All Else Pales against Nabokov's Fire

As always,  spoilers ahead: read at your own risk!

Prior to reading Pale Fire, Lolita was the only book of Nabokov’s that I had read.  After reading Pale Fire, I have plans to read a lot more of his novels.  I was smitten by Pale Fire by the end of the third paragraph, when Charles Kinbote, the fictitious author of Nabokov’s book, announces without warning or context, “There is a very loud amusement park right in front of my present lodgings.”  There is nothing like an off-kilter and potentially unstable first-person narrator to make me weak in the literary knees!   Then once the structure of the novel became clear to me I nearly swooned into a dead faint!  A novel in the form of a commentary on a 999-line poem, complete with an index and a never-ending set of refer-to’s and see-also’s?  I wasn’t sure my ex-academic heart could take the excitement!  Add to all of that Nabokov’s fierce intelligence, erudition, and sense of play and you have what is possibly a perfect novel.

This novel seems to me to be first and foremost a novel about the relationship between art, artist, and critic.  As a novelist and an academic, Nabokov would have been familiar with all the roles he explores in this work.  And as one who analyzes the books I read, I find my role as reviewer a fun dilemma, since Pale Fire effectively criticizes the critic.  I suspected from the forward that Kinbote’s commentary would be about way more than the poem upon which it claims to be commenting, but I was unprepared for how very little it cared about the actual poem.  Instead of subtly unraveling a narrative from verse, the novel tells its story in spite of the verse! 

Kinbote, once Charles the Beloved of Zembla, has fled to America after escaping from the extremists who have taken over his “distant northern land.”  Having made his way to New Wye, he has befriended poet John Shade and attempted to influence him to write an epic poem about Zembla and its erstwhile king.  In spite of the fact that the poem written has nothing to do with Kinbote’s intended theme, he has decided to create a commentary to the poem that “attempt[s] to sort out those echoes and wavelets of fire, and pale phosphorescent hints, and all the many subliminal debts to me,” as he tells us at the very end of his book.  This open tension between the text and Kinbote’s revealed subtext makes for great humor and amusement.  My favorite example is his dismissal of most of the second canto, which focuses on the death of the poet’s daughter.  Kinbote finds the whole section rather tiring, as he states: 

[The poet] affected not to speak of his dead daughter, and since I did not foresee this work of inquiry and comment, I did not urge him to talk on the subject and unburden himself to me.  True, in this canto he has unburdened himself pretty thoroughly, and his picture of Hazel is quite clear and complete; maybe a little too complete architectonically, since the reader cannot help feeling that it has been expanded and elaborated to the detriment of certain other richer and rarer matters ousted by it.

Through Kinbote’s commentary, Nabokov shows on an exaggerated scale how the critic can never read a work for what it actually is.  He brings to it all his own expectations, his own experiences, his own memories, and his own desires.  What the artist wants to say and what we want to hear are seldom if ever the same thing.  We will skip over whole sections that do not address the area that we are interested in in order to focus on the thing that resonates with us.  And of course Nabokov has fun with this very idea by lacing Pale Fire with all kinds of references and interests that no one reader will gather altogether to one big end.  Even as I focus on the relationship between the critic and the art work, there are dozens of subthemes that I need to leave alone for other readings.  How is Timons of Athens central to the themes of the book (other than providing the line of poetry that gives Shade’s poem, and Nabokov’s novel, its title)?  What is the importance of Kinbote’s religious observations?  Why is Kinbote obsessed with surnames and their national origins and meanings?  Why are Kinbote’s sexual proclivities given so much attention in the novel?  Any area of focus will not be able to give full due to the text because we as readers pick and choose our own way through the novel. 

And there is the suggestion that the act of reading and interpreting is its own creative act, separate and distinct from the creation of the original art.  In commenting on Shade’s poem, Kinbote creates his own narrative, and as we bring ourselves to any work, we necessarily re-create our own stories and experiences within that reading.  The uniting factor, according to Pale Fire, is that all these acts—the act of creating art and the act interpreting art—are incredibly narcissistic!  Shade refuses Kinbote’s suggestions of a poetic theme in favor of his own life story revolving around him, his wife, and his daughter.  Kinbote can’t  help but wish the poem were about him, and creates his own story, redirecting us from Shade’s experiences to Kinbote’s own!  And we, of course, at the next level, take it all and make it about ourselves.   I suspect Nabokov had a blast playing with this idea, and in an interview I read, he stated that he purposefully planted all kinds of hidden treasures and allusions for readers to find and grab onto.

Also in my reading I came across the notion that a series of articles have been written arguing over the relationship between Kinbote and Shade.  Namely, they argue that Kinbote is not really Kinbote, but a crazy Botkin, a scholar passed over briefly in the novel and mentioned in the Index.  Others say that Shade never really existed but as a figment of Kinbote’s imagination, or that Kinbote is the fictitious creation in the mind of Shade.  I have no doubt that there is great evidence for any and all of these readings—and the end statements by Kinbote certainly suggest that there is a whole lot of crazy going on—but this is the type of analysis that I find generally unsatisfying.  The pleasure of the reading comes in that first-person narration in which we know that the narrator can’t be trusted to tell us the truth.  Whether that narrator is a deranged scholar, a manipulative poet, or a true king of Zembla doesn’t really matter.  Nabokov created a thrilling, funny, twisted tale that keeps the brain running around itself trying to figure out what is actually going on, and you can practically hear him chuckling to himself as he writes as Kinbote:  “I have no desire to twist and batter an unambiguous apparatus criticus into the monstrous semblance of a novel.”

Nabokov has made it to the top of my list of writers of whom I am in awe.