Ron Rosenbaum on Pale Fire
Jorn Barger
The Novel of the Century:
Nabokov's Pale Fire
by Ron Rosenbaum
O.K., I'll play. You know, the
Century-Slash-Millennium List Game. I admit I was
reluctant to get into the whole Man -of-the-Century,
Movie-of-the-Millennium enterprise. But a couple of
things changed my mind: calls from two networks and a
newsmagazine on the Hitler question-was he the "most
evil" man of the century? should he be Man of the
Century, period?-started me thinking in those terms.
And then the arrival of a book I'd long been looking
forward to, a book which suggested my first Edgy
Enthusiast End-of-Century Award, the one for Novel of
the Century. The book that prompted these reflections
and confirmed me in my choice for Novel of the
Century was Brian Boyd's remarkable, obsessive,
delirious, devotional study, Nabokov's Pale Fire
(Princeton University Press). And (insert 21-gun salute
here) my award for Novel of the Century goes to
Nabokov's Pale Fire, with Ulysses and Shadows on
the Hudson taking the silver and the bronze.
The Judge's Rationale: Pale Fire is the most
Shakespearean work of art the 20th century has
produced, the only prose fiction that offers
Shakespearean levels of depth and complexity, of
beauty, tragedy and inexhaustible mystery.
One of the achievements of Brian Boyd's book is that
he makes explicit the profound way in which Pale Fire
is a Shakespearean novel-not just in its global vision
and the infinite local reflections in a global eye it
offers, but also in the profound way in which Pale Fire
is haunted by specific works of Shakespeare, and by
Shakespeare himself as Creator. If, as Michael Woods
(author of The Magician's Doubts) argues, Pale Fire
offers "a theology for skeptics," Brian Boyd makes
explicit the ways in which it is a theology of
Shakespeare.
Before I pay further tribute to Pale Fire, I want to pay
further tribute to Brian Boyd. Yes, I already saluted his
courage and scrupulousness as a scholar for renouncing
his previous position on the Pale Fire narrator
question at the Nabokov Centennial Night last April
(see The Edgy Enthusiast, "Nabokov's Pale Ghost: A
Scholar Retracts," April 26).
But he deserves new accolades for this new
book-length examination of Pale Fire. An investigation
notable less for his new theory of the controversial
narrator question (with which I respectfully disagree)
but for the way his pursuit of the narrator question has
deepened the vista of delights in the novel and-most
importantly-disclosed an even deeper level of
Shakespearean affinity and signification in Pale Fire.
If Charles Kinbote is the ostensible narrative voice of
Pale Fire, the one who writes the footnoted
commentary to the poem that opens the novel,
deliriously mad commentary that forms the bulk of the
book, Brian Boyd has become-and I mean this as the
highest compliment-Kinbote's finest Kinbote.
Before venturing further into the depths and delights of
Pale Fire theories, I want to pause here for the benefit
of those who have not yet tasted the pleasures of Pale
Fire. Pause to emphasize just how much pure reading
pleasure it offers despite its apparently unconventional
form. Following a brief foreword, the novel opens with a
999-line poem in rhymed heroic couplets formally
reminiscent of Alexander Pope, but written in
accessible American colloquial language at least on the
surface. Please don't be intimidated by the poem's
length or formality; it's a pleasure to read: sad, funny,
thoughtful, digressive, discursive, filled with
heart-stopping moments of tenderness and beauty.
Following the poem (entitled "Pale Fire") which is
identified in the foreword as the last work of John
Shade, a fictional Frost-like American poet, another
voice takes over: the commentator Charles Kinbote. A
delightful, deluded, more than a bit demented voice
whose 200 pages of commentary and annotations on
the poem constitute the remainder of the novel.
Kinbote's voice is completely mad-he is the ultimate
unreliable narrator, the mad scholar colonizing the
poem with his own baroque delusion-but also
completely irresistible. Kinbote weaves into his
footnoted annotations on the poem the story of his
own relationship with the poet, John Shade. How he
befriended him during the last months of his life while
Shade was composing "Pale Fire." How he'd disclosed
to Shade, a colleague at the college where they both
taught literature, the fantastic story of his (Kinbote's)
supposed secret identity: that he was not really Charles
Kinbote, but rather the exiled King of Zembla, a
"northern land" where he once ruled as Charles the
Beloved until he was deposed by evil revolutionaries
from whom he fled into exile. Revolutionaries who sent
an assassin to hunt him down, an assassin whose
bullet, meant for Kinbote, mistakenly killed John Shade
instead.
And now, having absconded with the dead poet's
manuscript of "Pale Fire," holed up in a cheap motel in
the mountains, Kinbote attempts to demonstrate with
his commentary that Shade's last masterpiece is really
about him, about Kinbote, about his own tragic and
romantic life as King of Zembla, his flight and exile. All
this despite the fact that, on the surface, neither
Kinbote nor Zembla appears anywhere in "Pale Fire,"
despite the fact that the poem seems on the surface to
be John Shade's attempt to come to terms with his
own tragedy, the suicide of his beloved daughter Hazel
Shade-and his efforts to explore the possibility of
contacting her in the Afterlife, across the border
between life and death which has exiled her from him.
As I said, it only seems complicated and cerebral. In
fact, reading Pale Fire, both novel and poem, is an
almost obscenely sensual pleasure. I guarantee it.
Nor should the pleasures of reading Brian Boyd's book
be underestimated, even though I believe he's reading
into Pale Fire a ghost story as fanciful as the one
Kinbote reads into John Shade's poem. Boyd's ghost
story is his new revised solution to the Pale Fire
Narrator-Commentator Question: Who is Commentator
Charles Kinbote? If we believe he invented an imaginary
past as Charles the Beloved of Zembla, did he also
invent John Shade the poet he's purportedly reading
his Zemblan story into? Or did Shade invent Kinbote?
For some three decades following the 1962 publication
of Pale Fire, most critics and readers have followed
the ingenious solution to this mystery offered by Mary
McCarthy in a famous New Republic essay entitled "A
Bolt From the Blue." McCarthy argued from submerged
clues in the Commentary that the "real" author of the
Commentary and Foreword (and Index) in Pale Fire,
the real Zemblan fantasist, was a figure barely
mentioned in the Commentary, an academic colleague
of Shade and Kinbote called, anagrammatically, V.
Botkin.
I won't go into the details of her dazzling conjecture
here, suffice it to say it's powerfully persuasive and
held sway until the early 1990's when Brian Boyd
unveiled his first (and now abandoned) Pale Fire
theory. Based on Mr. Boyd's interpretation of a
discarded epigraph from a revised manuscript of a
Nabokov autobiography, Mr. Boyd argued that Kinbote
did not exist as Botkin, or as a separate entity of any
kind: that Kinbote was invented by John Shade who not
only wrote the poem called "Pale Fire" but invented a
mad Russian scholar-commentator to write a
Commentary that massively misread Shade's own poem
as a Zemblan fantasy.
O.K., I'm not doing justice to Boyd's conjecture
perhaps because I've never found it convincing: It
always seemed needlessly reductive to collapse the
voices in the novel from two to one. But Mr. Boyd's
theory did attract a considerable number of believers
who called themselves "Shadeans"-even after Mr. Boyd
pulled the rug out from under them a couple years ago
by retreating to an intermediate position that said,
Well, no, Shade didn't invent Kinbote, but Shade's
ghost, after his murder, somehow "inspired" Kinbote's
(or Botkin's) Zemblan fantasy from Beyond.
But now Mr. Boyd has pulled the rug out from under
himself once again.
In his new theory, Mr. Boyd has virtually abandoned
John Shade entirely to argue that the real source, the
true inspiration for the amazing shimmering imaginary
land of Zembla, is not Kinbote or Shade or
Shade-from-beyond-the-grave, but John Shade's dead
daughter Hazel whose ghost, Mr. Boyd says, insinuates
Zemblan promptings into both John Shade's poem and
Kinbote's beautifully mad commentary to it.
Although Mr. Boyd tries to justify the process of literary
investigation that led to this conclusion with reference
to the great logician of scientific discovery Karl Popper,
Mr. Boyd neglects the warning of a far earlier logician,
the medieval philosopher William of Ockham, who
famously cautioned: "Entities should not be multiplied
beyond necessity."
I have to be candid and say that Brian Boyd's conjuring
the ghost of Hazel Shade into Kinbote's muse seems to
me an instance of a gifted exegete going one entity
beyond necessity. Yet I also have to say that, it
doesn't matter, it doesn't detract from Mr. Boyd's
book, it doesn't detract from my admiration for Mr.
Boyd's beautiful Kinbotean obsession with Pale Fire. If
it doesn't detract, what it does do is distract the way
a red herring distracts, from the true achievement of
Mr. Boyd's book: his successful effort to refocus our
attention on Nabokov's preoccupation in Pale Fire with
the mystery of the afterlife, specifically with the
afterlife of art, the afterlife of Shakespeare. The ghostly
muse most truly revealed by Mr. Boyd's excavation of
Pale Fire is not the ghost of Hazel Shade but the
shade of William Shakespeare.
It was Nabokov's wife, Vera, Mr. Boyd reminds us in a
footnote, who "singled out potustoronnost (the
beyond) as her husband's 'main theme' throughout his
work." It is a theme often overlooked, or looked down
upon, in the commentary on Pale Fire. Yes, the entire
Third Canto of John Shade's four-canto poem "Pale
Fire" is dedicated to John Shade's sojourn at something
called "The Institute for the Preparation for the
Hereafter" where he meditates upon the possibility of
communicating with the daughter he lost across the
divide between life and afterlife.
But too many, I believe, read Shade's search for signs
and traces of the hereafter purely as comedy. The
comedy is there but only as a veil for the enduring
Mystery it simultaneously mocks and pays tribute to.
A mystery echoed implicitly in every line of the "Pale
Fire" poem beginning with the famous opening
passage: "I was the shadow of the waxwing slain/ By
the false azure in the windowpane;/ I was that smudge
of ashen fluff-and I/ Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky."
Life after death in the "reflected sky," the mirrored afterworld
of art. One of the things I find irritating about the way people
read Pale Fire (and write about it) is the recurrent failure to
take the poem, the astonishing 999-line work called "Pale Fire,"
seriously enough, on its own terms. In fact, the poem as it
stands alone, even without the Commentary, is a powerful and
beautiful work of art, one that, I would argue, deserves far
more recognition than it gets from those who don't seem to get
that it's more than a pastiche for Kinbote to prey on with his
parasitic exegesis.
In fact, let me take a real leap here, let me go out on a limb few
would venture forth upon, let me make the following assertion:
Not only is Pale Fire the (English-Language) Novel of the
Century, but "Pale Fire" the poem within the novel may well
come to be looked upon as the Poem of the Century in its own
right.
But let me return briefly to the afterlife. As I said, it is not so
much Mr. Boyd's far-fetched argument that Hazel Shade's ghost
is the afterlife muse of "Pale Fire" that makes his book so
illuminating as it is his exploration of the afterlife of
Shakespeare in Pale Fire. In particular, the afterlife of
Hamlet, the ghost in Hamlet, and Hamlet as the ghost that
haunts Pale Fire.
Early in Kinbote's commentary on the poem, he cries out against
his supposed enemies: "Such hearts, such brains, would be
unable to comprehend that one's attachment to a masterpiece
may be utterly overwhelming, especially when it is the
underside of the weave that entrances the beholder and only
begetter, whose own past intercoils there with the fate of the
innocent author."
When I reread this passage, I initially thought of it as a kind of
allegory of Brian Boyd's own obsessive "attachment to a
masterpiece," especially to the "underside of the weave" of
Pale Fire-of the way Mr. Boyd has become Kinbote's Kinbote.
But submerged in the coils of that passage I think there is an
expression of the way Vladimir Nabokov had himself become
Shakespeare's Kinbote: ecstatic commentator on his own
overwhelming attachment to a kindred creator, William
Shakespeare.
When Kinbote speaks of 'the weave that entrances," he speaks of
the entranced as "the only begetter," which is the mysterious
phrase for the shadowy figure evoked in the dedication of
Shakespeare's sonnets to their "onlie begetter."
Scholars have argued for centuries over the identity and
significance of "onlie begetter," but there can be little doubt that
the only begetter passage in Pale Fire is one more instance of
the way "the underside of the weave" of Pale Fire is shot
through with a web of Shakespearean references, the way Pale
Fire is dedicated to, haunted by, a work of Shakespeare-and not
the most obvious one.
The obvious one is Timon of Athens, since it seems at first that
Pale Fire takes its title from this amazing passage in Timon, a
bitter denunciation of a cosmos of Universal Theft:
I'll example you with thievery:
The sun's a thief, and with his great attraction
Robs the vast sea; the moon's an arrant thief,
And her pale fire she snatches from the sun;
The sea's a thief, whose liquid surge resolves
The moon into salt tears.
God is that great! That last liquid surge that resolves the moon
into salt tears: the image, of course, of flickering moonlight
dissolved (reflected) on the surface of the waves, dissolved into
the gleaming golden teardrops of light. And, of course, the theme
of theft, all Creation as theft from a greater Creator, is shot
through the book and may reflect Nabokov's theft from-at the
very least his debt to-Shakespeare.
But Brian Boyd has come up with a less obvious but perhaps
more crucial Shakespearean origin for the title of Pale Fire: the
pale ghost in Hamlet who speaks of his haste at dawn to return
to the purgatorial fires of the underworld in these terms:
Fare thee well at once!
The glow worm shows the matin to be near,
And gins to pale his uneffectual fire ...
Boyd makes a brilliant link between that passage in Hamlet
about the ghost and the glow worm and a fragment of a poem in
the Commentary to Pale Fire, lines in which John Shade
conjures up Shakespeare as the ghost of electricity, a fantastic
glow worm, illuminating the contemporary landscape from
beyond:
The dead, the gentle dead-who knows?-
In tungsten filaments abide,
And on my bedside table glows
Another man's departed bride.
And maybe Shakespeare floods a whole
Town with innumerable lights.
Shade's poem (which of course is Nabokov's composition) is
called "The Nature of Electricity," and it is, in fact,
metaphorically electrifying in its suggestion that a current from
the afterlife illuminates contemporary creation, that
Shakespeare's ghost illuminates Nabokov's creation.
I think Mr. Boyd is at his most astute when he comments upon
this passage: "The evocation of Shakespeare flooding a whole
town with light [suggests] something particularly pervasive and
haunting about Shakespeare's creative energy ... From start to
finish of Pale Fire Shakespeare recurs as an image of
stupendous fecundity." And he adduces a further instance of
Shakespeare as the ghost of electricity in Kinbote's
Commentary when the mad annotator avers: "Science tells us,
by the way, that the Earth would not merely fall apart but
vanish like a ghost, if Electricity were suddenly removed from
the world."
Electricity, as a ghost that creates the world, doesn't merely
haunt it but holds it together, gives it coherence; Shakespeare
as the ghost that gives Pale Fire its astonishing holographic
coherence-the way each particle reflects the whole like a jewel,
the way the whole haunts each particle like a ghost of
coherence. But in Mr. Boyd's elucidation of the theme it is not
just the ghost of Shakespeare, but a specific ghost in
Shakespeare: the ghost of Hamlet, which is the spirit that
electrifies Pale Fire.
Isn't it curious that the two novels that are to my mind chief
rivals for greatest fictional achievement of the century,
Ulysses and Pale Fire, are both haunted by Hamlet's ghost?
Joyce, as I'm sure you know, devoted an entire chapter of
Ulysses, the pivotal "Scylla and Charybdis" chapter, to an
eccentric theory of the special relationship between
Shakespeare and the ghost in Hamlet. To the apocryphal (but
not utterly improbable) anecdotal tradition that one of the roles
Shakespeare played as actor was that of the Ghost in Hamlet.
And that, in crying out on stage to his son (his namesake, the
young Prince Hamlet) across the divide between life and
afterlife, Shakespeare was himself-the theory goes-somehow
crying out to the departed spirit of his own son, the twin called
Hamnet, who died at age 11, not long before Shakespeare wrote
or at least played in Hamlet.
In the thicket of Joyce's speculation about ghostly fathers and
sons, Hamlets and Shakespeares, one can sense Shakespeare
emerging as the ghostly father of Joyce. And similarly in
Nabokov as the ghostly father of Pale Fire.
Nabokov, Mr. Boyd reminds us, once called Hamlet "the greatest
miracle in literature." What makes Pale Fire Novel of the
Century is that it, almost alone, has that absolutely miraculous
"bolt from the blue" quality. Pale Fire is as startling, as
stunning, as life-changing as the sudden heart-stopping
appearance of a real ghost. And the real ghost that inspires
Pale Fire from beyond the grave, the real shade that haunts its
reflected sky is not Hazel Shade's, but Shakespeare's Hamlet.
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