Homosexuality in Pale Fire

            As Ashley wrote in her blog “nothing is accidental” in Nabokov’s Pale Fire.  With this mindset I explored the topic of homosexuality and found the following lines quite interesting…

Yet, if prior to life we had

Been able to imagine life, what mad,

Impossible, unutterable weird,

Wonderful nonsense it might have appeared!

So why join in the vulgar laughter? Why

Scorn a heareafter none can verify:

The Turk’s delight, the future lyres, the talks

With Socrates and Proust in cypress walks,

-Canto Two-Lines 217-224

            Throughout Pale Fire I believe that there is a great significance placed on the references of trees and that the cypress trees referenced in the lines “the future lyres, the talked with Socrates and Proust in cypress walks” may be alluding to the myths of Orpheus and Cyparissus.

                         

In Greek and Roman mythology the cypress tree has an association with the stories of Orpheus and Cyparissus in the Ancient Roman poet Ovid’s Metamorphoses.  In the tale, Cyparissus is portrayed as a boy who after accidently killing his beloved pet stag with his javelin was turned into a cypress tree to forever mourn for others in their sorrows from his incessant grief. Cyparissus’ unfortunate end is framed within the story of Orpheus.  Orpheus was well known as a legendary poet and musician whom the God Apollo had given a golden lyre as a gift. On one fateful day Orpheus’ wife Eurydice was killed by vipers in an effort to escape from a satyr.  Orpheus immersed with grief then ventured to the underworld to make a deal with Hades to retrieve his wife.  Hades agrees to allow Orpheus to bring back Eurydice under the condition that he must ascend in front of his wife and if he turned is eyes toward her before they reached the light the gift of her delivery would be lost.  Unfortunately Orpheus could not control his anxiety of losing Eurydice again and averted his gaze towards her causing Eurydice died a second time.  In his despair of his loss “Orpheus had abstained from the love of women, either because things ended badly for him, or because he had sworn to do so. Yet, many felt a desire to be joined with the poet, and many grieved at rejection. Indeed, he was the first of the Thracian people to transfer his love to young boys, and enjoy their brief springtime, and early flowering, this side of manhood” Orpheus subsequently begins playing his lyre and the cypress of the once Cyparissus sways to Orpheus’ beautiful remorseful music.

            This hidden reference to homosexuality is accompanied by the references to Socrates and Proust; both of whom have had their sexual orientation questioned with Proust being known as one of the first European novelist to mention homosexuality openly in literature. 

            I believe that this reference to homosexuality is another piece of evidence to the web that is interlaced between the poem by John Shade, the commentary of Charles Kinbote, and the story of the former King of Zembla Charles the Beloved.  In the preface, Charles Kinbote is portrayed by a group of drama students at the University as “a pompous women hater with a German accent, constantly quoting Housman and nibbling raw carrots” (25).  There is also attention given to a few of Kinbote’s male lovers throughout the commentary.  Charles the Beloved is also depicted as having a flame with his childhood friend Oleg who were illustrated as "in a manly state and moaning like doves" (127) after locking themselves up in Charles' room and sharing his bed. 

            It is clear through the allusions that are twisted within Pale Fire that Nabokov is playing a mind game of chess with his audience.  However in his game, if the reader does not play by his rules he or she will potentially miss the point of the novel.  Kinbote states that “today, when the "feigned remoteness" has indeed performed its dreadful duty, and the poem we have is the only “shadow” that remains, we cannot help reading into these lines something more than mirrorplay and mirage shimmer” (135).  By climbing the ladder of comprehension the story continues to create a shadow in our minds that manifest countless questions but by following Nabokov’s instructions and “reading into these lines” a greater meaning can be achieved.        

The Second Rung of the Ladder

            It has become obvious through my departure from a superficial cognitive process into a more transcendent mindset that simplicity is not a feature of Nabokov’s Pale Fire. From this fact, it is apparent that the five key facts that I had argued to be true in my previous blog are obviously not true at all.  As Bizz revealed in her blog, the poet John Shade is not real.     What then in Nabokov’s Pale Fire is real?  This is a tricky question, but I believe that Nabokov may have created an enigma in which each character- Shade the poet, Kinbote the narrator, and King Charles the Beloved are each no more real than the other.  Instead, the entire scheme is an intricate manipulation of imagination and reality. 

            In the “Lumpers and Splitter” chapter of Nabokov’s Blues, Nabokov is illustrated as a man of science that strongly emphasizes the importance of microscopic study and dissection to classify different butterflies and to determine their evolutionary morphology.  This method of classification was contradictory to the accepted method of examination at the time.  The form of research that was usually used was ultimately on a strictly phenetic standpoint.  It is defined as a style that focuses on the overall similarities of characteristics among the biological taxa without any regard to the phylogenetic relationships.  Nabokov was appalled by this lack of depth in research by his colleagues and expressed his anger of their ignorance by stating…

“Their solicitude for the ‘average collector who should not be made to dissect’ is comparable to the way nervous publishers of popular novels pamper the ‘average reader’-who should not be made to think”(84).

            I speculate that the depth that Nabokov displays in his research of dissecting a specimen to its most microscopic form, then relating these minuscule differences to the species and lepidoptry as whole unit and then determining its evolutionary pattern is a complexity that mirrors Nabokov’s writing style in his novel Pale Fire.  It is clear just through my surface reading and comprehension of Pale Fire that Nabokov makes the reader think profusely.  Nabokov states “that a writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.”  I believe that the evidence of this notion can be identified throughout Pale Fire.  One of the most obvious illustrations of this for example is the creation of Shade’s 999 line poem on eighty medium sized index cards.  It is exposed in “Lumpers and Splitters” that similar index cards were also used throughout Nabokov’s research to methodologically record information on his genitalic dissections.  This however is only a mere shallowly observed clue to the entanglement of imagination and science in the novel’s web. 

            One other point I feel needs to be addressed of “Lumpers and Splitter” in its association with Pale Fire is the act of lumping and splitting.  It is discussed in Nabokov’s Blues that Vladimir Nabokov used the method of splitting a species into different genus by determining significant distinctions between butterflies while most lepidopterists lumped groups together out of convenience and lack of knowledge.  My question that pertains to the novel Pale Fire is the investigation of whether Nabokov is lumping or splitting imagination and science?  Or does he in fact have greater knowledge of the order that I cannot comprehend yet?   

Scientific Investigation of Pale Fire

            In class on Tuesday, Professor Sexson instructed the class to focus on finding facts what we perceive as painfully obvious in Nabokov’s Pale Fire.  To accomplish this task, I have chosen to piece together the clues as a scientist by first focusing on the main characters/topics featured in the novel and the facts that correlate with them.  The most obvious for me include Mr. Shade, Dr. Kinbote, Sybil Shade, Judge Goldsworth, and the poem.

Mr. Francis Shade:  Mr Shade is a famous American poet.  He was born on July 5, 1898 and died July 21 1959.    He had a favorite shagbark hickory tree. (see line 49 and pg. 89).  He was a humble looking man (26).  He wrote of winter on a summers day (13). 

Dr. Kinbote: Is Mr. Shade’s friend and wrote the commentary for the poem “Pale Fire”.  He moved in as Mr. Shades neighbor on February 2 1959 to New Wye Appalachia and worked as a Professor with Mr. Shade at Wordsmith University.  He is a strict vegetarian that does not like his food handled by anyone else (pg 20) and is a fond admirer of Mr. Shade. 

 

Mrs. Shade (Sybil): Is Mr. Shade’s wife and his confidant in the poem “Pale Fire”.

 

Judge Hugh Warren Goldsworth: Owns a house next door to the Shades that he rents out to Dr. Kinbote. His literary work consisted of legal works and an album of histories/pictures of the people that he sent to prison or condemned to death.  He left Kinbote with detailed instructions/commentary and household articles.  He also owned a black cat that came with the house (82-85).  The house also had many doors to the outside and is referred to by Kinbote as the “Goldsworth Castle” (97).   

 Poem: The poem is in 4 Cantos by Mr. Shade.  It was written on 80 index card with Canto One and Four both being 166 lines (13 cards), Canto 2 and 3 both being 334 lines (27 cards).  The poem is 999 lines total and was labeled with the date that each card was created.  The drafts that were unutilized by the poet were all burned in the incinerator minus 12 cards. 

My Attempt at Understanding a Segment of the Episteme in Foucault's The Order of Things

[As a forward to this blog, I thought that it was appropriate to begin by expressing a few of my first initial reactions that have emerged through my endeavor at comprehending Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things.  In all honesty, this novel has literally left my head spinning in I guess in a somewhat positive way.  The entire concept of the novel and Foucault’s interpretation of the structure of knowledge fascinates me but I am just worried that through my struggle with the novel that I have possibly missed the point Foucault is illustrating.  Here’s my attempt through the choosing of one of many passages that I felt induced a response….]

“But though language no longer bears an immediate resemblance to the things it names, this does not mean that it is separate from the world; it still continues, in another form, to be the locus of revelation and to be included in the area where truth is both manifested and expressed…..Claude Duret points out that Hebrews, the Canaans…all right from left to right, following ‘the course and movement of the first heaven, which is most perfect, according to the opinion of the great Aristotle, tending toward unity’; the Greeks….and of course the Romans and all Europeans write from left to right, following ‘the course and movement of the second heaven, home of the seven planets’; the Indians, Cathayans, Chinese….write from top to bottom, in conformity with the ‘order of nature, which has given men heads at the tops of their bodies and feet at the bottom’; ‘in opposition to the aforementioned’, the Mexicans write either from bottom to top or else in ‘spiral lines, such as those made by the sun in its annual journey through the Zodiac’.  And thus ‘by these five diverse sorts of writing the secrets and mysteries of the world’s frame and the form of the cross, the unity of the heaven’s rotundity and that of the earth, are properly denoted and expressed’.  The relation of languages to the world is one of analogy rather than of signification; or rather, their value as signs and their duplicating function are superimposed; they speak the heaven and the earth of which they are image……..but since the disaster at Babel we must no longer seek for it-with rare exceptions-the words themselves but rather in the very existence of language, in its total relation to the totality of the world, in the intersecting of its space with the loci and forms of the cosmos” (37).[i]

            In this passage, Foucault discusses initially discusses the event that occurred at the Tower of Babel which caused raw language being dissipated into several forms.  In the tale of the Tower of Babel the descendants of Noah stated “Come, let us make a city and a tower, the top whereof may reach to heaven; and let us make our name famous before we be scattered abroad into all lands.”  However, as construction began, God came forth and confounded their tongue, resulting in the rupture of language that led to the project being demolished and the people dispersing across the Earth[ii].  Although language in its natural form was lost, Foucault draws attention to the fact that the combination of the numerous molds of language creates an arbitrary image of truth.  

            I found Foucault’s description of the various structures of writing in different cultures to be a beautiful analogy to the connection that all languages have with one another in the world.  “By these five diverse sorts of writing the secrets and mysteries of the world’s frame and the form of the cross, the unity of the heaven’s rotundity and that of the earth, are properly denoted and expressed” It is a phrase that I do not know if I can completely grasp but the analogy I believe correlates with a past point made by Ashley in one of her previous blogs.  In this blog, she referenced the story of Haroun and the Sea of Stories and how the novel depicts the base of our existence and further muses that life may be an eternal ring as it is so depicted through the symbol of Oroubouros or in norse mythology jormungandr (who is a serpant that lives in the depths of the sea with its tail in its mouth that is forever doomed to encircle the earth but when he lets go, the earth will come to an end).  This eternal circle of language I find is further emphasized in Foucault’s illustration of the power of imagination in representation that “exists within man, at the suture of body and soul” and is the “foundation for all empirical sciences of order.”  This genesis arises from the two concepts of the analysis of nature and the analytic of imagination.  Foucault expresses the analysis of nature being a negative force that confuses and scatters the representations that resemble one another and the analytic of imagination being the positive force that reconstructs our impressions causing representational archetypes to manifest continually throughout history[iii].  These two concepts are in an everlasting battle of destruction and then construction that accentuates the notion that all knowledge changes over time.   

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[i] Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things; an Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage, 1973. 37. Print.

[ii] Campbell, Gordon. "Genesis 11." King James Bible. Oxford [u.a.: Oxford Univ., 2010. Print

[iii] Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things; an Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage, 1973. 37. Print.

Deliberation of Truth and Lies

In Dr. E.O Wilson’s presentation on Thursday, Dr. Wilson stated that all of man’s troubles arise from not knowing who we are, where we come from, and where we are going with the focus of the discussion being on the future of “where are we going?”  As I digested the ideas Wilson was raising I realized that many of the topics introduced seemed to relate perfectly to concepts in Ibsen’s plays.  While Dr. Wilson addressed belief vs. knowledge he stated that “we are a nation of Peter Pans that live in a fantasy world” as it pertains to recognizing the necessity of preserving biodiversity to maintain the existence of our world.  A nation of Peter Pan’s I believe parallels perfectly with our dialogue on Thursday of The Wild Duck and keeping the life lie alive.   

            At the end of our examination of The Wild Duck we were asked to place our vote on truth or lies but for some reason that I could not identify, I had trouble choosing a standpoint.  

(As a side note I later considered the different situations that truth and lies could pertain to.  The first image that popped into my mind was the concepts displayed in The Matrix and envisioning how Neo must have felt discovering the truth about the Matrix after entering reality from the dream world all human being were entrapped in.  My next thought was what my ideal dream world would be if I could choose.  I came to the conclusion that I would like to be a Jedi Master in Neverland (random I know but I believe that it would be awesome!)  I then contemplated what my choice would be; would I choose the blue pill to let me continue being a Jedi or would I choose the red pill and have my eyes opened to the Matrix.  Further, if the tables were turned would I want to or do I have the right to unveil the reality in another person’s dream world?  It seems to me that this all depends on circumstances and the individual)  

The idealism posed by Gregers to open Hjalmar Ekdal’s eyes to the truth of certain situations in his marriage were founded upon the belief that Hjalmar’s illusion was identical to a wild duck dying  in the depths of a “poisoned swamp” (250).  The bringing to light of the past transgressions of the Ekdal family however ultimately led to the tragic suicide of the Ekdal’s precious daughter Hedvig.  The outcome of the destruction of the life lie I feel did not solely result from the truth being revealed, but by weakness in character of Hjalmer in response to the revelation and various other elements that influenced the situation such as the method in which Gregers chose to expose the past relationship between Gina and Mr. Werle.

           

I still feel as if it is too difficult to choose between the notions of truth and lies.  I find truth and lies to not be a solid black or white and in reality truth and lies (or illusions) are bizarrely interwoven.  An example of this is when Maria pointed out in class of the meaning of language being founded upon the mind’s tendency to tie a word with an illusion.  This can be represented through a number of different aspects as well.   Dr. E.O Wilson discussed “true science” be the collective knowledge we have of the “real world” that can be determined using “magical formulas” such as the scientific method to break it down into its most rudimentary components.  This explanation however I feel does not exemplify a concrete illustration of truth.  Dr. Wilson emphasized in his conference that knowledge is obtained through the connection of the various disciplines of social science, natural science, and the humanities that causes the methods in which the world is examined to be more transparent.  With transparency how can we choose between truth and lies?  I am not sure if either absolutely exists.  I hypothesize that no one can escape truth that is away from illusion because there is always more depth to any story than meets the eye.  This can be proven through each of Ibsen’s plays that we have dissected so far.  The art of Ibsen’s plays go far beyond what we have uncovered and embody natural science, social science, and the humanities.  However, we have not even scratched the surface of the psyche of Ibsen during the creation of these plays and other aspects that could be of influence.  

 

           

SO in conclusion, at the dismay I am sure of Professor Sexson I still cannot willfully place my vote on either side of truth or lies but my answer may change with further class discussions.