TT 409: “There is a very loud amusement park right in front of my present lodgings"
Brief digression into Annie Hamilton, Tavi Gevinson, and Vladimir Nabokov
The trending topics bar of Twitter was lit up for over a day as many scolded Annie Hamilton for something in GQ called “I Finally Befriended My Idol Tavi Gevinson. Would It Fall Apart Over Taylor Swift?”
When I read the work in question I was surprised, for the “essay” seemed to be a hilarious and carefully planned satire of a current idiom, the oversharing confessional. All the people criticizing Hamilton as a terrible prose stylist were clearly misreading her text. This was no straight confessional. Rather, an author had invented a character.
Unexpectedly, her piece was also an advertisement for a much longer work, a “zine,” by Tavi Gevinson called Fan Fiction: a Satire. This was also a very carefully planned literary prank. The topic is Taylor Swift, and I enjoyed it as much as the Hamilton prelude.
Tavi Gevinson and Annie Hamilton are real people, but how much is “real” in the two literary pranks is unclear. I suspect it is like Larry David playing “Larry David” in Curb Your Enthusiasm or Nathan Fielder playing “Nathan Fielder” in The Rehearsal. Yes, a lot comes from the original personality, but that personality is torqued for poetic effect.
Since Taylor Swift is so all-consuming to the world at large, it only makes sense to start treating this topic as meta. To make the conceit even more obvious, Gevinson begins Fan Fiction with a quote from Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire, one of the most sophisticated satires in the literary canon. Like Pale Fire, Fan Fiction is written in different styles and offers varied literary devices….
The first page of Pale Fire has a famous sentence: “There is a very loud amusement park right in front of my present lodgings.” Charles Kinbote is trying to lay out an academic history, but he gets flustered and has restate a detail. Thus, “There is a very loud amusement park right in front of my present lodgings.” At this moment we know Kinbote is an unreliable narrator.
Both Gevinson’s Fan Fiction and Hamilton’s “I Finally Befriended My Idol Tavi Gevinson” share a hilarious gambit near the ends of their narratives. In Gevinson, Taylor Swift offers overbearing notes to the preceding essay via email. In Hamilton, Gevinson offers overbearing notes to the preceding essay via email. Just marvelous comedy, and — in case there is any doubt — a moment where we know these women are not reliable narrators.
The modern oversharing confessional meets Nabokov! I thoroughly approve.
For those that haven’t read Pale Fire, Mary Gaitskill (an excellent writer herself) has a friendly overview. I am pleased that Gaitskill mentions Brian Boyd’s Nabokov’s Pale Fire: The Magic of Artistic Discovery. Some years ago I really had a great time reading Nabokov’s original alongside Boyd’s fabulous analysis. Time to make that journey again, perhaps…
I was amazed to see Gaitskill's description of her first encounter with Pale Fire, as it closely mirrors my own. I was a bit younger than she, maybe 19, but looking back on it I realize how utterly unprepared I was to get anywhere close to the levels of depth and meaning of this incredible work. Yet I too was completely seduced by its language, which shimmers off every page. Somehow it reached me on what felt like a very deep level, though I certainly couldn't have known what Nabokov was talking about. Years later, a friend who had seemed to me to be a pretty smart, multi-layered human being insisted that there were too many important crises to be dealt with in the world, and to my astonishment declared that he couldn't waste any time reading fiction, to keep up with everything he only read non-fiction. I told him I believe that one learns more that is important about life from fiction than from non-fiction. When he challenged me to prove it, I gave him a copy of Pale Fire. For whatever reason, he never raised the subject again! So funny that, though I was certainly in the dark about its meaning, I had given him Pale Fire purely on the basis of how much it had moved me.