Because the known and the unknown/Touch, . . . I return to George Oppen, an ancestral seashore, my palm, daily breath. This isn't too dramatic a thing to say for one drawn simply to the words of the title of the book from which the phrase I quote begins to arise: Of Being Numerous. After a long slog of winter in "New England," new anything will be desired--as well as desiring for the known. Oppen, poet's poet, reminds us about the nature of revealing.
Which brings me to Pale Fire. Specifically, to comments inside a 1982 text (I was just forming my own mature opinions then. . . ) about Pale Fire: From a book by David Packman (nothing to do with the popular video game of that time, I'm sure. . . ) called Vladimir Nabokov: The Structure of Literary Desire, we have this bit of liberation (one of my favorite words) and reason (one of my most difficult):
"In. . . readings of Pale Fire. . . a story is extracted from the text. This story is, of course, really in the reader's own construction. Each [reading] involves a decision as to how the text may be framed. . . Meaning is fixed in each case by the position of the frame. As Boris Uspensky has noted, 'The transition from the external to internal point of view and vice versa may be considered as a natural frame in painting. The same phenomenon may be noted in a literary work."
But how much emphasis does a desiring reader place on internal and external frames of discovery (perhaps we shall call it uncovery)?
"However, in emphasizing the internal frame, these readings tend to efface the text's external frame. The fictive world beyond the internal frame. . . is treated as if it were the paramount reality, or at least what the conventions of the realist novel propose as such. A work of art, however, is never the same as the paramount reality. . . On the contrary, the artistic text is a 'finite province of meaning,' an 'enclave within the paramount reality marked by circumscribed meanings and modes of experience"
Meanings circumscribed by and for and to whom? Modes of experience by and for and to whom? I return to this*, and wish you well--in uncovery as well as discovery. May the pleasures be yours. *"This story is, of course, really in the reader's own construction. Each [reading] involves a decision as to how the text may be framed. . . Meaning is fixed in each case by the position of the frame. As Boris Uspensky has noted, 'The transition from the external to internal point of view and vice versa may be considered as a natural frame in painting. The same phenomenon may be noted in a literary work." And to Che the same, layers of lace and strands of hair, a geography in text to figure. Probe and lift, and give text context. Venture forth, in and out of it, my friend.
