5HC: A Nabokov too far? (spoilers)
Related to the prisoner in “V.R.T.” and his powerful vision of a dream woman, an episode I have argued marks a shift in the character from misogyny to sexual attraction to sexual congress, I now turn to Nabokov’s Pale Fire.
This is a book about a poem “Pale Fire” by “Shade” and notes on the poem by “Kinbote.” In notes to the poem’s lines 433–34, Kinbote describes how the escaped king of Zembla, a promiscuous homosexual, tells his long-suffering Queen Disa that he does not love her, and he subsequently dreams of her repeatedly for an extended sequence of several pages, summarized in this manner:
The dream sequence stands out as something different in the text (rubbing shoulders with the trace ghost story in that type of difference), but it does not lead to the king’s happy reunion with his queen or anything like that. So I am wondering if Wolfe took that bit and made it more crucial, and gave it a resolution.
Is this something, or is it a Nabokov too far?
For calibration purposes, is it greater than or less than the commonplace observation about the “white fountain” mention in the poem (lines 707; 716; 758; 802) and how this relates to the white fountain in the Urth Cycle?
Another possible angle regarding 5HC is how critical work on Pale Fire shows clues that Kinbote is probably being influenced by text he is encountering or remembering in real time, for example, Brian Boyd suggests that Kinbote, in exploring the closets of the Goldsworth girls (in the Foreword, written at the beginning), is reminded of Hope’s The Prisoner of Zenda, an association which starts his own Eastern European phantasmagoria about “Zembla” in the rambling pages that follow. My point here with regard to 5HC is to note that texts, given within the text of 5HC, are being worked and warped, all before our very eyes.
It is not I who am crazy...
This is a book about a poem “Pale Fire” by “Shade” and notes on the poem by “Kinbote.” In notes to the poem’s lines 433–34, Kinbote describes how the escaped king of Zembla, a promiscuous homosexual, tells his long-suffering Queen Disa that he does not love her, and he subsequently dreams of her repeatedly for an extended sequence of several pages, summarized in this manner:
The gist, rather than the actual plot of the dream, was a constant refutation of his not loving her. His dream-love for her exceeded in emotional tone, in spiritual passion and depth, anything he had experienced in his surface existence.
The dream sequence stands out as something different in the text (rubbing shoulders with the trace ghost story in that type of difference), but it does not lead to the king’s happy reunion with his queen or anything like that. So I am wondering if Wolfe took that bit and made it more crucial, and gave it a resolution.
Is this something, or is it a Nabokov too far?
For calibration purposes, is it greater than or less than the commonplace observation about the “white fountain” mention in the poem (lines 707; 716; 758; 802) and how this relates to the white fountain in the Urth Cycle?
Another possible angle regarding 5HC is how critical work on Pale Fire shows clues that Kinbote is probably being influenced by text he is encountering or remembering in real time, for example, Brian Boyd suggests that Kinbote, in exploring the closets of the Goldsworth girls (in the Foreword, written at the beginning), is reminded of Hope’s The Prisoner of Zenda, an association which starts his own Eastern European phantasmagoria about “Zembla” in the rambling pages that follow. My point here with regard to 5HC is to note that texts, given within the text of 5HC, are being worked and warped, all before our very eyes.
It is not I who am crazy...
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