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Pale Fire
Questions of Authorship
Vladimir Nabokov
Gary O’Neil, Meghan Stuart,
Willy Versteeg, Dale Williams
English 4040F - November 10, 2008
Composition
Butterflies
“From the age of seven...my first glance of the
morning was for the sun, my first thought was for
the butterflies it would engender...I have hunted
butterflies in various climes and disguises: as a
pretty boy in knickerbockers and sailor cap; as a
lanky cosmopolitan expatriate in
flannel bags and beret; as a fat
hatless old man in shorts” --
The Velvet Butterfly.
“One minute before his death, as we were
“My dark Vanessa, crimson-barred, my blest crossing from his demesne to mine and
My Admirable buttery!”(21). had begun working up between the
junipers and ornamental shrubs, A Red
“A muscat grape
Admirable came dizzily whirling around us
like a coloured flame...One's eyes could
An old-fashioned butterfly,
not follow the rapid butterfly in the
ill spread,
sunbeams as it flashed and vanished, and
In shape“(93).
flashed again...Then the tide of the shade
reached the laurels and the magnificent
creature dissolved in it" (290).
Chess
126-7 – “As soon as Monsieur Beauchamp had sat down
for a game of chess at the bedside of Mr.
"If you're not sleeping, let's turn on the light. Campbell...ending his game in a draw"127.
I hate the wind! Let's play some chess" Alright"57.
There are rules in chess
“Playing a game of worlds, promoting pawns problems: interdiction of
dual solutions, for instance
To ivory unicorns and ebon fauns" (63);
226.
“I played chess with a young Iranian enrolled in our
summer school"74.
Precursor Shade
“By the end of May I could make out the outlines of “My sublime neighbour's face had something about
some of my images in the shape his genius it that might have appealed to the eye, had it
would give them; by mid-June I felt sure atleast been only leonine or only Iroquoian; but
that he would recreate in a poem the dazzling unfortunately, by combining the two it merely
Zembla burning in my brain. I mesmerized him reminded one of a fleshy Hogarthian tippler of
with it, I saturated him with my vision, I pressed indeterminate sex. His misshapen body , that
upon him, with a drunkard's wild generosity, all gray mop of abundant hair, the yellow nails of
that I was helpless to put in verse myself. his pudgy fingers, the bags under his eyes, were
only intelligible if regarded as the waste products
Every writer creates his own precursors as his/her eliminated from his intrinsic self by the same
modifies our conception of the past, as it will forces of perfection which purified and chiseled
modify the future.” his verse. He was his own cancellation" (26).
“Here, he is, I would say to myself, that is the
“I experienced a grand sense of wonder whenever head,containing a brain of a different brand... I
am looking at him. I am witnessing a unique
I looked at him, especially in the presence of physiological phenomenon: John Shade
other people, inferior people. This wonder was perceiving and transforming the world, taking it
enhanced by my awareness of their not feeling in and taking it apart, recombining its elements
what I felt, not seeing what I saw, of their taking in the very process of storing them up so as to
Shade for granted, instead of drenching every produce at some unspecified date an organic
nerve, so to speak, in the romance of his miracle a fusion of image and music, a line of
presence" (27). verse...Shade's poem is, indeed, that sudden
flourish of magic: my gray-haired friend, my
beloved old conjurer, put a pack of index cards
into his hat--and shook out a poem“(28).
Sybil/Vera My wife reads my stuff only after I have completed
the fair copy in long hand on lined index cards
which I fill out while standing at my lectern or
"Not only did I understand
then that Shade regularly
lolling in the garden. I am an uncommunicative
read to Sybil cumulative
toiler, and in the case of the loner novels my
parts of his poem but it patient first reader awaits the unknown book with
also dawns on me now serenity for years and years. Formerly, that is
that, just as regularly, she before we could afford secretaries, she used to
made him tone down or type all my works and correspondence. She
remove everything continues to read, very carefully, typescript and
connected with the proofs, correcting my grotesque misspellings
magnificent Zemblan and sometimes querying an obscure or
theme" (81)`. repetitious word–
September 25th, 1966 Interview
Composition In method B the hand supports But method A is agony! The brain
the thought, Is soon enclosed in a steel cap of
The abstract battle is concretely pain
fought. A muse in overalls directs the drill
The stops in mid-air, the swoops Which grinds and no effort of the
I'm puzzled by the difference between to bar will
Two methods of composing: A, the kind A canceled sunset or restore a Can interrupt, while the
star automaton
Which goes on solely in the poet's mind,
And thus it physically guides the Is taking off what he has just put
A testing of performing words, while he phrase on
Is soaping a third time one leg, and B, Toward faint daylight through the Or walking briskly to the corner
The other kind, much more decorous, when inky maze. store
He's in his study writing with a pen. To buy the paper he has read
before.
Why is it so? Is it, perhaps because
In penless work there is no pen-poised
pause
The History of
And one must use three hands at the
same time,
Having to choose the necessary rhyme,
Hold the completed line before one's eyes,
And keep in mind all the preceding tries?
Or is the process deeper with no desk
Authorship
To prop the false and hoist the
poetesque?
For there are those moments when
Too weary to delete, I drop my pen;
I ambulate--and by some mute command
The right word flutters and perches on my
hand.
--Pale Fire, Canto four, 335-72
Background Medieval Writing
Michel Foucault, What is an Author? Scribes
Compilers
Last week
– Annotation
Commentators
– Amplification
– Rubrication
Authors
– Illumination
The Construction of the Modern
Changes
Author
Movement of authority from religion and antiquity
Invention of the Printing Press to the individual
The Protestant Reformation Orality to print
Growth of the book industry
Changes in copyright laws
Pale Fire
Commentary as Authorship
Pg 301 After writing, Kinbote sees a future “sans
anything but his art” Is that even possible? Is
there art without community/audience? Verso Revolutions Series
The Digital Future.
Editing
Division of Person and
Sound
Author
Personalization
Borges and I Sybil Shade
“I do not know which of us has written this page” Censorship and Editorship
Who is in the work? Who owns the text? Outside influence upon the finished text
“Those pages cannot save me, perhaps because Another screen between the reader and the
what is good belongs to no one not even to him, person writing
but rather to the language and to tradition.”
John Shade Extinction of Personality
A shade of the person behind the Author “What happens is a continual surrender of himself
as he is at the moment to something which is
more valuable. The progress of an artist is a
“I was the shadow of the waxwing slain/ By the continual self-sacrifice, a continual extintion of
false azure in the windowpane” personality.”
- T.S. Eliot
Tradition and the Individual Talent
Dr. Charles Kinbote “Nevertheless the urge to find out what he was doing… the
itching desire to see him at work...proved to be utterly
agonizing and uncontrollable and led me to indulge in an
A stand-in for the reader orgy of spying which no considerations of pride could
stop.
Windows, as well known, have been the solace of
Spying on the man behind the Author
first-person literature throughout the ages...When my
casement window ceased to function because of an
elm’s gross growth, I found, at the end of the veranda,
Attempt to re-construct the personality an ivied corner from which I could view rather amply the
front of the poet’s house. If I wanted to see its south side
I could go down to the back of my garage and look from
Ultimate inability to get to the this personality behind a tulip tree across the curving downhill road at
several precious bright windows, for he never pulled
down the shades (she did)”(87).
Translation
