Pale Fire
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I remember one particular problem I had been trying to compose for months. There came a night when I managed at last to express that particular theme. It was meant for the delectation of the very expert solver. The unsophisticated might miss the point of the problem entirely and discover its fairly simple, “thetic” solution without having passed through the pleasurable torments prepared for the sophisticated one. The later would start by falling for an illusory pattern of play based on a fashionable avant-garde theme which the composer had taken the greatest pains to “plant.” Having passed through this “antithetic” inferno, the by now ultra-sophisticated solver would reach the simple key move as somebody on a wild goose chase might go from Albany to New York by way of Vancouver, Eurasia and the Azores. The pleasant experience of the roundabout route (strange landscapes, gongs, tigers, exotic customs, the thrice-repeated circuit of a newly married couple around the sacred fire of an earthen brazier) would amply reward him for the misery of the deceit, and after that, his arrival at the simple key move would provide him with a synthesis of poignant artistic delight.
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If we are justified in transposing this triad to Pale Fire then, plausibly, the thetic solution is Kinbote’s account taken at face value and the antithetic solution is the one I outline above. But could the conspiracy of coincidences point to a third, synthetic, solution and, if so, what is it? The question has provoked literary critics into voluminous scholarship. As we plunge on through Boyd’s book, we meet with four proposed solutions. The first two can be briefly described and, I think, safely ignored: Shadeans, who argue that Kinbote is the invention of Shade; and Kinboteans, who argue that Shade is the invention of Kinbote. There is a conclusive objection to the Shadeans: In 1962, Nabokov himself affirmed the autonomy of the commentator in his diary, wondering, “if any reader will notice that the nasty commentator is not an ex-king and not even Dr. Kinbote but Prof. Vseslav Botkin, a Russian and a madman.” The objection to the Kinboteans is less conclusive but still cogent: It is aesthetically unsatisfying. If Shade is the invention of a lunatic, we are sunk in a skeptical bog in which it is not possible to know anything—and all the wonderful and carefully plotted absurdity, pathos and humour of the encounter between Shade and Kinbote is drained of its reality and collapses into a suffocating solipsism. It is not credible that an aesthete of Nabokov’s skill and subtlety would offer this as the masterstroke of his greatest novel.
A third proposed solution supposes that the question of attribution is by design undecidable. Evidence for the Kinbotean view is perfectly and deliberately balanced with evidence for the Shadean view so that the novel approximates the effect of that well-known optical illusion used in the psychology of perception—an image of a duck that can, with equal justification, be seen as a rabbit. But the undecidability thesis violates our operating assumption: That under sustained scrutiny Pale Fire will yield a third and final solution whose sophistication provides, “a synthesis of poignant artistic delight.” When expressed in terms of Nabokov’s chess problem analogy, we are being asked to believe that the solution is an irresolvable indecision between two closing moves and has the result that the “solver” never checkmates his opponent. It is simply not tenable to postulate that Nabokov’s elegant reward for the ultra-sophisticated reader is to force him into the position of Buridan’s Ass.
And what is more: not one of these solutions has anything at all to do with the preoccupying theme of Shade's poem: His lifelong interested in the possibility of an afterlife; a phase of bitter skepticism after his daughter, Hazel, commits suicide; and, finally, his quiet certitude that the subtle but manifold harmonies he detects in the pattern of everyday life (and which he tries to reflect in his poem) do, after all, implicate the existence of a transcendent reality—though this can only be intuited, and never known, by the living. This brings us to Boyd's solution, what we may call "the hypothesis of post mortem suggestion." Boyd argues that the ghost of Hazel Shade exercises an unnoticed but persistent influence on Kinbote to help shape his Zemblan fantasy into a form that will subconsciously inspire her father to write his poem.
I noted earlier that Kinbote’s fantasy is cobbled together from items in the judge’s house. And while this is true in respect of several details obvious on a first or second reading, Boyd shows that under closer analysis Kinbote’s picture of Zembla appears to be painted from the palette of Hazel’s life experiences. Let us examine a representative example to properly understand Boyd’s methodology.
Kinbote tells us he was imprisoned in his own castle by insurrectionists but escaped through a secret tunnel in his cell and then fled across the mountains to the sea. By a comic stroke of fate, the clothes he fumbled across and put on in the pitch dark of his cell turn out to be a bright red sweater and cap. And thus, attired like a court jester, he flees—reaching a mountainside farmhouse just as night begins to fall. The farmhouse is home to a farmer and his wife who, “like personages in an old tedious tale,” offer Kinbote shelter, and the next morning, instruct their daughter to show him the shortest way to the pass. The girl is lonely and lascivious—in keeping with the stereotype about the pretty daughters of farmers. At a secluded glade where they are to part ways, she makes a pass at the pederast and is rudely rebuffed. And so Kinbote strikes on alone, smugly satisfied at her humiliation, and reaches a mountain lake. In its azure surface, he sees his own reflection—red-sweatered, red-capped, rippled by the wind—until the reflection suddenly turns and vanishes. Kinbote looks behind him and sees the empty ledge of rock on which some red-clad person or thing had stood and whose image he had mistaken for his own. A shiver of alfear (“a sudden uncontrollable fear of elves”) runs between his shoulder blades. But later, he finds out that local loyalists had learned of his escape and outfit and run about in red sweaters and caps to confuse the authorities—thus, it seems, explaining the mysterious being on the ledge.
Boyd suggests that we excise this scene and set it side by side with an event in the life of Hazel Shade. On the night she died, Hazel ventured out on her first and last blind date. Ugly and awkward, she does not make a good first impression on her suitor: He recoils at the sight of her and, after offering an implausible excuse and a perfunctory apology, leaves her standing in abject humiliation outside the Hawaiian restaurant where they were to have dined. It is raining. The pavement is wet and shiny. In its azure surface (in this context the adjective is odd and significant) is splashed the red light of a neon sign. For Hazel, the failed date is the last and greatest in a long serious of intolerable disappointments. She takes a bus to Lake Omega, wades through the undergrowth, and drowns herself.
In comparing the two scenes, Boyd draws our attention to the following points of similitude: The eeriest moment of Kinbote’s narrative follows a young woman’s sexual rejection when he gazes into azure water and sees a splash of red that indicates a mysterious presence. This, Boyd argues, deliberately recalls the red light in an azure puddle outside the Hawaiian restaurant, Hazel’s humiliation, and the lake into which she finally plunged. If he is correct, it is notable that the triadic model of interpretation is here completed in miniature as the reader moves through three solutions of increasing sophistication: The reflection is first Kinbote, then a Zemblan loyalist and finally (the synthetic solution for the ultra-sophisticated reader) the ghost of Hazel Shade.
On superficial inspection, this sort of exegesis may seem wiredrawn—even ironically Kinbotean. However, a certain aching elusiveness is precisely what we would expect if the hypothesis is correct. A subliminal suggestion from Hazel to Kinbote and from Kinbote to Shade must, for both authors, operate below the threshold of conscious awareness. And Boyd’s argument gathers additional force as he piles up point after point. Colours, etymologies, literary allusions, faunal names and palindromic wordplay connected to Hazel’s life appear in Kinbote’s fantasy in pointillistic profusion. Boyd then reminds us that all these coincidences are set against two highly suggestive background details: During her brief life, Hazel was at the centre of poltergeist activity after the death of an aunt and later held a solitary seance in a haunted barn. During that seance, a bouncing light spelled out a seemingly garbled message; and in that message, the word “atalanta” occurred three times. An attentive reader may remember this when, as John Shade crosses the lawn to his death, a Red Admirable alights on his sleeve as if in warning or valediction—a butterfly whose binomial name, we learn in Kinbote’s commentary, is Vanessa atalanta.
Once the secret explanatory mechanism has been postulated (the ghost of Hazel inspires Kinbote to inspire Shade) we find subtle corroboration of it everywhere. For example: Kinbote tells us that his father, Alfin the Vague, had a passion for “flying apparatuses.” One very special monoplane was built for him in 1916 and, in 1918, became his “bird of doom” : Executing a tricky vertical loop, Alfin flew the plane smack into the side of a hotel being constructed on a coastal heath, “as if for the special purpose of standing in a king’s way.” The first lines of Shade’s poem, meanwhile, open with an image that expresses his preoccupation with death and the afterlife,
A third proposed solution supposes that the question of attribution is by design undecidable. Evidence for the Kinbotean view is perfectly and deliberately balanced with evidence for the Shadean view so that the novel approximates the effect of that well-known optical illusion used in the psychology of perception—an image of a duck that can, with equal justification, be seen as a rabbit. But the undecidability thesis violates our operating assumption: That under sustained scrutiny Pale Fire will yield a third and final solution whose sophistication provides, “a synthesis of poignant artistic delight.” When expressed in terms of Nabokov’s chess problem analogy, we are being asked to believe that the solution is an irresolvable indecision between two closing moves and has the result that the “solver” never checkmates his opponent. It is simply not tenable to postulate that Nabokov’s elegant reward for the ultra-sophisticated reader is to force him into the position of Buridan’s Ass.
And what is more: not one of these solutions has anything at all to do with the preoccupying theme of Shade's poem: His lifelong interested in the possibility of an afterlife; a phase of bitter skepticism after his daughter, Hazel, commits suicide; and, finally, his quiet certitude that the subtle but manifold harmonies he detects in the pattern of everyday life (and which he tries to reflect in his poem) do, after all, implicate the existence of a transcendent reality—though this can only be intuited, and never known, by the living. This brings us to Boyd's solution, what we may call "the hypothesis of post mortem suggestion." Boyd argues that the ghost of Hazel Shade exercises an unnoticed but persistent influence on Kinbote to help shape his Zemblan fantasy into a form that will subconsciously inspire her father to write his poem.
I noted earlier that Kinbote’s fantasy is cobbled together from items in the judge’s house. And while this is true in respect of several details obvious on a first or second reading, Boyd shows that under closer analysis Kinbote’s picture of Zembla appears to be painted from the palette of Hazel’s life experiences. Let us examine a representative example to properly understand Boyd’s methodology.
Kinbote tells us he was imprisoned in his own castle by insurrectionists but escaped through a secret tunnel in his cell and then fled across the mountains to the sea. By a comic stroke of fate, the clothes he fumbled across and put on in the pitch dark of his cell turn out to be a bright red sweater and cap. And thus, attired like a court jester, he flees—reaching a mountainside farmhouse just as night begins to fall. The farmhouse is home to a farmer and his wife who, “like personages in an old tedious tale,” offer Kinbote shelter, and the next morning, instruct their daughter to show him the shortest way to the pass. The girl is lonely and lascivious—in keeping with the stereotype about the pretty daughters of farmers. At a secluded glade where they are to part ways, she makes a pass at the pederast and is rudely rebuffed. And so Kinbote strikes on alone, smugly satisfied at her humiliation, and reaches a mountain lake. In its azure surface, he sees his own reflection—red-sweatered, red-capped, rippled by the wind—until the reflection suddenly turns and vanishes. Kinbote looks behind him and sees the empty ledge of rock on which some red-clad person or thing had stood and whose image he had mistaken for his own. A shiver of alfear (“a sudden uncontrollable fear of elves”) runs between his shoulder blades. But later, he finds out that local loyalists had learned of his escape and outfit and run about in red sweaters and caps to confuse the authorities—thus, it seems, explaining the mysterious being on the ledge.
Boyd suggests that we excise this scene and set it side by side with an event in the life of Hazel Shade. On the night she died, Hazel ventured out on her first and last blind date. Ugly and awkward, she does not make a good first impression on her suitor: He recoils at the sight of her and, after offering an implausible excuse and a perfunctory apology, leaves her standing in abject humiliation outside the Hawaiian restaurant where they were to have dined. It is raining. The pavement is wet and shiny. In its azure surface (in this context the adjective is odd and significant) is splashed the red light of a neon sign. For Hazel, the failed date is the last and greatest in a long serious of intolerable disappointments. She takes a bus to Lake Omega, wades through the undergrowth, and drowns herself.
In comparing the two scenes, Boyd draws our attention to the following points of similitude: The eeriest moment of Kinbote’s narrative follows a young woman’s sexual rejection when he gazes into azure water and sees a splash of red that indicates a mysterious presence. This, Boyd argues, deliberately recalls the red light in an azure puddle outside the Hawaiian restaurant, Hazel’s humiliation, and the lake into which she finally plunged. If he is correct, it is notable that the triadic model of interpretation is here completed in miniature as the reader moves through three solutions of increasing sophistication: The reflection is first Kinbote, then a Zemblan loyalist and finally (the synthetic solution for the ultra-sophisticated reader) the ghost of Hazel Shade.
On superficial inspection, this sort of exegesis may seem wiredrawn—even ironically Kinbotean. However, a certain aching elusiveness is precisely what we would expect if the hypothesis is correct. A subliminal suggestion from Hazel to Kinbote and from Kinbote to Shade must, for both authors, operate below the threshold of conscious awareness. And Boyd’s argument gathers additional force as he piles up point after point. Colours, etymologies, literary allusions, faunal names and palindromic wordplay connected to Hazel’s life appear in Kinbote’s fantasy in pointillistic profusion. Boyd then reminds us that all these coincidences are set against two highly suggestive background details: During her brief life, Hazel was at the centre of poltergeist activity after the death of an aunt and later held a solitary seance in a haunted barn. During that seance, a bouncing light spelled out a seemingly garbled message; and in that message, the word “atalanta” occurred three times. An attentive reader may remember this when, as John Shade crosses the lawn to his death, a Red Admirable alights on his sleeve as if in warning or valediction—a butterfly whose binomial name, we learn in Kinbote’s commentary, is Vanessa atalanta.
Once the secret explanatory mechanism has been postulated (the ghost of Hazel inspires Kinbote to inspire Shade) we find subtle corroboration of it everywhere. For example: Kinbote tells us that his father, Alfin the Vague, had a passion for “flying apparatuses.” One very special monoplane was built for him in 1916 and, in 1918, became his “bird of doom” : Executing a tricky vertical loop, Alfin flew the plane smack into the side of a hotel being constructed on a coastal heath, “as if for the special purpose of standing in a king’s way.” The first lines of Shade’s poem, meanwhile, open with an image that expresses his preoccupation with death and the afterlife,
I was the shadow of the waxwing slain
By the false azure in the window pane. I was the smudge of ashen fluff—and I Lived on, flew on in the reflected sky. |
A plane flying into a building and a bird flying into a window—the echo may seem accidental until we learn that Shade’s father was an ornithologist who had a bird named after him: Bombycilla shadei. Once again, the clue is disguised in binomial nomenclature until we arrive at the end of Kinbote’s Index and read: “Waxwings; birds of the genus Bombycilla shadei.” In other words, the waxwing, which flies into a window in Shade’s poem, has an indelible affinity with this father; and Kinbote’s father flew his “bird of doom” into the many windows of a hotel.
To postulate that Kinbote himself worked all these coincidences into his commentary and then pretended not to notice them quickly runs into incoherence. Kinbote is crushed to discover that Shade has written an Appalachian poem and not a Zemblan romaunt. “Given that Kinbote has already thrust the Zembla of his commentary on Shade as the ideal subject for his next poem,” notes Boyd, “that commentary cannot merely be Kinbote’s response to what the poem turns out to be.” Like the single-author and undecidability hypotheses, the idea that Kinbote adjusted his commentary to create the coincidences ex post facto solves one problem by introducing many more. Boyd’s solution has the virtue of avoiding this pitfall; of explaining the coincidences without violating the internal logic of the novel. And the novel’s timeline does not contradict him: Shade began the poem after Kinbote moved into the judge’s house and began to tell Shade stories of Zembla—thereby opening a channel for Hazel’s influence which explains the coincidences while preserving the independent reality of both men. This is the first argument in its favour.
A second is that a clear precedent for something like Boyd’s solution—both its content and its structure—is found throughout Nabokov’s other work. In Ultimata Thule, The Vane Sisters, Transparent Things (and many other novels and stories) Nabokov explores the possibility of an afterlife and of communication between the living and the dead. Like Kinbote and Shade, living characters in these stories remain innocently and ironically oblivious to the spectral communication they have received. In The Vane Sisters, the narrator's last sentence laments that he has not received any message from the beyond but itself forms an acrostic that spells out that very message. “Most of the stories I am contemplating,” Nabokov explained to his editor after the publication of The Vane Sisters, “will be composed according to this system where a second main story is woven into, or placed behind, the superficial semitransparent one.” Two years after his death, his wife, Vera, went so far as to declare the beyond--potustoronnost—her husbands, “main theme.”
And this prefigures the third and final argument in favour of Boyd’s hypothesis which is perhaps the most important one: It is subtle and aesthetically satisfying. Where the other solutions propose an irrelevant thimblerig of authorial identities that drains the novel of its realism, Boyd’s solution leaves the basic fictional data of the novel intact while offering a tantalising answer to the question Shade poses in his poem. Shade is right on both counts. There is, as he imagines, a transcendent reality and it makes contact with our world in ways we do not expect and therefore do not notice. For Shade, a poet whose image of the afterlife was a bird flying impossibly into the reflected sky, the evidence he sought was concealed in the last place he ever imagined: In his insane neighbour’s stories of Zembla—which Kinbote glosses as Resembla or, “Land of Reflections.”
The religious implications of all this have led some to declare Nabokov’s aesthetic a “theology for skeptics.” This raises an interesting question: Did Nabokov himself believe in an afterlife? In his autobiography, Nabokov depicts himself standing among rare butterflies and reports, “a thrill of gratitude to Whom It May Concern—to the contrapuntal genius of human fate.” It would seem, therefore, that Nabokov understood that his own literary designs, over which he exercised control, formed part of a much larger design over which a Supreme Author exercised control. This idea is supported by points of similitude between his own life and the fictional reality of Pale Fire—and most saliently and poignantly in this fact: in 1922, Nabokov’s own father, like Shade, was mistakenly assassinated by a gunman aiming for someone else and July 21, the day on which Shade is shot, is Nabokov’s father’s birthday.
Nabokov’s art invites the reader on a journey of discovery, the discovery of intelligent intention, that for him had metaphysical implications. “The glory of God is to hide a thing,” Nabokov writes in Bend Sinister—paraphrasing Bacon paraphrasing Proverbs—“and the glory of man is to find it.”
To postulate that Kinbote himself worked all these coincidences into his commentary and then pretended not to notice them quickly runs into incoherence. Kinbote is crushed to discover that Shade has written an Appalachian poem and not a Zemblan romaunt. “Given that Kinbote has already thrust the Zembla of his commentary on Shade as the ideal subject for his next poem,” notes Boyd, “that commentary cannot merely be Kinbote’s response to what the poem turns out to be.” Like the single-author and undecidability hypotheses, the idea that Kinbote adjusted his commentary to create the coincidences ex post facto solves one problem by introducing many more. Boyd’s solution has the virtue of avoiding this pitfall; of explaining the coincidences without violating the internal logic of the novel. And the novel’s timeline does not contradict him: Shade began the poem after Kinbote moved into the judge’s house and began to tell Shade stories of Zembla—thereby opening a channel for Hazel’s influence which explains the coincidences while preserving the independent reality of both men. This is the first argument in its favour.
A second is that a clear precedent for something like Boyd’s solution—both its content and its structure—is found throughout Nabokov’s other work. In Ultimata Thule, The Vane Sisters, Transparent Things (and many other novels and stories) Nabokov explores the possibility of an afterlife and of communication between the living and the dead. Like Kinbote and Shade, living characters in these stories remain innocently and ironically oblivious to the spectral communication they have received. In The Vane Sisters, the narrator's last sentence laments that he has not received any message from the beyond but itself forms an acrostic that spells out that very message. “Most of the stories I am contemplating,” Nabokov explained to his editor after the publication of The Vane Sisters, “will be composed according to this system where a second main story is woven into, or placed behind, the superficial semitransparent one.” Two years after his death, his wife, Vera, went so far as to declare the beyond--potustoronnost—her husbands, “main theme.”
And this prefigures the third and final argument in favour of Boyd’s hypothesis which is perhaps the most important one: It is subtle and aesthetically satisfying. Where the other solutions propose an irrelevant thimblerig of authorial identities that drains the novel of its realism, Boyd’s solution leaves the basic fictional data of the novel intact while offering a tantalising answer to the question Shade poses in his poem. Shade is right on both counts. There is, as he imagines, a transcendent reality and it makes contact with our world in ways we do not expect and therefore do not notice. For Shade, a poet whose image of the afterlife was a bird flying impossibly into the reflected sky, the evidence he sought was concealed in the last place he ever imagined: In his insane neighbour’s stories of Zembla—which Kinbote glosses as Resembla or, “Land of Reflections.”
The religious implications of all this have led some to declare Nabokov’s aesthetic a “theology for skeptics.” This raises an interesting question: Did Nabokov himself believe in an afterlife? In his autobiography, Nabokov depicts himself standing among rare butterflies and reports, “a thrill of gratitude to Whom It May Concern—to the contrapuntal genius of human fate.” It would seem, therefore, that Nabokov understood that his own literary designs, over which he exercised control, formed part of a much larger design over which a Supreme Author exercised control. This idea is supported by points of similitude between his own life and the fictional reality of Pale Fire—and most saliently and poignantly in this fact: in 1922, Nabokov’s own father, like Shade, was mistakenly assassinated by a gunman aiming for someone else and July 21, the day on which Shade is shot, is Nabokov’s father’s birthday.
Nabokov’s art invites the reader on a journey of discovery, the discovery of intelligent intention, that for him had metaphysical implications. “The glory of God is to hide a thing,” Nabokov writes in Bend Sinister—paraphrasing Bacon paraphrasing Proverbs—“and the glory of man is to find it.”