Now read this! Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire
Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire is more fun to read than just about any book I know. By “fun” I mean that it’s a lot more than funny, but, being a poem, plus a critical appraisal of a book (with copious footnotes), and a novel, all combined, it engages the reader — as one flips back and forth through its pages — in the same way a really great puzzle or a game does.
Pale Fire begins with a 999 line poem in four cantos written by John Shade, a famous American poet. It’s one of the most beautiful long poems in our language and begins with an unforgettable image:
I was the shadow of the waxwing slain
By the false azure in the windowpane;
I was the smudge of ashen fluff–and I
Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky.
And from the inside, too, I’d duplicate
Myself, my lamp, an apple on a plate:
Uncurtaining the night, I’d let dark glass
Hang all the furniture above the grass,
And how delightful when a fall of snow
Covered my glimpse of lawn and reached up so
As to make chair and bed exactly stand
Upon that snow, out in that crystal land.
The striking description here of the tricks of perception a mirroring window can inflict on the eye and the mind will mirror many of the literary deceptions contained in the novel.
The poem is autobiographical and centers on the apparent suicide of Shade’s daughter Hazel, and includes discussions of death and the afterlife, glimpses of his family and writing life, and culminates with a rumination on the power of poetry to help us comprehend life and the miracle of our universe.
This beautiful, touching, and somewhat serious poem is followed by a supposed “Foreward” and “Commentary” written by Charles Kinbote, the poet’s neighbor and, Kinbote would have us believe, Shade’s closest confidant and literary executor. The Commentary is in the form of notes to lines in the poem, though each note will take us absurdly beyond the poem itself into the funhouse of Kinbote’s mind. Here’s the entry on the unexceptional word “often” in line 62:
Often, almost nightly, throughout the spring of 1959, I had feared for my life. Solitude is the playfield of Satan. I cannot describe the depths of my loneliness and distress. There was naturally my famous neighbor just across the lane, and at one time I took in a dissipated young roomer (who generally came home after midnight). Yet I wish to stress that cold hard core of loneliness which is not good for a displaced soul . . . . I kept moving from window to window, my silk nightcap drenched with sweat, my bared breast a thawing pond, and sometimes, armed with the judge’s shotgun, I dared beard the terrors of the terrace.
What the hell, the reader will ask, does any of that have to do with John Shade’s poem?
Is Kinbote mad? He may well have been Shade’s friend, but that’s drawn into question with his implicit confession that he is also Charles Xavier Vseslav, or Charles II, the deposed King of Zembla (think “semblance”), a “distant northern land”, and the target of Soviet-styled revolutionaries who may have mistakenly murdered Shade in an assassination attempt on Kinbote.
Kinbote would also have us believe that most of the credit due for Shade’s poem should go to Kinbote himself, for the inspiration he provided during long walks the two took at the time of its composition. The evidence he points to in the poem however is slim, even tortured.
Ultimately, Kinbote suggests that the poem is really entirely about himself. His note to lines 939 and 940 — “Man’s life is a commentary to abstruse/ unfinished poem. Note for further use.” — reads, “If I correctly understand the sense of this succinct observation, our poet suggests here that human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece.” In reality, according to Kinbote, it’s not Shade’s poem, but Kinbote’s commentary, that is important. This is Pale Fire in a nutshell, and one of Nabokov’s biggest winks in the book.
Among other things, Pale Fire is a riotous satirical commentary on literary criticism, particularly the kind that focuses overmuch on the author’s life and not sufficiently on the work — the text — itself. The book also includes extensive footnotes at the end, which provide their own funhouse moments as you follow the breadcrumb trail they leave throughout the book.
Pale Fire may not be as scintillating or sexy as Lolita or Ada: or Ardor, nor as outright funny as some of Nabokov’s earlier novels written in Russian and set in Germany, but, if you’re willing to have your assumptions about what is entertaining, funny, and beautifully written turned upside down, and to enjoy a novel unlike anything else you’ve ever read, you’ll fall in love with Pale Fire.
Other recommended works: Ada: or Ardor, The Defense, Lolita (of course), Despair, Laughter in the Dark, and The Collected Short Stories.
Now Read This! appears every Monday. Learn about all the great books you wish you’d read. Then read them.
Latest posts by Christopher Guerin (Posts)
- A Sunday on La Grande Jatte (Seurat) - August 3, 2013
- Hyde Mill (Sandy Ellarson) - July 27, 2013
- Hands and Feet (Alice Bea Guerin) - July 20, 2013
- Cafe Terrace at Night (Van Gogh) - July 13, 2013
- Winter Landscape (Sesshu) - July 6, 2013
Print This Post
Vladimir Nabokov is the greatest author ever, and Lolita is tne best book ever!
While I really love Nabokov’s “Pale Fire” and Nabokov’s work in general, I have some reservations I would like to share. On the positive side, this is one of the great experimental novels in the English language, looking back to Sterne on the one hand and looking forward to post-modernism and post-structuralism on the other hand. The whole thing is filled with literary devices designed to tickle and post-modernists’ literary libido – it is a self-reflexive text, being both a meta-text(i.e., a text about a text, that being the poem “Pale Fire”) and making reference to other Nabokov texts such as “Lolita” and “Pnin”. And, of course, the whole thing is at times howlingly funny. The reading of the text “Pale Fire” by Charles Kimbote is a parody of literary criticism before the advent of New Criticism. On the one hand, the novel is a parody of biographical criticism with the protagonist trying to relate the poem to events in the life of Jack Shade. On the other hand, the text is also an allegorical interpretation of the poem, trying absurdly to connect elements in the poem to political events in the imaginary land of Zembla(sometimes outlandishly). While Nabokov sometimes said a few things skeptical about New Criticism at the prodding of Edmund Wilson, Nabokov’s basic sensibilities were those of a New Critic – attend to the textual details and so forth. The critical process of the narrator is that of eisegesis(i.e., reading one’s own ideas into a text) rather than that of strict exegesis. Most of the laughs in the novel spring from the absurdity of all this. I do not think it a perfect book, however. The name ‘Jack Shade’ , like that of the name of ‘Rosetta Stone’ in the novel “Pnin”, strikes me as a trifle too obvious, bordering,as it were, on the cute…in the pejorative sense. I suppose this is where Martin Amis got the idea of ‘John Self’ in “Money”(where this sort of thing works rather better, in my opinion). I don’t know. Personally, I groan at all this myself. That’s just my reaction. At one point in the text of “Pale Fire”, a character expresses some political opinions that seem straight out of Buckley’s ‘the National Review.’ One assumes this reflects Nabokov’s own viewpoint. Similarly, in “Pnin”, a character expresses negative opinions about Stendhal and some of the lesser literary realists which seem straight from the mouth of Nabokov. Understand me carefully here. There is nothing wrong with having opinions(and there is nothing wrong with having opinions contrary to my own). However, when you have a character spouting the author’s opinions, it comes dangerously close to one of those Ayn Rand novels where one character or the other is always spewing off the ideas of the author. The whole thing reflects a fundamental flaw within Nabokov’s imagination. Keats’s once defined ‘negative capability’ as the creative ability to get inside the character/persona of another person, losing your identity within that person and being able to see and express things from that persona(Robert Browning obviously took Keats quite literally). Nabokov was incapable, in my opinion, of negative capability. If he had contempt for something, he was incapable of expressing anything but contempt for it – he made no attempt whatsoever to ‘understand’ anything contrary to his views. One student of Nabokov’s once said he had said something positive about the prose of Dostoyevsky in front of Nabokov – Nabokov, he said, responded by deep-sixing his marks. Of course, professors do that all the time. In Nabokov’s criticism of other authors, Nabokov would often call authors he didn’t like “frauds”(Stendhal, Pound, Eliot) and even stooped to calling Henry James a “pale porpoise.” Suppose Henry James were indeed a “pale porpoise.” What does this have to do with his writing? Nabokov was simply resorting to personal insults when he should have made concrete criticisms of the authors in question. To call Stendal, Pound, et al ‘frauds’ suggests they were dishonest – trying to put something over on their readers. One can dislike Stendhal or Pound without questioning their literary or personal honesty. Richard Rorty, in his Everyman introduction to “Pale Fire”, asserted that Nabokov was a ” kind” and “generous” man. I’m afraid I have reservations about that. Personal insults are not made in a spirit of kindness and generosity. All this bespeaks a certain limitation within Nabokov’s creativity. Don’t get me wrong. I love “Pale Fire.” And “Pnin” and, to a certain extent, “Lolita.” “Pale Fire” is one of the great ‘odd’ novels in the English language, trailing only (as everything must) “Tristram Shandy.” And “Pale Fire” is just plain funny. But it’s not flawless. Like “Lolita”, it is a flawed masterpiece, rather like Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn.” Nabokov’s intelligence was formidable, but his creative expression had certain unfortunate, and definite,limits. In my opinion. Greg Cameron, Surrey, B.C., Canada
I read your comments with interest, because I have similar thoughts on Nabokov myself! See my in-depth look at him in two different chapters of my book, ART FOR ART’S SAKE & LITERARY LIFE (Nebraska, 1996), and also in my essay, “The Cold War, American Aestheticism, the Nabokov Problem–and Me,” in Kelly Comfort, ed., ART AND LIFE IN AESTHETICISM (Palgrave, 2008).
I’ve a love-hate relationship with VN. I think LOLITA is a wonderful book, and I much admire PALE FIRE (though, like you, I think it’s highly imperfect). But I find extremely repellent VN’s nasty dismissal of so many major authors, in interviews, in prefaces, and throughout ADA. He was, in many ways, an intolerant and nasty little man.
My observations, I should note, were in response to Greg Cameron’s comments, not to Christopher Guerin’s mini-essay.
Oh, and I have grave doubts about VN having been a “kind and generous” man. Indeed, a review in HUDSON REVIEW of Brian Boyd’s biography was headlined, “Nabokov and Nastiness”!