![]() His rudeness to those nice, sane, conservative, tax-paying Pharisees. I see Christ in an entirely different light. I wrote four papers in college on the Crucifixion – five, really – and every one of them worried me half crazy because I thought something was missing. You know what you’ve done? Do you realize what you’ve done? You’ve given this whole goddam issue a fresh new, Biblical slant. I’m goosebumps all over…By God, you inspire me. It’s staggering how you jump straight the hell into the heart of a matter. I should note here another similarity: Franny’s “mumbling” is an Orthodox Christian mantra from a 19th Century Russian guide to spiritual union with Christ, “The Way of a Pilgrim.” Compare this to Hazel’s “ Murmuring dreadful words in monotone.” (Line 356) Hazel may have merely been chanting mantras as part of her spiritual search, to the perplexity of her parents.Īfter his mother’s diatribe on diet, Zooey sarcastically retorts: Hazel likewise is on a spiritual search as her occult and her poetic interests attest. In Pale Fire, Kinbote’s mis en abime play in the barn, with the inane mother, the passive father and the disaffected daughter is markedly like the double-bind etiology of Franny’s crisis. ![]() It is also clear that these unattuned parents are the source of Franny’s breakdown and spiritual crisis. It is clear that he humbly proffers the tangerine according to her dietary diagnosis. Glass’ usual style is avoidant denial and going along with whatever Mrs. Zooey is amused because his solipsistic mother actually makes an accurate observation about his clueless father, but she does not see that he has taken his cue from her! Mr. All right, who else is being no help to you? ” (p.83) But none! Right after the eleven-o’clock news last night, what do you think he asks me? If I think Franny might like a tanger ine! The child’s laying there by the hour crying her eyes out if you say boo to her, and mumbling heaven knows what to herself, and your father wonders if maybe she’d like a tangerine. “He has absolutely no conception of anything being really wrong with Franny. Glass being clueless in proffering Franny a tangerine: Glass barges in on her twenty-five-year-old son, Zooey, while he is taking a bath (!) to complain, ironically, about Mr. Lacking in any real empathy but packed with over-abundant officious concern, she latches on to her one purview of authority and control – the nurturing mother. Twenty-year-old Franny Glass is having a “nervous breakdown” (really a spiritual crisis) and is being cared for by her didactic katydid of an obtrusive and clueless mother, who keeps pushing chicken soup at her and criticizing her diet. (The epithet actually demonstrates Hazel’s special genius at “word twisting.”) This all may seem a small point, but it is amplified immensely by the tangerine allusion to Salinger’s dysfunctional Glass family. ![]() ![]() Sibyl’s typical concern for her daughter is to offer banal bromidic advice such as “less starch, more fruit.” Hazel, on the other hand, criticizes her parents “ferociously” and sees Sybil as a “didactic katydid” – that is, chirpy and preachy. Yes.” feels like an irritated dismissal at her mother’s gratuitous disruption. Sybil’s proffering of a tangerine feels like a deflection from having to explain spiritual terminology for which she has only “guarded scholium”– perhaps even a distaste (for mysticism as well as T.S. Hazel’s parents’ concern for their spiritually sensitive daughter is misplaced they care about her looks and social life, whereas her internal life remains unacknowledged, glossed over, or deflected. I began to see that all was not as it should be chez Shades, and there is a significant subtlety within the proffered tangerine. I now believe it was so intended – but deceptively. I also assumed it was meant to demonstrate the cozy triptych of the Shade family. The first time I read this passage I confess I thought “tangerine” was a rather weak reaching for a rhyme. And what does sempiternal mean?’ (Lines 368-372) ‘Mother, what’s chtonic?’ That, too, you’d explain, We find it in Shade’s poem, line 371:Īnd I would hear both voices now and then: I believe this deceptively simple image is a key to understanding Pale Fire as well. The allusion in Pale Fire I wish to discuss is a key metaphor from Salinger’s Franny and Zooey – the cluelessly proffered tangerine. It was discovered after Nabokov’s death that in his personal copy he had graded each of the 55 stories– mostly low and with only two A+’s: his own Colette and Salinger’s A Perfect Day for Banana Fish. They each had a story in The New Yorker’s anthology of the 55 best short stories published from 1940-1950. Salinger was actually one of the few of his contemporaries that Nabokov approved of. One allusion that I believe has not been mentioned suggests J. Nabokov’s Pale Fire is replete with allusions to literary greats (and some not-so-greats), as is well known.
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