of alienated “emigrant-outsider” (55) and sexually perverse characters in Nabokov’s later works. David Larmour speaks about Martin’s sexuality and masculinity and their manifestation through sports in “Getting One Past the Goalkeeper: Sports and Games in Glory.” Larmour allows Martin no heroic qualities when he concludes that as his identity, masculinity, and sexuality become increasingly confused and intertwined, the novel simply removes Martin “from the reader’s gaze” (72), leaving the three main characters undefined and tenuous. In “The Crewcut as Homoerotic Discourse in Nabokov’s Pale Fire,” Paul Allen Miller examines the breakdown of the five central binary opposites of the novel. Although he relies on some cultural assumptions about sexuality, he convinces the reader that in Kinbot’s world, like elsewhere in Nabokov’s prose, stable identity does not exist. Engaged in a dialogue with each other, Tony Moore, in “Seeing through Humbert: Focussing on the Feminist Sympathy in Lolita,” and Elizabeth Patnoe, in “Discourse, Ideology, and Hegemony: the Double Dramas in and around Lolita,” offer innovative, albeit irreconcilable, readings of Lolita. In Moore’s reading, Lolita is sexually assertive and outwits Humbert who is trapped in “his own masculine rhetoric” (94). Moore argues that through rereading his own story, Humbert recognizes “his theft of the girl’s childhood” (105). Humbert’s reevaluation of the story is marked by a return to “tasteful and reticent” prose. Moore invites the reader to treat Lolita as “paper and ink, not flesh and blood” (108) and to avoid moral and political judgement. Conversely, Partnoe speaks of Lolita instead as a molested and tortured child. She asserts that despite Humbert’s attempts to manipulate the reader by his elegant and witty prose, [End Page 272] what happens to Lolita qualifies as nothing but rape. She maintains that the novel silences women by robbing Lolita of her own voice in the narrative; she goes on to claim based on personal teaching experiences that the novel intimidates...

Nabokov's 'Pale Fire': The Magic of Artistic Discovery by Brian s> Boyd (review)

510 SEER, 79, 3, 200 1 compromising himself and persist in the struggle to speak, write and behave like a free personality in an unfree country: the Soviet dictatorship was not sui generisin essence, but had been preceded by countless other banal, evil and doomed attempts by spiritual mediocrities to change human nature and the organization of society. Of particular interest is Doyle's examination of Dombrovskii's second novel, 7The Apeis Comingforits Skull,an attack on Nazism (not Hitlerism) which inevitably in places reads like an attack on Stalinism, if not on Communism (Dombrovskii appears not to have criticized Lenin or Leninism by name, despite implying in his last two novels that Stalinism derived from Leninism, and this may in part explain why Solzhenitsyn and Grossman, who clearly trace the Soviet tragedy back to I9I7, have attracted more attention than Dombrovskii). Doyle's monograph, clearly the result of an enormous amount of careful work, is painstakingly annotated and referenced, with some rare illustrations and a detailed and very comprehensive bibliography (although I was surprised not to find Meniaubit'khoteli etisuki,Moscow, i997). He had access to a large amount of unpublished materials, both in the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art and in the private archives of Dombrovskii's widow and niece. Doyle suggests that Dombrovskii stands 'midway between Solzhenitsyn and Bulgakov. He presents a unique combination of the moral certainties, campaigning purpose, and narrative power of the former, with the intellectual subtlety, broad cultural awareness, and formal and stylistic versatility of the latter' (p. I 96). Although one senses an element of overstatement and special pleading here (and occasionally elsewhere), this volume does make one want to read Dombrovskii again, and so it has achieved what was presumably one of its author's main objectives. Department of SlavonicStudies MARTIN DEWHIRST lUniversity ofGlasgow Boyd, Brian. Nabokov's'PaleFire'. TheMagic of ArtisticDiscovey.Princeton UniversityPress,Princeton,NJ, 1999. Xii+ 303 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. f I8.95. VLADIMIR NABOKOV'S Pale Fireis one of his most cryptic and inscrutable texts, a work that, since its publication in I962, has inspired considerable critical attention and provoked an ongoing debate that has divided Nabokov scholarship as to the true role and identity of the novel's dual authorprotagonists .At the same time, the novel perhaps best exemplifiesNabokov's notion of creative plotting, of constructing a text that is 'a game of intricate enchantment and deception', one that invites the reader to seek out its 'spectacularsecrets'.BrianBoyd has alreadydemonstrated,particularlyin his ground-breakingstudyofAda(Ada.ThePlaceofConsciousness, Ann Arbor, I985), a sensibilityalertto the complexitiesof Nabokov'spatterningof themes,motifs and allusions, crucial in the pursuit of solutions. Here he applies a similarly acute and exacting approach in his exploration of the significant details of John Shade's poem and Charles Kinbote's commentary, whilst re-enacting the processof discoveryexperienced by the readerwho is compelled to return REVIEWS 5I I to the novel again and again, each time disclosing new clues and new problems. Boyd's volume is constructed in three parts. Each section- 'Thesis', 'Antithesis' and 'Synthesis' emulates the movement of a spiral, Nabokov's symbol of 'time unwound', famously elaborated in his autobiography, Speak, WVemory (i 969). The conceit serves to illustrate the process of reading, rereading and re-rereading that Pale Fire demands, and the parallel process of discovery that Boyd elaborates in his commentary. Parts One and Two offer few revelations, but rather serve to lay the ground, as it were, isolating significant passages, identifying patterns of allusion and motif, and introducing themes of reversal and transformation which underpin the volume's concluding chapters. It is not until the end of Part Two that Boyd begins to address the element key to the resolution of his thesis Shade's preoccupation with death. This extends, in the volume's final section, into a contentious, fascinating and highly persuasive argument which proposes that the text is not only haunted by the spirit of Hazel Shade, whose suicide predates her father's poem and Kinbote's commentary, but that Kinbote's evocation of Gradus, the assassin, is also inspired by a ghost, this time retrospectively by the murdered Shade. In this way, Shade guarantees his artistic...

The Construction and Demolition of the Luhmann Heresy

Among social theories, autopoiesis achieves an almost unequalled level of complexity and abstraction. Yet this has has not in any way deterred commentators from among the ranks of legal and socio-legal academics from launching critical attacks on the theory. This article argues that many of these detractors miss their mark, because their authors either misinterpret the theory by failing to recognize its radical nature and the new paradigm that it introduces, or, in the more extreme cases, project onto the theory immoral or irrational ambitions which are nowhere to be found in the writings of Niklas Luhmann or other autopoietic theorists. All this brings to mind Nabokov's novel Pale Fire, which also is concerned with criticism, projection and misinterpretation (as well as self-reference and insanity). In that novel the text is a poem, while the plot, concerning a paranoid literary critic, unfolds in the notes commenting on this poem. This article reverses this device by placing the main commentaries and criticisms in the main text and the `autopoietry', extracts from the writings of autopoietic scholars, which form the subject of the critical attacks, in the footnotes.

Nabokov at the limits: redrawing critical boundaries

Introduction. Ada's Malbrough s'en va-t-en guerre, D. Barton Johnson, Music in the Theatre of the Mind: Opera and Vladimir Nabokov, Charles Nicol Resonances of Popular Music in Lolita, Pale Fire, and Ada, Barbara Wyllie, The Quest for a Natural Melody in the Fiction of Vladimir Nabokov, Julian W. Connolly, Vladimir Nabokov's Invitation to a Beheading and Igor Stravinsky's Petrushka, Nassim W. Balestrini, Ballet Attitudes: Nabokov's Lolita and Petipa's The Sleeping Beauty, Susan Elizabeth Sweeney Pninian Performatives, Masha Raskolnikov Alexander Pope's The Rape of the Lock and Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire, Lisa Zunshine, European Art: A Framing Device?, Christine Raguet-Bouvart Nabokov and Comic Art, Gavriel Shapiro, Nabokov's Painted Parchments, Ralph Ciancio.

Nabokov's Pale fire: the magic of artistic discovery

Acknowledgments xi Introduction 3 PART ONE - THESIS: READING STORY AS DISCOVERY 15 1. Foreword 17 2. Poem 25 3. Commentary 37 4. Index 63 5. Fire 67 PART TWO - ANTITHESIS: REREADING IN SEARCH OF THE STORY BEHIND 75 6. Intrusions of the Real: Shade 77 7. Excursions from the Real: Kinbote 89 8. Problems: Shade and Kinbote 107 PART THREE - SYNTHESIS: RE-REREADING DISCOVERY AS STORY 127 9. Transformation 129 10. From Appalachia to Zembla: Woman Spurned 149 11. Pale Fire: Origins and Ends 173 12. A Poem in Four Cantos: Sign and Design 188 13. From Zembla to Appalachia: The Contrapuntal Theme 207 14. Pale Fire, palefire: The Spiral Unwinds 233 Conclusion 247 Notes 263 Bibliography 291 Index 299

Azure Afterimages: Reflections on Nabokov's Pale Fire

Many responses to Nabokov's Pale Fire: The Magic of Artistic Discovery drew attention to suggestive particulars in Pale Fire whose purpose I here try to ascertain. There are details and designs still to be traced at every phase of reading Pale Fire: a first reading (the A-Z pattern, which may also indicate the key role of Hazel that I proposed in N PF); rereading (a "Botkin" implied in the "catkin" evoked but eschewed late in the poem; implications hidden in place-names like Kobaltana or in personal names like Sylvia O'Donnell); and re-rereading (the echo of "The Vane Sisters" in the Vanessa at the end of Shade's poem and his life; the scene starring Gordon, the boy from whom Gradus recoils but whom the king has clearly possessed, as an ironic variation on the pattern of women spurned; the echo of Pope's "distant northern land" in the last three words of the Index).

Lolita’s Loose Ends: Nabokov and the Boundless Novel

Research Article| June 01 2000 Lolita’s Loose Ends: Nabokov and the Boundless Novel James Tweedie James Tweedie Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Twentieth-Century Literature (2000) 46 (2): 150–170. https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462X-2000-3003 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation James Tweedie; Lolita’s Loose Ends: Nabokov and the Boundless Novel. Twentieth-Century Literature 1 June 2000; 46 (2): 150–170. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462X-2000-3003 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter Books & JournalsAll JournalsTwentieth-Century Literature Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © Hofstra University2000 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Articles You do not currently have access to this content.

Ada 's Erotic Entomology

Nabokov incorporates the natural world and natural science to a greater extent in Ada than in any other novel except The Gift . Ada Veen is an avid lepidopterist and botanist and her scientific interest drives the memoir's extensive biological content. Van Veen, by contrast, focuses humorously on the sexual connotations of insects and flowers (which are associated in his memory with Ada and the intense excitement of early sexual awakening). Indeed, the Ardis sections of the memoir almost embody in perverse literal form what Kinbote in Pale Fire describes as "the lust that Nature, the grand cheat, puts into us to inveigle us into propagation" (621). The extent to which Ada 's biological stories parody, reflect and counterpoint the human plot is astonishing; yet readers must pursue the offered glimpses of natural detail in order to uncover the intricate motifs and patterns involving insects in the incestuous relationships of the Veens.

Coetzee's Nabokov's Pale Fire and the Primacy of Art

Coetzee's Nabokov's Pale Fire and the Primacy of Art