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Nabokov is notorious for having written‘Lolita’ ...
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http://liberreview.blogspot.com/2012/01/pale-fire-vladimir-nabokov.html
FRIDAY, 27 JANUARY 2012
‘Pale Fire’ Vladimir Nabokov
Vladimir Nabokov is notorious for having written ‘Lolita’ but thereafter too little attention is paid to his work. He is a writer of the greatest genius and ‘Pale Fire’ may well be his masterpiece. In June 1932 Mary McCarthy wrote a review of the newly published work in ‘The New Republic’ which she opened with the words “Pale Fire is a jack in the box, a faberge gem, a clockwork toy, a chess problem, an infernal machine, a trap to catch reviewers, a cat and mouse game, a do it yourself novel. It consists of a 999 line poem in four cantos in heroic couplets together with an editor’s preface, notes, index and proof corrections. When the separate parts are assembled, according to the manufacturer’s directions, and fitted together with the help of clues and cross references, which must be hunted down as in a paper-chase, a novel on several levels is revealed” Mary McCarthy was enormously enthusiastic about ‘Pale Fire’ but not all contemporary critics showed such warmth and the book has remained the subject of sustained debate ever since.
The lyric poem Pale Fire has been written by John Shade, a sixty year old professor whose academic field is Alexander Pope, teaching at a fictional university in New England. The poem speaks of the loss of his daughter Hazel who drowned at an early age, although the possibility of suicide cannot be excluded. A foreword and a lengthy commentary as well as an index have been written by Charles Kinbote, a visiting lecturer at the university who teaches Zemblan literature and is a great admirer of Shade. The juxtaposition of these texts forms the fabric of the novel and it is through Kinbote’s contribution that the narrative is obliquely conveyed. Shade, it emerges from the foreword, has been shot accidentally and the manuscript purloined by Kinbote who then arranges for its publication with his foreword and commentary as the novel ‘Pale Fire’. Kinbote is a bearded,vegetarian pederast whose affection for Shade is not reciprocated. In his typically self deluding way he observes “ And he was a very dear friend indeed! The calendar says I had known him only a few months but there exist friendships which develop their own inner duration, their own eons of transparent time, independent of rotating, malicious music”. Kinbote may or may not be of sound mind but he is universally loathed by not only Shade’s wife but the entire faculty at New Wye. Having made off with the manuscript Kinbote proceeds to reveal in his commentary a great deal about his own life whilst shedding little if no light on the genesis and meaning of the poem.
This complex interplay of texts makes for a work of extraordinary richness. Through the chaos of Kinbote’s magisterial self-importance Nabokov succeeds in presenting to the diligent reader a deftly worked and highly articulate tapestry of satire, comedy, farce and tragedy. The role of the academic literary critic who invests his own commentary with more weight than the original text can bear is only the most obvious target of Nabokov’s satire. Kinbote’s disappointment that Shade has not written the poem about Charles II of Zembla that Kinbote wanted him to write does not inhibit him from telling us what Shade should have written and how he should have done it. Pathetically he observes “Although I realise only too clearly, alas, that the result, in its pale and diaphanous final phase, cannot be regarded as a direct echo of my narrative, one cannot doubt that the sunset glow of the story acted as a catalytic agent upon the very process of the sustained creative effervescence that enabled Shade to produce a 1000 line poem in three weeks.” In Kinbote, Nabokov has created an extraordinarily vivid portrait of human vanity, who is a constant source of entertainment to the reader as his flights of fantasy and self importance become ever more absurd.
‘Pale Fire’ is, however, also a very serious novel on a different level as Nabokov addresses, principally through the text of the long poem, the relationship between life and art and death. It is through the creative act that Shade attempts to give purpose to his life after the death of his daughter but also in the face of his own death which, ironically, he imagines to be a long way off but which he nevertheless feels it appropriate to confront. He is also attempting to impose through the act of creation some sense of structure or order on a life which seems to be all too briefly lived and subject to the vagaries of chance and hazard.
The title of the poem is taken from Timon of Athens “the moon’s an arrant thief, and her pale fire she snatches from the sun”, which Kinbote knows but inevitably manages to misquote. He is, of course, the moon who has stolen whatever light he may shine from the sun that is Shade; from this departure point Nabokov weaves a complex web of verbal pyrotechnics. He adores playing with words, supplying double meanings and nuanced gradations of meaning by felicitous juxtapositions. With his love of puns and half revealed coincidences of meaning Nabokov sometimes gets carried away with the intoxication of his own rhetoric so that precise descriptions are often confused with tropes and fancies which serve only to create even richer layers of meanings both false and true.
It is all tremendous fun for both Nabokov and the reader but has led many critics, whilst admiring his verbal brilliance, to condemn ‘Pale Fire’ as an essentially sterile work demonstrating nothing but the author’s undoubted cleverness. Mary McCarthy, in concluding her review in 1962, thought otherwise “Pretending to be a curio it (‘Pale Fire’) can not disguise the fact that it is one of the very greatest works of art this century, the modern novel that everyone thought dead”. Art or Artifice, the debate will continue for as long as ‘Pale Fire’ is read but, read it will be, for it is one of the cleverest and most entertaining novels ever published.
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