lOOKS
441
tions to wrench everything into a Zemblan context. High jinks--but
how elaborate can a joke be? Two hundred and twenty-eight pages
is
just too much. I am no foe of parody, but this parody seemed to me
almost as boring as its object; one soon begins to suspect that the
parodist has more in common with the parodee than he will admit,
or perhaps than he is aware of. He, too, enjoys the game and so what
he has produced, in this garrulous commentary ("The wedding guest
here beat his breast/For he heard the loud bassoon") is more pastiche
than
parody. His ingenuity is as much misplaced as that of the
Kinbotean pedants he thinks he is satirizing. He has looked too long
into the abyss and, as Nietzsche warned, the abyss is now looking
into
him.
The abyss took a look in a recent
Encounter
in which Mr. Nabokov
published fifteen close-printed pages on "Pushkin and Gannibal"–
Pushkin's African great-grandfather-which reads like a parody of
American scholarly research:
.a
clotted mass of trivial data whose
cautious academic prose contrasts painfully with the wit, the grace, the
impudent clever aper<;us of the same author's
Gogol.
But stay!
Is
it
the same author? Do we perhaps have a case of demonic possession?
Should we now speak of Vladimir Kinbote? Surely he is the author of
Pale Fire
and of "Pushkin and Gannibal"!
I was just finishing this review when Mary McCarthy'S lengthy
celebration of
Pale Fire
appeared in the June 4
N ew R epublic.
I respect
greatly her critical acumen, but in this case I am unable to explain her
enthusiasm except by the hypothesis that she enjoys solving double
crostics more than I do, and in fact that she thinks they are a form of
literature. Her
review~s
five pages long and is practically all devoted
to scholastic detective-work of the most elaborate kind. Literary criticism
-that is, evaluation-is confined
to
the final paragraph, which seems
stuck on as if she realized it was necessary to justify, however briefly,
the preceding four and fourteen-fifteenths pages of exegesis:
In any case, this centaur-work of Nabokov's half poem, half prose,
this merman of the deep, is a creation of perfect beauty, symmetry,
strangeness, originality and moral truth. Pretending to be a curio, it
j::annot disguise the fact that it is one of the very great works of art of
this
century, the modern novel that every one thought dead and that
was only playing possum.
This seems to me unconvincing. Without quibbling about "half poem,
half prose" when the proportions are rather one to five-that merman
has scales right up
to
his neck- I am unable to find either in the book
