Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

 

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Volume 9 Number 3, December 2008

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The Narrative Technique in Nabokov’s Pale Fire: An Analysis

 

by

 

Dr. Khan Farhadiba

Tafila Technical University

 

Within the chronology of Nabokov’s works, Pale Fire (1962) came after Lolita (1955) and The Real life of Sabastian Knight (1961), and it conjures up the unreal world of Zembla, possibly a metaphor of the transformation of Russia into the Soviet Union. But politics never comes to the foreground in the novel, it runs as sub-text which produces tropes of exile, displacement, fragmentation and loneliness and even domentia.

 

The novel, to be sure, has two story-lines: one takes place in New Wye, a small New England town, and the other in a foreign land, Zembla (Russia). John Shade is a poet and professor, and acclaimed within literary circles, who has written a poem called Pale Fire. Shade dies before he can write the final line and it is Kinbote who finishes the poem with a foreword and a commentary. Shade is the New England man and Kinbote, though his next—door neighbor, is from Zembla. Shade is an acknowledged man of letters and Kinbote of a dubious literary standing. William Monroe describes Kinbote as "Nabokov's parasitic processor of literary materials, criticism's answer to the Cuisinart"1. However, Kinbote now alleges that he was close to Shade and thus perhaps the best equipped to comment on Pale Fire which, again, he asserts has grown out of his own stories about life in Zembla. "The appetitive and mechanical Kinbote reads into the poem Pale Fire his own disillusionments and obsessions, both personal and political, reducing Shade's poem to a gloss on the political affairs of Zembla, 'a distant-northern land'"2. We are to believe that quasi-Russian status quo in the distant northern kingdom of Zembla has recently (May 1958) been overturned by a Soviet-inspired political coup; the king, Charles ‘the Beloved’, a fugitive aided by dashing and loyal noblemen, has after suitably picturesque adventures succeeded in fleeing the country; the new ruler, however,  is  anxious lest he become the focus for émigré dissidence, an assassin is sent to track him down. As the commentary unfolds and Kinbote expatiates upon the various manly customs of Zembla and incidents in the King’s life, his boldness reaches a state where we comprehend that he is no Zemblan patriot-in-exile but the king himself: the note to line 691 finally topples over the first person narrative rather than the third person.      

 

Thus the narrative structure of Pale Fire is complicated from the beginning: The first being web of author/writers dialogies as it is Shade’s poem as much as Kinbote’s who claims to have provided the source, the location and the incentive, "Kinbote sees himself not only as a character in a novel but as the potential author of other works of fiction. He also seems to know, as Joyce's Molly Bloom does ('Jamesy, let me up out of this'), whose fiction he is in. If he manages to avoid suicide ('God will help me, I trust, to rid myself of any desire to follow the example of two other characters in this work'—not people in this world, we note, but 'characters in this work', the novel that his edition of Shade's Pale Fire has become), he expects to 'assume other disguises, other forms'…. He will hang on his fantasy, or he will have to let it go…. What matters is not what happens but what might happen, the multiple chances, the darkness confronted but not, for the moment, embraced (203)"3. The second being the true/false diexis because the details are so bizarre that one cannot but wonder whether Zembla even exists. Moreover, Charles Kinbote as a sexual invert and imperial fantasist constantly reminds one of Humbert, the character/narrator of Lolita and Shade also parallels the name ‘Haze’ from Lolita as a symbol of confusion. In this way there is parody and intertextuality which run into one another. Here, Nabakov parodies the kind of biographer who secretly believes that in a just world his subject should really be writing the story of his life, rather than the other way round. The genre most obviously parodied by Pale Fire is that of the scholarly edition, devotedly assembled by a self-effacing hermit whose only concern is to establish his author’s text: far from submitting to such harmless drudgery, Kinbote attempts to substitute his own work for Shade’s disappointing poem. This makes Pale Fire a ludic counterpart to Eugene Onegin, “whose scholarly punctilio it transmogrifies into editorial high-handedness. As it appears, however, the parody is of other genres as well; for just as Kinbote changes from a madman to a king, so Pale Fire changes from poetry to prose, from whodunniit to cod biography to mock edition, in a comedy of transformation that includes the novel form itself.”(97). 4

 

Likewise, John Shade’s poem continues in the tradition of James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a young Man and like it its first Canto focuses on the budding artist explaining how Shade came to be a poet. In this canto there are references also to ‘Goldsmith’ and ‘Wordsworth’ (Oliver Goldsmith and William Wordsworth) and Shade becomes a ‘wordsmith’ by reinventing the two. There is also reference to ‘Chapman’s Homer’, the poem by Keats in which he discusses his impressions while reading Chapman’s translation of Homer’s great works. But Shade uses Keats’s poem as a newspaper headline wherein it refers to a home run scored by Ben Chapman, a player for the Boston Red Sox. The importance here is that the process of reading and interpretation is confused—names have been once again conflated and references crisscrossed. Later on, Kinbote’s reading of Shade’s poem will make even grosser errors of interpretation. This theme of reading and ‘misreading’ is introduced very early and it seems that what Nabokov wants to question is the right and wrong way of narrating a literary work. How important is the author’s intention? How can one know what the author intends? These questions that the narrative raises not only makes it metafictional/self reflexive in its tenor but also goads one to reconsider the relationship between a literary work and literary criticism. The work of the critic (Kinbote) is to reflect the authentic light of the literary text and to have a peek at what is there. Kinbote emphasizes this idea of reflection, which he finds in the original text (Shakespeare's Timon of Athens):

 

The sun is a thief: she lures the sea

and robs it. The moon is a thief

he steals his silvery light from the sun

The sun is a thief: it dissolves the moon (p.80)

 

Therefore, In the context of the novel, it is normal to assume that Kinbote (Commentator) is to Shade (Poet) as moon is to sun in this analysis, a mere reflector of light elsewhere generated. Thus, on the whole, Kinbote's role in the novel is that of a reflector; he is only restating the notions and images of others. Clearly the author succeeds in showing the Kinbote's (the critic) character by comparing it with Shade (the poet). Shade is shown as dead since the first lines of the book. What is alive, is sensed through two things: the poem and its commentary. Nabokov draws a highly comic picture of the two poles of literature. Embedded in this is a whole web of binary oppositions- illusion and reality, past and present, sanity and insanity and so on. It has become evident that both of them are involved in a highly subjective activity. But the difference lies in the poet's making no attempt to hide his subjective interest while the commentator is expected to assume an objective tone if his activity is to be taken in high esteem. A close analysis of this "objectivity" indicates that it does not go beyond the surface and indeed Kinbote is no less megalomaniac and subjective than the poet he is writing about.

 

One of main questions that Shade asks deals with poetry: is poetry an appropriate medium for remembering the past, and for grappling with grief? One might ask whether Shade’s poem is really a poem considering that it is part of a larger novel. There is tension between Shade’s arguments on poetry and the poem’s narrative role as part of the novel. One can understand this as a tension between Shade’s arguments on poetry and the poem’s narrative role as part of the whole. Within the poem, Shade discusses functions of poetry as a genre, but as a whole, the poem becomes an early chapter in longer story. But if we deconstruct the essence of the whole input we come to realize that this philosophizing about the narrative is all about the two realms that poetry deals with—the personal and the poetic.

 

At the personal level, there is a lot that relates to Shade—his parents, his wife and his daughter. Sybil Shade is his wife and it is through the name ‘Sybil’ that a counter narrative is set up. She is the very antithesis of the mythological ‘Sybil’—female prophets with divine abilities to foresee the future according to Greek mythology. Sybil Shade, however, cannot foresee the tragedy that is to befall her husband and therefore cannot forewarn him. Here there is a complicated implicature, a postmodern strategy that Nabokov uses. Forewarning could be paraphrased as ‘translating’ the future, and Shade himself is unable to do this—‘How ludicrous these efforts to translate/into one’s private tongue a public fate’—but by writing an ‘untranslatable’ poem Shade has put a stop at his public fate. Also since his poem is so dense it needs a commentary per se and thus comes in Kinbote! Here the poet is subject to two types of damage-physical and intellectual. The first is done at the hands of Gradus, the secret agent who mistakenly kills Shade while Kinbote mars Shade's legacy (the poem) by means of making a perverse explication of the poem to fit his own inflated ego and fantasies.

 

There is also Shade’s daughter who manipulates the intertextuality in the narrative through a question she asks: ‘What does semi-piternal mean?’ This refers us to T.S. Eliot’s ‘Little Gidding’, the fourth of Eliot’s ‘Four Quartets.’ The opening lines are: “Midwinter Spring is its own season/Semi-piternal though sodden towards sundown/Suspend in time, between pole and tropee.’ It is through ironic juxtapositioning that we can see the dissonance between Eliot’s eternal season and Shade’s death and snow, shadows and ice. The more violent irony is that the question is posed by the very girl who drowns herself in a frozen lake. The most important stanza thematically and autobiographically occurs at the close of "Canto Two" and concludes at the exact midpoint of the poem—line 500. Here Shade describes the suicide of his daughter, a personal tragedy that has naturally intensified his concern with the question of an afterlife. Hazel Shade's death is perhaps the poet's most important lyric impulse for the composition of Pale Fire. The stanza begins with a general description of nature, a summing up that sets the general scene for a personal cataclysm:

 

It was a night of thaw, a night of blow,

With great excitement in the air.

Black spring Stood just around the corner, shivering

In the wet starlight and on the wet ground.

(11. 494-497)

 

The suicide of Hazel (youth) can be read as condemning or at least exposing the flaw of modern poetry. And canto III takes up in detail the 'death’ motif—the falling down at the pinnacle of one’s literary success. Thus Shade becomes an anagram of Hades, the underworld of the Greek mythology. The phrase ‘Elysian life’ in the poem alludes to a region in Hades where dead heroes live a peaceful afterlife and this again is introduction to Shade’s demand ‘never to forget’ or ‘be forgotten’. And this brings us to Shade’s idea of death as 'metamorphoses’ when if not he in person but at least his poem will change into something that has never been tried before, a metafictional, self-narrative via a poetic form.

 

The poetic form that Shade uses is replete with allusion and thus refers back to those poets of yore who have made it in the annals of memory and popularity. The word ‘stillicide’ refers to Hardy's poem ‘Friends Beyond’ (1898). The phrase ‘Pale Fire’ alludes to a passage from Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens that laments, "The sun's a thief, and with his great attraction / Robs the vast sea; the moon's an arrant thief, /And her pale she snatches from the sun; / The sea's a thief, whose liquid surge resolves / The moon into salt tears". Also the fictional resemblance between Shade and Robert Frost is made apparent halfway through the poem. While waiting for their awkward daughter, who will never, in this life return from her first, disastrous date, Shade and Sybil catch a bit of literary chatter on television. "With regard to Pale Fire a particular short poem of Frost's—which is not "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening"—I claim neither "cryptomnesia" nor, certainly, plagiarism, but rather a delicate but demonstrable network of inspiration and illusion"5. The character Gradus /Le Degre suggests obscurity or mystery and the commentary by Kinbote alludes to Boswell’s Life of Doctor Johnson, a prototype of modern biography where Boswell comments on the life of Johnson. Also, in his foreword Kinbote meticulously describes Shade's manuscript (Canto One) where one can find many poetic allusions (to Wordsworth's "Prelude", say or to Pope). Further Kinbote’s ‘Hudibrastis’ refers to Samuel Butler’s poem ‘Hudibras’, a parody. And finally the allusion to Arcadian has a very tragic significance—the Arcadian New Wye ceases to be the intended Utopia that Shade wanted it to be, and is also meaningless without Kinbotes intended guiding hand.

 

Thus, we can see why Pale Fire is a striking early example of modern narrative technique. There is a pronounced heteroglossia that strikes within the first few pages: multiple interpretations, reality and fantasy, dubious authorship, pronounced intertextuality, metaficionality and self-reflexivity "Pale Fire is a cryptic, secretive text designed to disrupt and confound totalizing systems. It is a provocative gauntlet thrown down before systemizers of every stripe, an aesthetic performance put on with smiling fierceness"6. In addition to this there is a profound unrevealing of the relationship between ethics, aesthetics, epistemology and metaphysics compounded by other vistas of surprise that are in themselves inexhaustible and complex. With Pale Fire, the course Nobokov has plotted for the reader compels the external cooperation necessary to reconcile the novel’s competing narratives. But the novel finally repays the reader’s conscription by creating in him or her the agile, the most versatile, the best of Nabokov’s best creations. To the reader who allows Kinbote to de-familiarize the act of reading, the work promises a blissful re-familiarization, a renewed appreciation of the gift of literary art.

 

We are absurdly accustomed to the miracle of a few written signs being able to contain immortal imagery, involutions of thought, new worlds with live people, speaking, weeping, laughing. We take it for granted so simply that in a sense, by the very act of brutish routine acceptance, we undo the work of ages, history of the gradual elaboration of poetical description and construction, from the treeman to Browning, from the caveman to Keats. What if we awake one day, all of us, and find ourselves utterly unable to read? I wish you to gasp not only at what you read but at the miracle of its being readable (so I used to tell my students), (Pale Fire 289). With Pale Fire, Nabokov allows his reader-ever the artist’s student to gasp at him or herself for mustering the resources required to read this miraculously unreadable novel.

 

Works Cited:

 

1. 'Lords and Owners': Nabokov's Sequestered Imagination*
by William Monroe. From Power to Hurt: The Virtues of Alienation. © Copyright 1998 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Used with the permission of the University of Illinois Press. Portions of this essay are revised from "The Sequestered Imagination: Nabokov versus the Materialists," Philological Quarterly 70:3 (1991): 379-94.

2. From Power to Hurt: The Virtues of Alienation. © Copyright 1998 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Used with the permission of the University of Illinois Press. Portions of this essay are revised from "The Sequestered Imagination: Nabokov versus the Materialists," Philological Quarterly 70:3 (1991): 379-94.

3. Nabokov, Vladimir. "Signs and Symbols." The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995: 594-599.

4. Tony ,Sharpe. Vladimir Nabokov, New York: Routledge, (1991) 97.

5. Shades of Frost: A Hidden Source for Nabokov's Pale Fire
by Abraham P. Socher (Originally published in the Times Literary Supplement (TLS), July 1, 2005, and reprinted with its permission. This version restores 2 paragraphs which were excised for reasons of space and includes a few other minor additions.)

6. Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire (New York: Berkley, 1962). Nabokov challenges anti-volitional materialisms wherever he finds them. Freud and Marx, for example, are favorite targets of his fictional and non-fictional barbs.