Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire is an extraordinary work of fiction and at points probably the most fun I’ve had reading in a long while. It is also a great challenge to your blogger qua blogger. Should you take a (spoiling) glance at Wikipedia you would see that some of the major critical questions surrounding the work concern whether half of the cast of characters even exist within its world, or whether they are instead the ravings of the probable madman who is our narrator. When I write about literature I try to grasp onto what is solid – I focus, as this blog’s name suggests, upon stories. Here, therefore, I have my work cut out for me with all this confusion. Or I would, if the work did not at the same time contain such a holistic richness, where language, form, structure, and apparent plot, work together to deliver ideas and thoughts with the maximum impact, that there remains plenty to say.
With Pale Fire the challenge of writing about it comes not only from an atmosphere of uncertainty, but also from the very structure of the work. I write long-ish blog posts, but I try to spare readers whole monographs. Yet Pale Fire contains multitudes. It is not only a poem of 999 lines in rhyming couplets by a murdered author. It is also accompanied by foreword and commentary and index by another man, one who claims to be friends with the author, and whose commentary, besides being some five times the length of the author’s work, also seems to be as much an adventure story as attempt at close analysis. It is a confession, a tale of daring escape, and an academic satire, even before we try to think about its relation to the poem itself.
Even working out how to read the book is a choice and challenge. In the “Foreword”, Charles Kinbote, our guide and colleague of the deceased poet John Shade at an American university, describes how we are best to read Pale Fire. First, he tells us, we read his commentary, and only then do we read the poem with the notes, before we finally read the notes a third time on their own again. I ignored this bizarre suggestion and read the poem first, then put the book down for a month, then read the poem again, before reading the commentary in isolation afterwards. Such an approach I think makes sense, because in essence Pale Fire is two stories in contention – the poem and Shade’s narration fight the tale and narration of Kinbote in his critical apparatus, where Kinbote is actively trying to control our understanding of the former.
Here I’ll begin with the poem, then the commentary, and try to suggest how they fit together.
Poem
Pale Fire is a poem of 999 lines, broken into a mirrored four-canto structure (166-334-334-165) with the last line remaining unwritten at the time of John Shade’s murder. It is rhymed throughout in heroic couplets (AABB etc, iambic pentameter), which provides an ironic contrast with the relative mundanity of its autobiographical contents. (Here I should note that I am assuming Shade is telling the truth, that his narrator is himself, rather than some distanced figure, which is not really something one is normally supposed to do with poems these days). John Shade describes topics like his early life, his family and his views on life after death. At its centre lie his love for his wife and his grief over his daughter’s death by suicide.
Probably the most sensible critical approach to the book as a whole is to see it as showing the interplay of reflection and masking, self and other. Hence the two sides of the work, Shade and Kinbote, the mirrored structure of the poem, and plenty besides. In the poem, Shade shows more ambivalence to the topic of reflection and deception than his editor. “I was the shadow of the waxwing slain / By the false azure in the windowpane”, the poem’s first couplet, describes the death of a bird from a false assumption regarding transparency. In trying to recover the memory of his parents, who died young, Shade can only create shadowy images that have no substance – many reflections, but not the real thing. Shade’s poem shows him holding on to a sense of the real which poetic reality disappoints, at least to begin with.
Disappointment and pessimism come across elsewhere in the poem too. Madness stalks Shade, even before we get into the “outside” world of Kinbote, such as through the figure of his Aunt Maud, who suffers from dementia and can speak, but never find the right words. The greatest cause for sadness, however, is his daughter Hazel, whose ugliness and ungainliness seem to curse her to her early doom (“no lips would share the lipstick of her smoke”), and who on the night of her death is betrayed cruelly by a date. But it is here, unlike with his parents, Shade succeeds in recreating his daughter’s life. Poetry helps him to build a parallel image to his experience of her final evening as he watches television and waits for her to come home, one where he imagines her final moments. And this allows the positive couplet in Canto 4, where “I’m reasonably sure that we survive / and that my darling somewhere is alive”.
While the poem is a place of unsatisfactory reflections, that is far from the whole story, as his eventual hope for Hazel shows. Its most moving passages are when the poet does strike out in love and successfully grasps on to his object:
And I'll turn down eternity unless
The melancholy and the tenderness
Of mortal life; the passion and the pain;
The claret taillight of that dwindling plane
Off Hesperus; your gesture of dismay
On running out of cigarettes; the way
You smile at dogs; the trail of silver slime
Snails leave on flagstones; this good ink, this rhyme,
This index card, this slender rubber band
Which always forms, when dropped, an ampersand,
Are found in Heaven by the newly dead
Stored in its strongholds through the years.
This might, to an expert, be bad poetry. I find it moving. It’s a dance in time and reference between mundanity and the heavenly. And whereas pessimism might have lines supporting it elsewhere, here we have anything but that. It is not resignation in the face of the world – note the active verb “I’ll turn down”, and words like “passion” and “pain” which speak of emotions not blunted by the hardships of life. While Nabokov’s work is filled with irony – Shade expresses hope about waking up on the 22nd July as normal but in real life he is shot and never sees the day) – the poem, taken as Shade’s testimony, is free of this. Instead, it is connection, which indeed is the other value of the couplet structure – the iron bond of rhyme that links each line to line. Couplets might be humorous in essence, but sometimes we need them.
If I were to try to sum up the poem, then, which is difficult because as with all poetry it’s unfairly dense and could handle a much deeper analysis than what I’ve provided, I would say this: in a world of distorting and uncertain reflections and pain, through focused love towards those nearest him – his wife and daughter – Shade manages to create a work that ends with hope.
Solus Rex
The novel Pale Fire takes its name from the poem, Pale Fire, but it could easily have had another title – Solus Rex. This is the title that our commentator, Charles Kinbote, admits he would have given it. Kinbote is a larger-than-life figure, a madman in the Nabokovian mould. He is many things, and possibly none of them – a professor, an exiled king, a menace to his students and his colleagues, and an inveterate inventor of fictions. He claims to be protecting Shade’s legacy by publishing his poem, but then admits that Shade’s wife Sybil refuses to answer his letters, and he speaks of himself as of a man in flight from dangerous pursuers – he refuses to go to a library to check anything and is writing his notes in a remote log cabin.
His commentary is as multiple as he is. The one thing it is not is good academic criticism. Kinbote states the obvious and calls it analysis with the same brazenness as a certain blogger; at other times he simply refuses to do his job altogether – “my readers must do their own research” he declares. His index cheerily damns his colleagues by mentioning them in their connection with Shade and then noting “Not in the index” to show they aren’t worth any further consideration. In places his interpretations are so bizarrely off the mark that I found myself writing things like “no, I don’t think so”, in the margins. Towards the end of the book, faced with a momentary upsurge of academic integrity, he admits that a fair few of Shade’s “discarded drafts” were lines he simply made up. It would be a shock, except that his attempts don’t even manage to mimic the iambic pentameter correctly. No great poet, this editor.
All this, however, is secondary to the real part of the commentary – Kinbote’s description of his own life as exiled king of the north-European country of Zembla. More than academic score-setting, this is the reason for his notes’ existence. Kinbote believed that, over the course of his short “friendship” with Shade, he had convinced him to write this story as his poem. Shocked to discover that “Pale Fire” has nothing to do with this, Kinbote first attempts analytical pirouettes to find connections, then abandons the attempt, leaving the commentary an almost-standalone narrative of the life of Charles “the Beloved” of Zembla, from boyhood sexual escapades to the revolution that forces him to undertake a daring escape into exile. How much of any of this is true is the big academic question, indeed whether Zembla exists within the story to begin with.
Throughout, there are clues towards deeper truths, hints scattered among the pages. Kinbote is a lover of masks and subterfuge, unlike Shade – indeed, “King Charles” fled Zembla with the help of a disguise. Whereas in the poem, Shade tries to define the truths of his life among the many reflections and distortions of it, Kinbote’s section almost seems an attempt at the opposite – a befuddling of the truth which, somehow, still pokes out here and there. The reason why this works is that Kinbote has a certain amount of conscience, as mentioned above. He would prefer to omit than to lie outright, and sometimes he fails to omit things. Hence the occasional allusions to sexual misbehaviour, such as “his penetrating into the bedroom where his friend sat and shaved in the tub”, which is an index entry under his own name. Hence also the hints that his friendship with the Shades is not exactly all he claims it is. For example, regarding dinner parties he notes that “of the dozen or so invitations that I extended, the Shades accepted just three”. Then there is his reported speech to Sybil on one occasion, which begins as a benign monologue, only to be increasingly sullied with phrases like “do not interrupt me”, or “let me speak”, all within one long run-on sentence, as if he hopes we will not notice.
The two together
“Pale Fire”, the poem, has been published separately. The commentary, to a certain extent, could be too. What then, is the purpose of their cohabitation in one book, beyond merely providing the scaffolding for some academic satire? The treatment of grief within the work is what led me onto my own answer. Shade and his wife grieve the loss of their daughter. Those other poems of Shade’s which Kinbote quotes in the commentary all mourn for her too, directly or less so. His long poem itself is, at its heart, a working out of that grief, a transition from pessimism to hope for the future.
Kinbote’s relation to grief is entirely different. The high point of Shade’s grief within the poem he criticises as stylistically weak (“too laboured and too long”), then he steals the manuscript, convincing a weeping Sybil Shade on the day of her husband’s death that he ought to be the one to edit and publish his last poem.
Stepping back, then, we have two kinds of interaction. Kinbote scorns reality and is obsessive, sexually so even, about his favourite poet. The repeated suggestion regarding his past loves is that he has used and discarded them and that at no point has consent been anywhere in his thoughts. His relation to his colleagues is inimical – he seeks to crush or manipulate them, as he ultimately seeks to do to Shade himself by forcing him to write a poem about his (probably invented) past as a king. For Kinbote, simply, people don’t really exist.
Shade comes across as someone who is the opposite. His love for his wife and daughter are fundamentally unself-centred. His relationship with Kinbote, what we can read of it anyway, seems to be further evidence of a kindness and tolerance that Kinbote lacks. At one point Kinbote lets himself in to the Shades’ abode through a door left ajar, causing Shade to utter “an unprintable oath”. Shade had (apparently) mistakenly thought Kinbote was a travelling salesman. But still the Shades invite him to sit down and have a cup of tea. The walks the two men take, likewise, seem more like the poet is humouring the annoying (and lonely) foreigner Kinbote, than truly forming the deep friendship with him which Kinbote claims for himself.
In other words, the book is contrast of isolation versus connecting – the binding couplets placed against the commentary which is largely disconnected from the commented. This is perhaps the work’s most moral message, one that brings together all of its elements – the different forms, the trickery and disguises, the reflection. One life succeeds, another fails – it’s simply the case that the wrong man died. Nabokov liked his irony, of course. I have also failed to give any indication of how funny this book is. There’s not just the fun of puzzling it all out, but actual belly-laugh humour here. I think that’s why Pale Fire is so impressive. While I did find the Zembla story tedious at times, the novel as a whole is peerlessly readable. It’s funny, it’s allusive, it’s thoughtful, it’s moral. It’s basically impossible to read without finding at least one moment you can celebrate.
In short, it’s one of those books that is truly inspirational. It is quite simply a reminder of the heights that truly the best literary works can reach.