Enchantment and coincidence: A comparative study of "Don Quixote" and "Pale Fire"
Item
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Title
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Enchantment and coincidence: A comparative study of "Don Quixote" and "Pale Fire"
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Identifier
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AAI9997098
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identifier
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9997098
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Creator
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Hurley, Scott Crawford.
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Contributor
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Adviser: David Richter
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Date
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2001
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Literature, Comparative | Literature, Romance | Literature, American
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Abstract
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The dissertation posits a direct relationship between Nabokov's Pale Fire and Cervantes' Don Quixote, despite Nabokov's famous antipathy to the earlier work (Lectures on Don Quixote). The main field of comparison involves the two protagonists, Quixote and Charles Kinbote, the madmen who create themselves anew out of their reading as heroic, literary figures. It argues that their project is ontological; they try to write themselves into the world of literature as literature. Kinbote's commentary and Quixote's actions, each undertaken in response to literary works (John Shade's poem "Pale Fire"; the tales of chivalry in Quixote's library) are performances meant to delineate new selves, but they are also meant to create new subjects for literature. Quixote performs for his sage chronicler (who may be directing his actions), certain that he is being inscribed into a work of literature. Kinbote's reading of "Pale Fire" intends to transform the poem from a disinterested autobiographical piece into the epic of King Charles of Zembla, his chosen identity.;These novels are more than just vehicles for the stories of their protagonists; their narrative landscapes seem to devolve straight from their mental states. In Pale Fire, Kinbote's version of the poem struggles with the original for narrative ascendancy. This struggle mimics that between Quixote's version of the events unfolding in Don Quixote and the version of his unexpected narrator, Cide Hamete Benengali. The novels are born from the fissure in contradictory narratives. Each character, clinging fast to an ideal version is at war with the empirical "reality" of the world given by his author. The dissertation focuses on the palimpsestic quality of these novels; the narrative versions of Cide and Quixote are written on top of each other, mimicking the clash between the knight of the imagination and the world of sensual things. Such is precisely the case with the competing versions of "Pale Fire," the poet's and the commentator's (both poem and commentary are closely examined); and with Kinbote's fantastic Zembla and its mundane original, New Wye. In Don Quixote the inherent double nature of narrative is likened to enchantment, in Pale Fire to coincidence.;The final chapter of the dissertation brings the comparison into an historical context, arguing that the "narrative as palimpsest" style of the Quixote is the defining characteristic of the modern novel. This chapter looks at the tradition of the novel in English from the Eighteenth Century through Beckett and, of course, Nabokov. Pale Fire is characterized as a tribute at the end of a tradition to what began it. Emulating Cervantes, Nabokov attests to that fissure between narrative and the "story" narrative is meant to convey which defines Don Quixote and the genre it invented.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
