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Pale Fire is a fantastic book and rewards everything that you put into it and please read it if you are on the fence. And Boyd is correct when claiming that the writer of the entire poem/commentary complex is Hazel. e: lol he recanted his theory yet again a few years later, what a maroon. Tree Goat fucked around with this message at 06:10 on Aug 7, 2016 |
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Aug 7, 2016 06:02
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Bandiet posted:What's more ridiculous is people who cheapen an Unreliable Narrator device with vigorously defended "fan theories" Boyd is certainly silly (I think one of the essays linked in the OP accuses him of going "an exegetic bridge too far" which sounds about right), but from things like The Vane Sisters we can see that Nabokov is not above playing the kind of games that Boyd uses for evidence, and the theme of the supernatural floats around consistently enough without a satisfying referent, that it's tempting to play New Criticism style games with the work, even though the Author is stone cold Dead. I think Kinbote's unreliability functions very differently as a device than, for instance, Humbert Humbert, so reducing them both to just lines on a TV Tropes page cuts off some interesting approaches to tackling the work.
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Aug 7, 2016 18:32
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So less "I think it's silly to try to read too much into this book" and more "it's silly to call oneself a 'Shadean' and get tribalistic about close readings?" I can get behind that.
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Aug 7, 2016 23:01
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Right, it's definitely got the same satirization of close reading that you also see in, for instance, Lem's Gigamesh. And it's hard not to want to transfer Kinbote's narcissism and single-mindedness onto the academy as a whole. But I think it has more moving pieces than functioning just as satire. It is certainly more successful structurally than a lot of other books that attempt the story+gloss conceit (like, heaven help us, House of Leaves).
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Aug 12, 2016 03:41
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blue squares posted:I liked Canto One a lot, which surprised me, because I typically don't go for poetry. The other three I mostly just sat through, thinking that once I got to the commentary the real fun would start. But after several entries, I'm bored. When I read an individual entry, often there are funny or interesting moments, but when the book is sitting closed on my desk, there is nothing pulling me back to it. I'm all about narrative, so the other novels I am reading grab my attention much more when it is reading time. There is very much a narrative in the commentary, and it is almost entirely character-driven, and the emotional journeys of those characters is of central importance. I think us being glib earlier itt about the book's status as parody and/or puzzle box might give the impression that the central appeal of the book is as a serious of humorous vignettes with an optional mystery to solve and that is not a great place from which to go at Pale Fire, especially given what I know of your preferences from the TBB lit thread. I also think that Nabokov plays a similar trick here as in Lolita, where some of the affect from the characters whose emotional arcs are arguably central (Shade, Lolita) get waylaid by the intellectually exciting narrator. Lots of people talk about Humbert Humbert as a character, but Lolita herself can be somewhat erased from the novel (as per https://newrepublic.com/article/121908/lolita-cultural-icon). Similarly, there's a tendency to focus on Kinbote and his exact reliability regarding Zembla/royalty/assassins/etc. that can serve as an emotional distraction from Shade's loss and his mourning process. e: am I supposed to spoiler poo poo? idk how this works. Tree Goat fucked around with this message at 06:40 on Aug 19, 2016 |
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Aug 19, 2016 06:33
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