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| He is but a Pale Fire | |
| Posted by: BruceinIthaca 08:28 pm EDT 07/01/20 | |
| In reply to: re: Pass - lordofspeech 01:27 pm EDT 07/01/20 | |
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| I've decided James Grissom is the latest avatar of Dr. Charles Kinbote. They seem to have the same degree of annoying dudgeon--though Kinbote was at least amazing. | |
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| re: He is but a Pale Fire | |
| Last Edit: singleticket 01:10 pm EDT 07/02/20 | |
| Posted by: singleticket 01:09 pm EDT 07/02/20 | |
| In reply to: He is but a Pale Fire - BruceinIthaca 08:28 pm EDT 07/01/20 | |
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| Kinbote was amazing, more so than the poet John Shade which I think was the main comic point of the novel. I see Grissom more as a caricaturist who strikes good targets but uses racist, homophobic and anti-Semitic tropes to trigger new outrages through ancient animosities. He probably doesn't see himself as using these tropes but he is using them. |
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| re: He is but a Pale Fire | |
| Posted by: BruceinIthaca 10:40 pm EDT 07/02/20 | |
| In reply to: re: He is but a Pale Fire - singleticket 01:09 pm EDT 07/02/20 | |
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| I agree--his self-delusion is far less comic than the good professor's Frank Galati used to do a brilliant solo performance as Kinbote. Who could we cast as Grissom? It also makes me think of Paul Theroux's "Sir Vidia's Shadow," in which he writes about his "friendship" with V.S. Naipaul. Some unreliable narrators are more entertaining than others. |
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| re: He is but a Pale Fire | |
| Posted by: ryhog 08:41 pm EDT 07/01/20 | |
| In reply to: He is but a Pale Fire - BruceinIthaca 08:28 pm EDT 07/01/20 | |
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| The same degree of credibility too? Or would you prefer to rank them? | |
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| re: He is but a Pale Fire | |
| Posted by: BruceinIthaca 10:45 pm EDT 07/02/20 | |
| In reply to: re: He is but a Pale Fire - ryhog 08:41 pm EDT 07/01/20 | |
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| I could not say, as I have no idea to what degree Grissom is accurate. His rhetoric lacks credibility--one of the two main components of ethos in Aristotle's rhetoric. It doesn't mean he has his facts wrong--I do not have that kind of insider knowledge--but he certainly undercuts the degree to which many readers may grant his accounts truth status. Like Kinbote, he is somewhat parasitic in his relationship to Williams--and he has not found another genius to latch onto, barnacle like. I doubt he is the deposed king of Zembla--but then, was Kinbote. And, of course, there are readings that argue that Shade and his poem were inventions of Kinbote. Maybe the Williams we get in "Follies of God" is also a fiction (all biography is at the mercy of memory, which cognitive scientists now believe is creative as well as recollective). |
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| re: He is but a Pale Fire | |
| Posted by: ryhog 12:39 am EDT 07/03/20 | |
| In reply to: re: He is but a Pale Fire - BruceinIthaca 10:45 pm EDT 07/02/20 | |
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| But isn't the "memory" you are referring to that of the subject and those with first hand knowledge as a baseline, as opposed to that of an "interviewer" who didn't do a good job of memorializing what his subject said? No doubt Williams embellished/misremembered/etc his recollections. We all do. But we are not interested in scrivener's recollection or his creativity (unless, in the latter case, they set out to write a work of fiction. [There is a parallel discussion that is of the moment (but that we will not have in this thread), being the various creative licenses Miranda took in Hamilton. And no, of course I am not comparing Grissom to Miranda).] | |
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