Literary Criticism To Build A Fire
Olegario Benford
There is a fine tradition of writing by American fire lookouts, and in my own book I've tried to honor the inspiration they provided me without getting too bogged down in literary criticism. Philip Whalen, Gary Snyder, Jack Kerouac, Norman Maclean, Edward Abbey: all wrote memorably about being lookouts, but work in this vein pretty much petered out in the 1970s.
When there were thousands of us every summer, as was once true, the chances were better that a decent writer could be found somewhere in the bunch. Now there are only a few hundred, mostly with the Forest Service, but some as well in the Park Service and Bureau of Land Management, pretty much all of us in the West and Alaska. One very good book by a lookout was published in the 1990s — by Don Scheese, it's called Mountains of Memory — but I regret to report that it wasn't widely reviewed. So it's not like we've been a continuing presence in the popular imagination.
The best of what I've read on the subject of lookoutry tends to be aphoristic. This may explain why Gary Snyder's poems and journals are my favorite writing about the job, though they're scattered across his books, and you have to dig to find them. One of these, "Poem Left in Sourdough Mountain Lookout," written in the 1950s, ends on this great line:
Jack Kerouac is the most famous lookout of all — in Fire Season I write about the thrill of spending time with his lookout journal at the New York Public Library — but he only worked one season, 63 days in total, and the experience of intense solitude almost drove him insane. In The Dharma Bums and particularly Desolation Angels, the lookout material is pretty much all about his interior dramas. I've often wondered what he would have made of the experience if he'd stuck with it a few more summers.
Norman Maclean's novella "USFS 1919: The Ranger, the Cook, and a Hole in the Sky," the last story in A River Runs through It, has some surpassingly beautiful passages about being a lookout around the time of World War I. The main character lives in a tent and climbs a tree to look for smoke along the Idaho-Montana border. At one point Maclean writes: "It doesn't take much in the way of body and mind to be a lookout. It's mostly soul." Ultimately, though, the novella becomes a picaresque tale about a group of woodsmen planning to con a card game back in town when fire season ends.
Edward Abbey wrote a couple of lookout essays I really like. You can find them in his books Abbey's Road and The Journey Home. The second of these, Fire Lookout: Numa Ridge, includes these great lines: "The technical aspects of a lookout's job can be mastered by any literate anthropoid with an IQ of not less than 70 in about two hours. It's the attitude that's difficult: Unless you have an indolent, melancholy nature, as I do, you will not be happy as an official United States government fire lookout." Abbey's attempt to make fiction of his lookout experiences resulted in the novel Black Sun — which, I regret to say, I find a saccharine and sentimental story of lost love, although Abbey often claimed it was the book of his that he loved best.
The finest lookout book ever written, in my contrarian opinion, is Abbey's classic, Desert Solitaire. I say contrarian because the book isn't about being a lookout at all. It's about his time as a park ranger in Utah's Arches National Monument (now Arches National Park). But it captures the joys and sorrows, the moods and textures of life in what's left of our wilderness in a way almost no other book does, and my hunch — and it's only a hunch — is that he would not have written so beautifully about that world without the experience of his many seasons as a fire lookout, which is just another way of saying a careful student of wild country.
Pale Fire's unusual structure has attracted much attention, and it is often cited as an important example of metafiction,[4][5] as well as an analog precursor to hypertext fiction, and a poioumenon.[6] It has spawned a wide variety of interpretations and a large body of written criticism, which literary scholar Pekka Tammi [fi] estimated in 1995 as more than 80 studies.[7] The Nabokov authority Brian Boyd has called it "Nabokov's most perfect novel",[8] and the critic Harold Bloom called it "the surest demonstration of his own genius ... that remarkable tour de force".[9]
Starting with the epigraph and table of contents, Pale Fire is apparently the publication of a 999-line poem in four cantos ("Pale Fire") by the fictional John Shade with a foreword, extensive commentary, and index by his self-appointed editor, Charles Kinbote. Kinbote's commentary takes the form of notes to various numbered lines of the poem. Here, as in the rest of his critical apparatus, Kinbote explicates the poem very little. Focusing monomanically on his own concerns, he divulges what proves to be the plot piece by piece, some of which can be connected by following the many cross-references. Espen Aarseth noted that Pale Fire "can be read either unicursally, straight through, or multicursally, jumping between the comments and the poem."[10] Thus, although the narration is non-linear and multidimensional, the reader can still choose to read the novel in a linear manner without risking misinterpretation.[11]
The interaction between Kinbote and Shade takes place in the fictitious small college town and state of New Wye, Appalachia, where they live across a lane from each other from February to July 1959. Kinbote writes his commentary from then to October 1959 in a tourist cabin in the equally fictitious western town and state of Cedarn, Utana. Both authors recount many earlier events, Shade mostly in New Wye and Kinbote in New Wye and in Europe, especially the "distant northern land" of Zembla.
Shade's poem digressively describes many aspects of his life. Canto 1 includes his early encounters with death and glimpses of what he takes to be the supernatural. Canto 2 is about his family and the apparent suicide of his daughter, Hazel Shade. Canto 3 focuses on Shade's search for knowledge about an afterlife, culminating in a "faint hope" in higher powers "playing a game of worlds" as indicated by apparent coincidences. Canto 4 offers details on Shade's daily life and creative process, as well as thoughts on his poetry, which he finds to be a means of somehow understanding the universe.
In Kinbote's editorial contributions he tells three stories intermixed with each other. One is his own story, notably including what he thinks of as his friendship with Shade. After Shade was murdered, Kinbote acquired the manuscript, including some variants, and has taken it upon himself to oversee the poem's publication, telling readers that it lacks only line 1000. Kinbote's second story deals with King Charles II, "The Beloved", the deposed king of Zembla. King Charles escaped imprisonment by Soviet-backed revolutionaries, making use of a secret passage and brave adherents in disguise. Kinbote repeatedly claims that he inspired Shade to write the poem by recounting King Charles's escape to him and that possible allusions to the king, and to Zembla, appear in Shade's poem, especially in rejected drafts. However, no explicit reference to King Charles is to be found in the poem. Kinbote's third story is that of Gradus, an assassin dispatched by the new rulers of Zembla to kill the exiled King Charles. Gradus makes his way from Zembla through Europe and America to New Wye, suffering comic mishaps. In the last note, to the missing line 1000, Kinbote narrates how Gradus killed Shade by mistake.
Towards the end of the narrative, Kinbote all but states that he is in fact the exiled King Charles, living incognito; however, enough details throughout the story, as well as direct statements of ambiguous sincerity by Kinbote towards the novel's end, suggest that King Charles and Zembla are both fictitious. In the latter interpretation, Kinbote is delusional and has built an elaborate picture of Zembla complete with samples of a constructed language as a by-product of insanity; similarly, Gradus was simply an unhinged man trying to kill Shade, and his backstory as a revolutionary assassin is also made up.
In an interview, Nabokov later said that Kinbote killed himself after finishing the book.[12] The critic Michael Wood has stated, "This is authorial trespassing, and we don't have to pay attention to it",[13] but Brian Boyd has argued that internal evidence points to Kinbote's suicide.[14] One of Kinbote's annotations to Shade's poem (corresponding to line 493) addresses the subject of suicide at some length.
As Nabokov pointed out himself,[15] the title of John Shade's poem is from Shakespeare's Timon of Athens: "The moon's an arrant thief, / And her pale fire she snatches from the sun" (Act IV, scene 3), a line often taken as a metaphor about creativity and inspiration. Kinbote quotes the passage but does not recognize it, as he says he has access only to an inaccurate Zemblan translation of the play "in his Timonian cave", and in a separate note he even rails against the common practice of using quotations as titles.
The title is first mentioned in the foreword: "I recall seeing him from my porch, on a brilliant morning, burning a whole stack of [index cards of drafts of the poem] in the pale fire of the incinerator...".
According to Norman Page, Pale Fire excited as diverse criticism as any of Nabokov's novels.[17] Mary McCarthy's review[18] was extremely laudatory; the Vintage edition excerpts it on the front cover.[19] She tried to explicate hidden references and connections. Dwight Macdonald responded by saying the book was "unreadable" and both it and McCarthy's review were as pedantic as Kinbote.[20] Anthony Burgess, like McCarthy, extolled the book,[21] while Alfred Chester condemned it as "a total wreck".[22]
The connection between Pale Fire and hypertext was stated soon after its publication; in 1969, the information-technology researcher Ted Nelson obtained permission from the novel's publishers to use it for a hypertext demonstration at Brown University.[29] A 2009 paper by Annalisa Volpone also compares Pale Fire to hypertext.[30]
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