Re: Kerouac and Shade / Salinger and Nabokov
Camille Scaysbrook (verona_beach@geocities.com)
Sat, 15 Aug 1998 11:10:18 +1000
> Does John Shade in _Pale Fire_ remind anybody else of JDS -ever so
> slightly, and without matrimonial ties?
Oh GOD I have tried to perpetuate this idea SO many times and nobody's
taken the bait!!! I've tried to point out on several occasions the many,
many analogies we can draw between `Pale Fire' and not necessarily Salinger
himself but definitely Seymour and Buddy Glass. For one we have the
poet-seer (whose wife's name is SYBIL for Chrissake!), and his chronicler.
Even the eponymous poem has overtones of glass - it opens with a bird
flying into a window, believing the reflection in the glass to be a
continuation of the sky. I've got a whole list somewhere of Kinbote/Glass
comparisons if you're interested. I think it's interesting that unlike
Salinger, Nabokov presents not only a fragment but the whole of John
Shade's poem to us - a risky thing to do in some ways, but in others a very
clever thing because it makes us rely even less on the obviously unreliable
narrator - perhaps John Shade wasn't a genius at all. Salinger doesn't
allow us to make that decision for ourselves with Seymour - having never
read his work we must simply believe in Buddy's assessment.
In related news - I'm currently reading the second half of the very massive
Nabokov biography (`The American Years' by Brian Boyd) and was interested
to hear that in the 70's Nabokov wrote an article for the `Saturday Review
of the Arts' in which he said `From a small number of A-plus stories I have
chosen half a dozen particular favourites of mine'. The book says he
`marshaled extracts from Cheever, Updike, Salinger, Gold, Barth and Delmore
Schwartz, pausing each time to explain his choice or the difficulty of
choosing from such riches.' Maddeningly it doesn't say which ones, which I
would dearly love to know. Anyone have even the faintest idea about how to
get ahold of this article?
Camille
verona_beach@geocities.com
@ THE ARTS HOLE
www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Theater/6442
THE INVERTED FOREST
www.angelfire.com/pa/invertedforest